There need to be hearings now about this deeply compromised commission. Rove and
Zelikow must be issued subpoenas, as should the telecom companies to get their cell
phone records of all communications between Zelikow and senior officials at the White …

There
need to be hearings now about this deeply compromised
commission. Rove and Zelikow must be issued subpoenas, as
should the telecom companies to get their cell phone
records of all communications between Zelikow and senior
officials at the White House. Accountability and
transparency are hallmarks of a healthy government beholden
to the people it serves. With this Commission we got
neither and as a result the entire Commission Report must
be called into question. A new investigation is now
required to do what the Zelikow Commission did not do,
fulfill its mandate to provide a “full accounting of the
facts and circumstances” surrounding the September 11th
attacks.

9/11 CitizensWatch, which I served as
Co-Director, was the first to formally call for the
resignation of Zelikow, closely followed by the Jersey
widows of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee. We were far
more right and justified than we even knew at the time. And
now that we know this about Zelikow and we know that the
Commission failed to answer 70% of the questions posed by
the Family Steering Committee the case is now clear the
U.S. Government must convene a new investigation, this time,
co-chaired by a member of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee
and a formally appointed public advocate who sits with the
Commissioners. But first hearings are in order and should
be conducted immediately by the House Oversight Committee
and Senate Government Affairs Committee. It’s time to do
right by the victims, their families and the nation and
re-open this 9/11 investigation. Chairman Kean and
Vice-Chair Hamilton should be called upon to fully support
this new investigation in light of their betrayal of their
promise to conduct a full and fair independent
investigation.

9/11 CitizensWatch will soon issue an open
letter to the Congress on this issue. And one to the former
Commissions and staff. Look for it ahead of the release of
Shenon’s book on the 5th.

Regards,

Kyle F. Hence
9/11
Citizenswatch
target="_blank">http://www.911pressfortruth.com

Also,
check out:
href="http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Book_Director_of_911_commission_secretly_0131.html"
target="_blank">http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Book_Director_of_911_commission_secretly_0131.html

Washington DeCoded -
http://www.washingtondecoded.com

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful .
. .
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind.
George Orwell, 1946

Commission Confidential
EXTRA By Max
Holland

href="http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2008/01/commission-conf.html"
target="_blank">http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2008/01/commission-conf.html

In
a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission,
Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the
panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in
“surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser
Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during
the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11
attacks.

Shenon, who led The New York Times’ coverage of
the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a
new book entitled The Commission: The Uncensored History of
the 9/11 Investigation, to be published next month by Twelve
Books. The Commission is under an embargo until its February
5 publication, but Washington DeCoded managed to purchase a
copy of the abridged audio version from a New York
bookstore.

In what’s termed an “investigation of the
investigation,” Shenon purports to tell the story of the
commission from start to finish. The book’s critical
revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the
figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor
and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior
to his service as the commission’s executive director.
Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and
leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners
for appointing Zelikow in the first place, and then
allowing him to stay on after his myriad
conflicts-of-interest were revealed under
oath.

Shenon’s narrative is built from extensive
interviews with staff members and several, if not all, the
commissioners. He depicts Zelikow as exploiting his central
position to negate or neutralize criticism of the Bush
administration so that the White House would not bear, in
November 2004, the political burden of failing to prevent
the attacks.

The Commission includes these specific
revelations:

–Kean and Hamilton appreciated that Zelikow
was a friend and former colleague of then-national security
adviser Condoleeza Rice, one of the principal officials
whose conduct would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with
her on the National Security Council (NSC) during the
presidency of Bush’s father, and they had written a book
together about German reunification. The commission
co-chairmen also knew of Zelikow’s October 2001 appointment
to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose
several additional and egregious conflicts-of-interest,
among them, the fact that he had been a member of Rice’s
NSC transition team in 2000-01. In that capacity, Zelikow
had been the “architect” responsible for demoting Richard
Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As
Shenon puts it, Zelikow “had laid the groundwork for much of
went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months
before September 11. Would he want people to know
that?”

