Did the Kean Commission cover up the truth about 9/11?

Why is the commission bending over backwards to please the White House when it's supposed to be fiercely independent and bipartisan, made up of five Republicans and five Democrats?

The answer may lie in the little-known fact that the White House has a friend on the inside. And not just any friend, either.

His name is Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the commission. Though he has no vote, the former Texas lawyer arguably has more sway than any member, including the chairman. Zelikow picks the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses. He also picks which fights are worth fighting, legally, with the White House, and was involved in the latest round of capitulations – er, negotiations – over Rice's testimony. And the commissioners for the most part follow his recommendations. In effect, he sets the agenda and runs the investigation.

He also carries with him a downright obnoxious conflict-of-interest odor, one that somehow went undetected by the lawyers who vetted him for one of the most important investigative positions in U.S. history.

The 9/11 Commission had the broadest mandate of any commission in the history of the United States. With the exception of the Pearl Harbor Commission there has probably been no more important national security commission, but in terms of broad mandate, the 9/11 Commission could have looked at any aspect of this tragedy, and it’s regrettable that they didn’t do that.

Let me briefly look at the Commission itself… what this country needed was an independent, non-partisan commission. The Commission wasn’t non-partisan, it was presented to us as bi-partisan; but when you appoint a group of people, 5 Democrats and 5 Republicans, that is certainly not non-partisan, and I would argue that it’s not even bi-partisan, it’s balanced partisanship. And you look at the Commission’s report, time and time again, to see where the Democrats on the Commission checked the views of the Republicans checked the views of the Democrats, so forget this notion that this was some sort of bi-partisan commission, it wasn’t, it was balanced partisanship, and it did a great deal of harm to the final product.

Also if you look at the makeup of the Commission here you have an insufficiency in the kinds of people who were picked to be on the Commission, and I’m not going to look at the Commission members one by one, but the fact of the matter is this is a group of people without any intelligence experience at all. This is not a group of people— not one individual on this Commission had ever received a President’s Daily Briefing report, had never been involved as a consumer of intelligence, had very little understanding, and that was particularly true of one of the chairmen, the Governor from New Jersey, who admitted he had no understanding of the intelligence community whatsoever.

So there was insufficient stature, insufficient experience, insufficient knowledge of intelligence, and this was totally relevant to what needed to be done. It would have been very easy to get a Blue Ribbon commission. Where were people such as Sam Nunn, William Perry, George Schultz, General Brent Scowcroft, Bill Bradley, David Boren, Gary Hart, even Warren Rudman. People who had served on the intelligence committees, who had studied the problem of intelligence and policy very closely and may have had a contribution to make on the importance of change on the intelligence community.

The bank's (BCCI's) immunity from regulation and prosecution in the ensuing Reagan years became notorious. As treasury secretary, James Baker flagrantly declined to prosecute BCCI after it had been exposed for illegally acquiring First American. A former National Security Council economist told author Johanthan Beatty that "Baker didn't pursue BCCI because he thought a prosecution of the bank would damage the United States reputation as a safe haven for flight capital and overseas investments." A simpler explanation might be that Baker knew what secrets could be told by the highest-level surviving BCCI officials."

The full story of BCCI was never officially told, nor was the story of the Republican countersurprise. The Iran-Contra hearings successfully covered up the arms shipments to Iran before 1984, and the House Task Force investigation of the Republican Surprise went nowhere. As Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift correctly predicted in 1991, "Congress will not formally investigate charges that the Reagan campaign stole the election in 1980, in large part because Israel's supporters on Capital Hill do not want to put the spotlight on Israel's role, which during that period sold weapons to Iran in blatant disregard of President Carter."

The key figure in both cover-ups was the congressman Lee Hamilton, a friend of the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby who chaired the House Iran-Contra Committee in 1987 and the House Task Force from 1992 to 1993. The bland results of the House Task Force report were hardly surprising. Hamilton had earlier participated in a dishonest defense of the Contras against charges of drug trafficking. The chief counsel of the House Task Force was E. Lawrence Barcella, who had received $2 million in legal fees as the lead attorney for BCCI in the late 1980s. At that time, Barcella also was a law partner of Paul Laxalt, who had been chariman of the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980. Finally, Barcella had close personal connections to Michael Ledeen, from whom he had bought a house and shared a common housekeeper.

In 2003, Hamilton would be resurrected to cochair the 9/11 Commission, investigating a third crisis that involved both right-wing Republican politicians and Muslim fundamentalists. Many people, including U.S. government officials, had alleged a number of links between BCCI investors, the Bin Laden family, and the financing of al Qaeda. For example, a French book has charged that "after dominating the financial news through the 1990s, the BCCI is now at the center of the financial network put in place by Osama bin Laden's main supporters." But in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report these allegations were completely ignored. - pages 109-110, The Road to 9/11, by Peter Dale Scott, 2007