The newly declassified 9/11 documents are so damning of the Bush administration that anyone who paid their ten bucks for the much heralded and exculpatory "The 9/11 Commission Report" should consider tossing it into the waste can where it belongs. W.W. Norton, the venerable old New York publishing house, in the interest of accuracy should drop its best-seller from the non-fiction list and offer it alongside romance novels that comfort readers with fictional predictions of a happy and secure future.
In an interview with “This is Rumor Control,” Benjamin DeMott who last November published a scathing piece in Harpers Magazine called, "Whitewash As Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report Defrauds The Nation," says he believes the declassified documents prove his point. And given that the commissioners themselves studied those documents before releasing their report, DeMott now goes further. He tells “This is Rumor Control” that if they had written honestly about what they discovered it “would have indicated a presidential dereliction of duty so profound it would have been grounds for impeachment.”
Parker reported on the 52 astonishingly clear and precise warnings received by the Federal Aviation Administration prior to 9/11 and what those warnings say about the testimony of Condoleezza Rice.
But DeMott wonders why the commissioners themselves would evade the responsibility of stating in strong terms, “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?”
This Is Rumor Control: Mr. DeMott, you studied the commission report and were critical of its reluctance to lay blame on the Bush Administration. What did you think when you got a look at the newly declassified documents?
DeMott: First of all there’s the matter of what Condi Rice had to say when she appeared in the press room. She said that we had no warnings and how could anyone have ever have thought of an airplane being driven into a building. I’m not going to kid around, those statements were lies. They were clear untruths. The new information that we are being given at this late date is very important and it goes to the questions of credibility not only of Condoleezza Rice but of the whole administration.
For me the big story here is the extremely disturbing way the commission handled the 52 warnings and the other part is what the administration did in the way of denying that it ever had any such warnings.
This is Rumor Control: The documents were classified to the public but not the commission. How could it have written a report without pointing out the discrepancies in the evidence they were given.
DeMott: The commissioners had another alternative. They could have said that a real dereliction of duty was involved in the behavior of the President of the United States in relation to the warnings, to the information, to the documents he had that he was advised to study. The fact the didn’t study them, the fact that he didn’t take them seriously, the fact that his national security advisor didn’t take them seriously, all of this constitutes a clear dereliction of duty, grounds for impeachment. If the commission was going to deal with that information straightforwardly in its report it would have to face directly the question of dereliction of duty.
This is Rumor Control: Why didn’t it do that?
DeMott: It couldn’t do it because it was divided into partisan groups, and there lay awareness that it was close to an election and any such charge at that moment would have stirred the kind of mess that would have been destructive to the “peace of the republic”, to use a fancy phrase. They had to make peace with each other and also they had to make peace with a divided country that in many respects was filled with hostility because of the Iraq war, hostility that I haven’t seen since the worst days of the Vietnam War protest years.
This Is Rumor Control: Given this damning information, how could they frame it in such a way that lets the administration off the hook?
DeMott: On page 264 of the report where they deal with the FAA, it’s clear that they knew that the FAA warnings had to have gone to Condi Rice, had to have gone to the president and they should have dealt with this for what it was -- a presidential failure and a failure of alertness about which the people of the country deserved to know because the decision lying ahead of them was about what kind of qualities did you want in a chief executive. But instead of dealing directly with this matter of the warnings, a staggering 52, Mr. Zelikow and his staff change the whole subject to what the FAA did or didn’t do.
This is Rumor Control: You wrote a line in your piece that summed up this thesis for me. You wrote “and challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost --the possible rending of the nation’s social and political fabric.” Is it just in the collective human nature of the commissioners that once they saw the documents, the issue at hand of accusing the president was so huge that they couldn’t go through with it?
DeMott: I believe that to be the case. I understand the sense of threat that they were under but what troubles me most is the sleaze ball quality of the shift, the diversion, the distraction of the whole question of accountability.
They should have written about this in such a way that we could all see that the danger of the attacks by Al Qaeda were forwarded to the president, that he knew it, that Ms. Rice knew it.
This might sound like I don’t have any feelings for the 9/11 survivors. I do, but this thing was actually bigger that their torment and their suffering. This thing is a question of what should a president be? What should a president acknowledge as his responsibilities? You can’t do what the administration did and then have your ass covered by a commission that will say, as this one did, that the issue is really whether they FAA behaved properly. The issue is no attention was paid to these 52 warnings. That’s the issue.
Benjamin DeMott is Professor Emeritus at Amherst College and the author of Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind
BushCo has clearly violated the trust of and endangered the security of the American people, first by being asleep at the wheel when were attacked (or perhaps they looked the other way for some reason) and second, because they got us into a war with a nation that had NOTHING to do with the 9/11 attack on the U.S. now that we are closer to determining just who the treasonous bastard is that outed Ms. Plame, and everything involved with that sordid affair.. it will become even more clear just who the real "haters of freedom" are.
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