Daschle Pnackles "Commission Incredible"

(Reposted under new title upon request.)

The refusal to appoint a single 9-11 family member to the 9-11 commission angers me deeply. I know this issue was discussed here briefly before, but not enough, I believe. I am frankly shocked that the dramatic events of 9-11 can be swept under the rug as business as usual. The American people must be freed to dig out the truth from under the rubble.

This article is critical of Daschle and Kerrey, but to the extent that some of our guys are in bed with evil itself, let the chips fall where they may. I thought it was worth the long read, and a serious discussion of the government's own obstruction of justice for 9-11 families.

DASCHLE PNACKLES "COMMISSION INCREDIBLE"
-- Top Dem Mis-Kerrey's National 9/11 Probe
By W. David Kubiak

December 17th: 9/11 Commission Chairman Kean fires off a news blip claiming the September 11 attacks were "preventable," some officials had "simply failed", and "major revelations" are due next month.. Titillating stuff, without question, but Kean was already backing off the next day, "clarifying" that "We have no evidence that anybody high in the Clinton or Bush administrations did anything wrong," i.e., only mid-level heads may be required to roll.

While the "preventable" crackle fades away on the news ticker, I would commend your attention to a graver 9/11 story that never made the crawl bar but directly affects the credibility of this inquiry as a whole.

December 9th, two days after the 52nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the National 9/11 Commission itself was hit without warning by Tom Daschle's bombshell appointment of Iraq hawk Bob Kerrey to replace Max Cleland.

Kean's bully outbursts notwithstanding, the Independent 9/11 Commission is in trouble. A majority of members have been tarnished with conflict of interest allegations for their ties to airlines, oil firms, and the Bush/Cheney crowd. The commission is also under fire for not requiring witnesses to testify under oath and for allowing administration "minders" to chaperone its private deposition interviews. The Administration is not cooperating, the media is missing in action, and the Commission's clock is running out. With two-thirds of its mandated life already passed, it is still awaiting access to critical documents from the FAA, NORAD and the White House.

To make matters far worse, it's also lost Max Cleland, one of the few commissioners untainted by conflicts of interest and certainly the most outspoken with regard to the facts. By June of this year Cleland was already railing loudly against the Administration for "slow-walking" cooperation, insisting on "minders", and routing the Commission's information through a "political coordinator" in Ashcroft's Justice Department. Many victim family groups disappointed by the Commission's compromises, vacuous hearings, and delays were stating privately that Cleland was one of the only commissioners they could trust.

Then on July 11th, Tom Daschle suddenly and inexplicably nominated Cleland for one of the Democrat controlled board seats in the Export-Import Bank. The nomination required a presidential OK, but if approved would expel Cleland from the 9/11 Commission since no commissioner could simultaneously hold a federal post. So Daschle had knowingly put the fate of the Administration's harshest 9/11 critic into the hands of the Bush team itself.

Cleland for his part refused to shut up, "As each day goes by we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11th than it has ever admitted." (NY Times 10/26/03) He was also the only member to speak out against the Commission leaders' deal allowing the White House to severely limit and censure access to requested Bush briefing documents. As Cleland raged to Wolf Blitzer on CNN (11/13/03), ""This is a scam, it's disgusting. America is being cheated... We shouldn't be making deals. If somebody wants to deal, we issue subpoenas. That's the deal." That may have been Cleland's idea of the deal, but it was also apparently the last straw. Nine days later Bush confirmed Cleland's Ex-Im Bank appointment and purged him from the Commission for good.

The ball then returned Daschle's court as he alone had the authority to appoint Cleland's successor. The Family Steering Committee, which monitors the Commission's proceedings on behalf of many victim family groups, lobbied hard for another commissioner they could believe in -- someone who would be as fearless, focused and candid as Cleland, and help allay their increasing qualms. Their three recommendations included former Sen. Gary Hart, who had co-chaired the prophetic Hart-Rudman Commission on national security and terrorism; Eleanor Hill, a trusted commission staffer and former Pentagon Inspector General; and 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser, co-chair of September 11th Advocates. Breitweiser was in fact the family groups' favorite as she was not only "one of them," she had also been a driving force behind the 9/11 Commission's creation when Congress's joint intelligence investigation proved futile and Daschle meekly heeded Cheney's warning not to launch any inquiries of his own.

