Families Demand Exec. Director of 9/11 Commission Resign.

-- The Sept. 11 Family Steering Committee has reacted to the news that Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, attended a Clinton-Bush transition meeting for White House national security staff (on the Bush side with his co-author, Condoleeza Rice). Terrorism and the effort to capture Osama bin Laden were among the topics discussed at this meeting. Zelikow is thus hopelessly compromised as the head of an investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yet the executive director has controlled the entire flow of evidence presented to the members of the Kean Commission! Under the Commission's agreement with the White House Zelikow is one of only two allowed to read the presidential daily briefs predating Sept. 11 (the other is Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration member).

The FSC now demands Zelikow's immediate resignation. Next week should bring some very interesting developments. The Kean Commission is meeting, apparently with Rumsfeld and Tenet as witnesses. Clinton just made a big self-exonerating statement yesterday, claiming his administration told the incoming Bush people everything they needed to know in the effort to dismantle the Bin Laden terror network. Time magazine this week published a Joe Klein article on the ongoing controversies and the Family Steering Committee's list of 23 questions to Bush.

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Statement of the Family Steering Committee for
The 9/11 Independent Commission
March 20, 2004

From http://www.911independentcommission.org

The Family Steering Committee is deeply disturbed to learn about Executive Staff Director Phillip Zelikow’s participation in urgent post election briefings, December 2000, and January 2001, with Sandy Berger and Condoleezza Rice. In this particular meeting the Senior Clinton Administration official clearly warned that Al Qaeda posed the worst Security threat facing the nation.

It is apparent that Dr. Zelikow should never have been appointed to be Executive Staff Director of the Commission. As Executive Staff Director his job has been to determine the focus and direction of the Commission’s investigation, an investigation whose mandate includes understanding why the Bush Administrations failed to prioritize the Al Qaeda threat. It is abundantly clear that Dr. Zelikow’s conflicts go beyond just the transition period.

It is extremely distressing to learn this information at this late date. This new information clearly calls into question the integrity of this Commission’s investigation. The Family Steering Committee repeatedly expressed concerns over all members’ conflicts requesting that the commission be forthcoming so as not to taint the validity of the report. The Family Steering Committee was unaware of Dr. Zelikow’s participation in this intelligence briefing until today.

As such, the Family Steering Committee is calling for:

1. Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation.

2. Dr. Zelikow’s testimony in public and under oath.

3. Subpoena of Dr. Zelikow's notes from the intelligence briefings he attended with Richard Clarke

4. The Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.

The Family Steering Committee (FSC) is an independent, nonpartisan group of individuals who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The FSC does not receive financial or other support from any outside organizations.


(Letter from the Family Steering Committee to the 9/11 Commission chairs)

March 20, 2004

Dear Chairman Kean, Vice-Chair Hamilton, and Commissioners:

Very disturbing information has surfaced regarding Philip Zelikow's participation in the failure to heed warnings about al Qaeda and imminent attacks on America in the months prior to September 11th.

It is clear that Dr. Zelikow should never have been permitted to be a member of the Commission, since it is the mandate of the Commission to identify the source of 9/11 failures. Dr. Zelikow has a conflict of interest that extends beyond just the transition. It is now apparent why there has been so little effort to assign individual culpability. We now can see that trail would lead directly to the staff director himself.

What little time the Commission has left must be spent without the taint of Dr. Zelikow's influence. We demand his immediate resignation.

Sincerely,

The Family Steering Committee

When the commission is almost done?

Oy

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_3205.shtml

9-11 Panel Director May Have Conflict of Interest
By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Oct 6, 2003, 02:53
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The families of some of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings are calling for the staff director of the commission set up to investigate the attacks to be removed from a large part of the inquiry.
They say he has a conflict of interest in investigating the National Security Council, because of his previous relationship with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"We believe staff director (Philip) Zelikow should remove himself from any and all portions of the investigation addressing the NSC," the Family Steering Committee wrote in a letter sent to the commission Friday.

