From email:
Harper's Cover - 9/11 Report A "Whitewash"
harpers.org
From: inn.globalfreepress.com
October 2004
In an essay of the new October Issue of "Harper's Magazine",
editor and professor Benjamin DeMott describes, ''how the 9/11
Commission Report defrauds the nation''. DeMott is also author
of the books "The Imperial Middle" and "The Trouble With Friendship"
DeMott seems to go a bit further, than just outrage about "negligence".
Here are some excerpts from his 12-page essay:
"..this was the promise, after all: answers. Answers in return
for serious attention...
The Promise was not kept. The plain, sad reality - i report this
following for full days studying the work -is that The 9/11
Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind
it, is a cheat and a fraud.
It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantalize the
audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities
that demand immediate inspection and confrontation.
Because it is continously engaged in scotching all attempts to
distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission
can't discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits
of mind and temperament essential in those to discharge command
responsibility during crises. It can't tell the truth about what
was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning
points...
..the 567 pages, which purport to provide definitive interpretations
of the reactions, are in fact useless to historians, because
seeming terror of bias transforms query after commissarial query
after commissarial query -and silence after silence -into suggested
new lines of self-justification for the interviewees. In the
course of blaming everyone a little, the Commission blames nobody
-blurs the reasons for the actions and hesitations of successive
administrations, masks choices that, fearlessly defined, might
actually have vitalized our public discourse...
...there's little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied.
It can't call a liar a liar.
The most momentous subject before the 9/11 Commission was: What
did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United
States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so?...
...conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took his
position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped
that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct
and national unprepardness would be impossible.
The reason? The President's claim was untrue. It was a lie, and
the Commissioners realized they couldn't allow it to be seen
as a lie...
...nevertheless the chief executive, seated before the Commission,
declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive
as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost -the possible rending
of the nations social and political fabric...
...The President told us the August 6 report was historical in
nature.
Each paragraph of the Bin Laden briefing is directed not at the
past but at the present or future...
...The Commissioners have heard that Bush received more than
forty briefings naming Al Quaeda as a danger...
...The President expressed himself to National Security Adviser
Rice in March or April of 2001 as 'tired of swatting at flies'
and, on the same occasion, declared that he wanted 'to play offense...(wanted)
to take the flight to the terrorists'...
...Faced with The 9/11 Commission Report, this country's true
need now is to shout Shame! |