Daschle could not be pushed around by just anyone however. He fearlessly defied all victim group requests and New York editorials recommending a family member for the post, as well as thousands of faxes and emails begging him to choose Kristen above all. Daschle not only spurned these appeals, he flabbergasted everyone by appointing New School University's controversial president, Bob Kerrey, to the post.

Daschle's press office stressed all the Cleland/Kerrey parallels - both men were outspoken former senators, red-state Democrats, and decorated amputee Vietnam vets. What the press releases neglected to note was that, unlike Cleland, Kerrey was also an ultra-hawk, a strategic ally of Bush's neocon handlers, and an alleged war criminal to boot.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL, JUST RUN
Some who heard the news were disconcerted because of the unresolved war crime charges against Kerry for his command of a Navy Seals special ops unit in Vietnam. In the late '90s investigative journalist Gregory Vistica found Vietnamese and military witnesses who claimed Kerrey ordered the slaughter of 21 unarmed women and children in a raid on the tiny hamlet of Thanh Phong in February of 1969. Kerrey went on to lose a leg in a later skirmish, win the Medal of Honor, and enjoy a meteoric political career. Pressed by Vistica's revelations, Kerrey finally acknowledged the massacre in 2001, denying he started it, but admitting he didn't try to stop it either. Whatever the truth of that night, many more were alarmed by the fact that he concealed the bloody episode for three decades while exploiting his "war hero" status to realize his political goals (which were lofty, including a hard driving Presidential bid in '92).

One mainstream review of Vistica's expose, "The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey," noted that "Kerrey did his best to control the story and even to quash it by offering Vistica a job on several occasions. He also changed his story repeatedly: 'After the many talks I'd had with Kerrey over two-plus years, I came to see that he regarded the truth as fluid--something that could be modified, mixed, or diverted to suit his needs at the moment.'"

Reasonable doubt 1): how can someone who has shown so few misgivings about cover-ups or fluidic deceit for so long suddenly become a principled champion of concrete truth and full disclosure overnight?

ANSWERED PRAYERS
After serving one term in Nebraska's governor's mansion and nearly two in the Senate, Kerrey summed up his national security vision in a famous 1999 speech that urged more of everything martial: more intrusive intelligence, more sweeping surveillance, more billions (by far) for the Pentagon, and a more damn-the-costs-tests-&-treaties--full-speed-ahead! approach to Star Wars.

Reasonable doubt 2): if these were indeed your policy objectives, sir, what about the post-9/11 world is not to like?

PNAC: THE LITTLE RAD POLICY ENGINE THAT COULD
If Kerrey's gung ho '99 overtures seem to chorus the militant anthems of the Project for a New American Century, you have a good ear. PNAC, you may recall, presents itself as an ultra-patriotic think tank and the strategy Vatican of neo-conservatism. PNAC members and alumni like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, Abrams, et al. now dominate White House decision-making and are the guiding force behind our current global adventurist spree.

For the last five years PNAC members have openly advocated total US military and economic domination of land, space, and cyberspace to secure global hegemony and economic supremacy, all of which would speedily deliver -- drum roll -- "the New American Century!"

PNAC has been the clearest voice promoting US control of the oil rich Middle East states; the loudest boosting military spending, full spectrum dominance, and space war tech; and the most wistful (in 2000) publicly lamenting that all its grand designs would take forever to realize without "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

It's becoming clear that we the people should pay heed to what these guys pray for, since they always seem to get their wish. One real concern, as readers of Robert Stinnett's densely documented "Day of Deceit" (Free Press, 1999) may recall, is that the "old" Pearl Harbor was not exactly a grim godsend or even a surprise attack. Stinnett reprints the Navy intercepts and internal memos that prove FDR knew it was coming and deftly used the ensuing outrage against Japan to ship troops off to Europe. (At least until our troops took Baghdad, this ranked as the greatest political bank shot of our age.) FDR's foreknowledge has in fact long been known to serious students of the era, and the PNAC fellowship, if nothing else, is a historically literate crew.