The families say that Zelikow, who was a part of the Bush transition team, drafted a memo for Rice on reorganizing the NSC. Finding out why that body failed to anticipate or defend against the Sept. 11 attacks is a major part of the commission's mandate.

"Really, if he's looking at the NSC, he's investigating himself," said Lorie Van Auken, , whose her husband died in the attack on the World Trade Center and one of the authors of the letter.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

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please post only four
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check this out ('97 - '04):
Tom Kean
Philipp D. Zelikow (none)
Christopher Kojm
Daniel Marcus (none)
Richard Ben-Veniste
Max Cleland
Fred F. Fielding
Jamie S. Gorelick
Slade Gorton
John F. Lehman
Timothy J. Roemer (none)
James R. Thompson

...and for 'fun':
Henry Kissinger

When are these families going to get a break?

And when is mainstream media going to cover this story?

And did we not know this when it was formed? I believe we did, so why didn't they?

Am constantly amazed at how uninformed even well-placed people are when all they need to do is a little digging in mainstream media.

He may well be complicit in the gross negligence of the administration not focusing on AQ. The fact that he's selected as executive chair stinks big time. These people are hiding their guilt bigtime....3000 Americans died 9/11 and these people are directly responsible.

We've been discussing this the last couple of days here...I wonder if the familes of 9/11 victims got this from the DU?

Philip D Zelikow - Executive Director 9/11 Commission AND


Consider this passage from a piece in today's Times ...

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.
One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.

At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed.

"It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president's cyberterrorism adviser.



Now we know about Rice and Hadley, her deputy. But how about Zelikow? He's a former NSC official from the first Bush administration and a close associate of Rice's. The two of them even wrote a book together.

He was in the key meetings where the warnings -- seemingly ignored -- about al Qaida came up. He seems like someone you'd want to talk to to find out what they were warned about and why they didn't take the warnings more seriously.

Well, you don't have to look far to find him. He runs the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow is the Executive Director of the Commission, which means he has operational control of the investigation under the overall management of the two co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com /

Clinton Aides Plan to Tell Panel of Warning Bush Team on Qaeda


Mr. Zelikow, the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and a co-author of a 1995 book with Ms. Rice, has been the target of repeated criticism from some relatives of Sept. 11 victims. They have said his membership on the Bush transition team and his ties to Ms. Rice pose a serious conflict of interest for the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law-enforcement actions before the attacks.

Mr. Clarke said if Mr. Zelikow left any of the White House intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 without understanding the imminent threat posed by Al Qaeda, "he was deaf."

Mr. Zelikow said in an interview that he has recused himself from any part of the investigation that involves the transition, to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He said his participation in the Qaeda intelligence briefings was already well known. "The fact of what occurred in these briefings is not really disputed," he said.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0320-07.htm



Philip Zelikow is the executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the "9/11 Commission." He is also the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. After serving in government with the Navy, the State Department, and the National Security Council, he taught at Harvard before assuming his present post in Virginia to direct the nation's largest research center on the American presidency. He was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford, as well as the executive director of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. Zelikow's books include The Kennedy Tapes (with Ernest May), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (with Condoleezza Rice), and the rewritten Essence of Decision (with Graham Allison). Zelikow has also been the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of the Aspen Institute.

http://www.9-11commission.gov/about/bio_zelikow.htm

Atrios quotes this passage from Richard Clarke's interview tonight on CBS at length. But it's worth excerpting again for reasons I note below ...

"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.
"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.

For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."



This is the essence of the whole story. Everything.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

Who's Who on the 9/11 "Independent" Commission
<http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00148.htm>

is not showing up when I go to the link.

The question is only why did it take this long to come out. We know the Bushies are a conflict of interest. The question was only how they were going to work it, and it seems the first place to look is at the head of the operation.

If we had something less than a moribund media, this would have come out within a week of the fellow getting the post. As it is, only people interested already will pay attention -- or be able to find it USA today (I make a joke).

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

Could it have been removed for some reason?