–Karen Heitkotter, the commission’s executive
secretary, was taken aback on June 23, 2003 when she
answered the telephone for Zelikow at 4:40 PM and heard a
voice intone, “This is Karl Rove. I’m looking for
Philip.” Heitkotter knew that Zelikow had promised the
commissioners he would cut off all contact with senior
officials in the Bush administration. Nonetheless, she gave
Zelikow’s cell phone number to Rove. The next day there
was another call from Rove at 11:35 AM. Subsequently,
Zelikow would claim that these calls pertained to his “old
job” at the University of Virginia’s Miller
Center.

–The full extent of Zelikow’s involvement with
the incumbent administration only became evident within the
commission on October 8, 2003, almost halfway into the
panel’s term. Determined to blunt the Jersey Girls’
call for his resignation or recusal, Zelikow proposed that
he be questioned under oath about his activities. General
counsel Daniel Marcus, who conducted the sworn interview,
brought a copy of the résumé Zelikow had provided to Kean
and Hamilton. None of the activities Zelikow now detailed,
his role on Rice’s transition team, his instrumental role
in Clarke’s demotion, his authorship of a post-9/11
pre-emptive attack Doctrine, were mentioned in the résumé.
Zelikow blandly asserted to Marcus that he did not see
“any of this as a major conflict of interest.”
Marcus’s conclusion was that Zelikow “should never have
been hired” as executive director. But the only upshot
from these shocking disclosures was that Zelikow was
involuntarily recused from that part of the investigation
which involved the presidential transition, and barred from
participating in subsequent interviews of senior Bush
administration officials.

–Some two months later, as Bob
Kerrey replaced disgruntled ex-Senator Max Cleland on the
panel, the former Nebraska senator became astounded once he
understood Zelikow’s obvious conflicts-of-interest and his
very limited recusal. Kerrey could not understand how Kean
and Hamilton had ever agreed to put Zelikow in charge.
“Look Tom,” Kerrey told Kean, “either he goes or I
go.” But Kean persuaded Kerrey to drop his
ultimatum.

–In late 2003, around the time his involuntary
recusal was imposed, Zelikow called executive secretary
Karen Heitkotter into his office and ordered her to stop
creating records of his incoming telephone calls. Concerned
that the order was improper, a nervous Heitkotter soon told
general counsel Marcus. He advised her to ignore Zelikow’s
order and continue to keep a log of his telephone calls,
insofar as she knew about them.

–Although Shenon could
not obtain from the GAO an unredacted record of Zelikow’s
cell phone use–and Zelikow used his cell phone for most of
his outgoing calls–the Times reporter was able to establish
that Zelikow made numerous calls to “456″ numbers in
the 202 area code, which is the exclusive prefix of the
White House.

–Even after his recusal, Zelikow continued
to insert himself into the work of “Team 3,” the task force
responsible for the most politically-sensitive part of the
investigation, counter-terrorism policy. This brief
encompassed the White House, which meant investigating the
conduct of Condoleeza Rice and Richard Clarke during the
months prior to 9/11. Team 3 staffers would come to believe
that Zelikow prevented them from submitting a report that
would have depicted Rice’s performance as “amount[ing] to
incompetence, or something not far from it.”

–In Without
Precedent, Kean and Hamilton’s 2006 account of the 9/11
panel, the two co-chairmen wrote that Zelikow was a
controversial choice

. . [but] we had full confidence in
Zelikow’s independence and ability–and frankly, we wanted
somebody who was unafraid to roil the waters from time to
time. He recused himself from anything involving his work on
the NSC transition. He made clear his determination to
conduct an aggressive investigation. And he was above all a
historian dedicated to a full airing of the facts. It was
clear from people who knew and worked with him that Zelikow
would not lead a staff inquiry that did anything less than
uncover the most detailed and accurate history of
9/11.

Shenon’s radically different account of the
commission’s inner workings promises to achieve what none
of the crackpot conspiracy theorists have managed to do so
far: put the 9/11 Commission in disrepute.

href="http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2008/01/commission-conf.html"
target="_blank">http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2008/01/commission-conf.html

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