Whatever this administration's foreknowledge of 9/11 (and god knows they were warned eleven times), the issue with Kerrey is his ex post facto collusion with the PNAC crowd to pump the 9/11 terror to sell the conquest of Iraq.

MARKETING MAYHEM
Indeed to many 9/11 victim families in the Peaceful Tomorrows and Not in Our Name camp, Kerrey's most disturbing employment was his zealous membership in the PNAC-dominated Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Better known in peace & justice circles as the Committee to Bomb Iraq, the CLI was a White House-anointed "advocacy group" founded in November 2002 to bolster faltering poll support for PNAC's long planned Iraq war. Its mission according to its own website at the time: "The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq will engage in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize U.S. and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein… poses a clear and present danger to its neighbors, to the United States, and to free peoples throughout the world."

Although Saddam's "clear and present danger" remained ominously unspecified, PNAC board fixture and CLI executive director Randy Scheunemann saw a more immediate threat arising here at home: "There's going to be a huge need in the post-<2002> election vacuum to make sure that what happened in August doesn't happen in November and December... Capitol Hill offices have been getting a lot of calls against and not many for."

With public support tanking and Iraq war prep well underway, a huge PR campaign was called for and the CLI delivered. Chorusing White House canards about WMDs, mushroom clouds, UN futility, and Iraq/Al Qaeda collusion, CLI members and friends launched a media offensive that deluged news shows, op-ed pages, and high profile podia for three months. By March, deception prevailed, angst was restored, a majority believed Saddam had backed 9/11, and nearly 60% were ready for us to take him on alone.

By any PR standard the campaign was audacious and a great success. Poli-sci and propaganda buffs will no doubt study its techniques for many years. But beyond its skillful mendacity, the nature of CLI's membership teaches important lessons as well.

GAMES OF MONOPOLY, WAR AND PNACKLE
Remember Mussolini's maxim that fascism should rightly be called corporatism because it merges corporate interests with state power? Well, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq is sort of an American microcosm of Benito's corporate-martial dream, a corporatist hologram of our military-industrial complex writ small. Consider the strategic fusion.

You want military? Check recent CV entries for CLI Prez Scheunemann (Rumsfeld's Iraq policy consultant), or Richard Perle (Assistant Secretary of Defense & Chairman, Defense Policy Board), or Frank Gaffney (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) or James Woolsey (CIA chief) or arch-hawks like General Wayne Downing (Deputy National Security advisor & Iraq National Congress lobbyist) and General Buster Glosson (Chief of Gulf War I bombing campaign)

You want industrial? CLI chairman Bruce P. Jackson was a top seed in defense industry games throughout the Nineties and weapons giant Lockheed Martin's VP for Strategy and Planning right up to 2002 when he took the CLI post. Chairman of the CLI Board was George Schultz, a patriarch of Bechtel, which would go on to "win" more than $600 million in uncontested Iraqi infrastructure contracts. And let's not forget the indefatigable General Barry McCaffrey, notorious Gulf War I field commander, who now represents Raytheon Aerospace, Integrated Defense Technologies, and Veritas Capital, a growing Carlyle Group wannabe.

You want a complex? Consider the swarming CLI / PNAC nexus: not just CLI insiders like PNAC co-founder Robert Kagain, PNAC chairman William Kristol, PNAC's executive director Gary Schmitt, PNAC director Scheunemann, and PNAC's "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle, but also the Committee's compulsory conclaves with PNAC progenitors Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Just how much more PNACkled can one little group get?

These linkages are critical because they tie Kerrey directly into the heart of a crowd now being charged in various quarters with 9/11 foreknowledge, passive abetment and thus treason and murder. Indeed respected former cabinet ministers in both Britain and Germany have argued in print this year that 9/11 was "allowed to happen" as a great enabler for PNAC's imperial campaigns. In the US, Ellen Mariani, an elderly 9/11 widow, recently filed a civil RICO (Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organization) Act complaint against Bush and such key PNAC puppeteers as Cheney and Rumsfeld, presenting forty pages of evidence that they "knowingly let 9/11 happen for their personal and political gain." The gains enumerated include not only fear-induced poll bloat and 2002 congressional victories, but also the huge windfall profits realized by defendant-related firms in the destruction/reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq. (For example, Cheney's 433,000 Halliburton stock options alone have now appreciated to $26 million plus.)

