911 Commission Report Due Next May: Don't Expect too Much

Don’t expect too much from the 911 Commission. Read this. The conflicts of interest are mind boggling.

Newsweek
July 14, 2003
Nation and World

In Search of Answers by Chitra Ragavan

For biotech lobbyist Lisa Raines, it was supposed to be a quick business trip rom suburban VA to CA. “We kissed and said ‘goodbye’ and ‘I love you,’” recalls her husband, Stephen Push, “and I never realized it was going to be the last itme.” The date was September 11, 2001. The plane Raines was on, American Airlines Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon. The couple h ad been married 21 years. Push, now 51, quit his job as a public relations executive and started a group called Families of September 11. Now he has a new mission in life: seeking accountability from the government. “I still don’t know,” he says, “what happened on my wife’s plane.”

Push and the families of more than 3,000 men, women and children who died on September 11 want answers. But it remains to be seen whether official Washington wants to give them any. The hopes of the relatives rest with an independent bipartisan commission that, after months of delays, is just now beginning to work in earnest. This week, the commission will hold its third public hearing.

Its charge is sobering—and the panel is off to a rocky start. The staff has only recently sought millions of pages of government documents and commission members have alrady angered some victims’ relatives. Says 9/11 Widow Kristen Breitweiser, “There’s a whole reange of things that this commission doesn’t want to ask.”

The commission exists only because of people like Push and Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, 39, a money manager at Fiduciary Trust, died in the WTC. Many in the nations’ capitol wanted to leave the 9/11 postmortems to a joint congressional inquiry that will issue its final unclassified report shortly. But the families and congressional democrats were adamant in their belief that the Capitol Hill probe was too limited and media savvy family members like Push knew how to get attention. The pressure forced congress and a reluctant Bush administration to set up the commission last November.

Almost immediately, it bogged down. The panel’s first chairman, Henry Kissinger and vice chariman, George Mitchell resigned after refusing to accede to demands by some of the victims’ families that they disclose potential conflicts. Bush then named former new Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as Chairman. “I felt like a ton of bricks had dropped on me,” says Kean

-snip- NOTE: Kean has ties w/Saudis

Finding a staff director was especially excruciating. No one in the intelligence community wanted what is widely viewed as a thankless job. So Hamilton reached out to Philip Zelikow, a former defense attorney, constitutional scholar, presidential historian and national security expert who has held sensitive positions under Republicans and Democrats. Zelikow, 48, who coauthored a book (German Unified and Europe Transformed: A study in Statecraft) with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, is acutely aware of the sky-high expectation of the 9/11 families an the inevitable pitfalls. “When you have events of this kind,” he says, “there’s no document that can acquire the status of ‘revelations that quiet all concerns.’”

The commission’s mandate is to build on the report of the congressional investigation. But it wasn’t until May that members obtained access to some key classified transcripts related to the congressional proble, because the White House, which had waived executive privilege over those documents was debating whether it could restrict the commission’s access to the transcripts. “Every day that goes by,” says commissioner Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic representative from Indiana, “sand drops through the hourglass.”

The panel’s report is due next May.
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A commission source says the White House, the CIA and especially the Defense Department and the FBI have all been slow to provide documents requested. Commissioners were concerned enough to raise the issue during a meeting last week with the FBI Director Robert Mueller and “I think he received th message clearly,” says one source. The commission will turn up the heat on recalcitrant agencies at a news conference this week.

US News has learned that the commission’s staff has prepared a wish list of senior officials it wants to interview. Most notable: President Bush, Vice President Cheney and former President Bill Clinton. Whether these leaders will accept the invitation is an open question. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Last November, President Bush told commissioners to “follow all the facts wherever they lead.” Zelikow says he’s confident the White House will provide complete access. “Zelikow,” says commissioner John Lehman, “has done a first-class job of wearing down the bureaucracy.” But Roemer says it’s too soon to tell whether the White House will help or “stonewall” the commission. After all, he says, the adminstration refused to give congressional investigators access to the National Security Council, the cabinet level body that advises the president and implements his counterterrorism directives.

“The NSC,” says Roemer, “is the nexus.” Push is cautiously optimistic. “Everyone knows has subpeona power,” he says. “They’re going to do their best to convince people the gun is loaded and cocked.”

Competing agendas. The stakes are high all around. There will surely be a political price to pay if the White House denies the panel documents by asserting a claim of executive privilege. Though it agreed to the commission’s creation, the Bush administration views it warily, mindful that its report will be released in the middle of an election year.

For the families, however, the commission is the only hope of redress, since they can’t sue anyone for answers under the terms of a financial settlement hammered out by a special master attorney appointed by President Bush.
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Zelikow says the instances of wrongdoing will “of course” be pursued. But he maintains that the “fundamentally our inquiry is a historical and policy inquiry.” The families say that’s unacceptable."We have made it abundantly clear, over and over again, "fumed Breitweiser, "that we will not stand for some broad, sweeping historic account."

A couple of weeks ago, family members grew furious when they learned that the panelists for this week's public hearing on the history of Al Qaeda are all academics. Another complaint: Even though state-sponsored terrorism is supposed to be one of the topics the panel will address, Saudi Arabia's ties to the September 11th attacks—15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis—is not on the table.

Last week, Zelikow apologized to the families saying that this week's hearing will address the subject of al Alqaeda and terrorism only in broad terms because the commission still has not obtained important documents.
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