Until these accusations are fully explored and adjudicated, Kerrey's close strategic cooperation with these defendants in hyping their agenda makes him a prime "person of interest" in both the evidential and auxiliary sense.

WHO YA GONNA CALL? A TRUST-BUSTER?
So to sum up our reasonable doubts: Is a man who has: a) shown no personal aversion to grave cover-ups and duplicity; b) noisily promoted the militarist policies that 9/11 delivered; and c) collaborated with alleged accomplices in, and obvious beneficiaries of, the 9/11 attacks, really the best candidate we can find for a 9/11 sleuth?

Who knows what Daschle was thinking when he sacrificed Cleland, ignored victim family pleas, and conjured up Kerrey (or for that matter what possessed him earlier to spike his own 9/11 probe, back the Iraq war, and cheerfully sign off on the Patriotic Act)?

What we do know is Kerrey's own view of his job, which was published the same day as Kean's "preventable" claim. "The commission should not be a vehicle to bash President Bush, in Kerrey's view. The commission will have to do its work 'respectfully - but forcefully,' he said, so as 'not to embarrass the president.'" (NY Villager, 12/17/03)

We also know that whomever the commission might eventually finger for "failure" or "incompetence", the crucial question of winking foreknowledge has yet to be raised, and without Cleland's brave holler the victims' answer-hungry kin will have a much lonelier row to hoe.

-- End --

W. David Kubiak is director of Big Medicine, a research and education institute studying the corporate takeover of our country, culture and consciousness. His email is bigmed(at)nancho.net.

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PIRACY POLICY
This piece may be freely reprinted or reposted as
long as it's not messed with and credit is attached.
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Rolls over EVERY time...

Must be terrified of another anthrax mailing...

God forbid that the minority leader risk losing his seat for the sake of finding out the truth about 9/11!

"The commission should not be a vehicle to bash President Bush, in Kerrey's view. The commission will have to do its work 'respectfully -but forcefully,' he said, so as 'not to embarrass the president.'"

Well, we sure wouldn't want to embarrass the empty-flight-suit he might go New-ku-ler.

Daschle is a waste of space who is minority leader only because the Dem bosses want him to keep his seat in a pubbie state.

i.e., ..." only because the Dem bosses want him to keep his seat in a pubbie state."

This issue is one that crosses party politics and if the public united to force the g-d government to give us an open investigation, the political system would be forced to change.

Am I being naiive about that?

Is there ever going to be justice in America again?

I just like the sound of that so much better, Don't you?

Daschle has finally crossed my threshold of apathy toward him. I'm "deeply troubled" about this.


(biting through pencil)

but I wasn't sure what it was.

This clears it right up.

looks that way doesn't it?

it's a paradox. If he's one of the only ones the families could trust, why would he agree to let himself be neutralized?

Why did Cleland agree to accept his new job? I am really surprised that Cleland didn't stay until the panel was finished since he was one of the few that 9-11 families trusted.

What more could the gop do to him after running him out of the senate with the pictures of him and Saddam and calling Cleland unpatriotic.

He could have recognized he was fighting a losing battle, or was in personal danger, or ready to go down in flames;
or perhaps he thought he could do more go at the Ex-Im bank which is definitely a very important position.

for clarity? If it were my term, I would have spelled it "PNACkling" or perhaps even "PNAC-kling" just to make sure people could see your PNAC reference right away instead of puzzling how to pronounce this marvelous new word you are introducing for the first time.

Brilliant read! You have encapsulated my own thoughts on this dismaying development, and I'm sure many others agree.

Thanks especially for the new info about Daschle's role in this abomination. One more reason to demand he step down or unmask himself as a mole for the fascists.

I sent your article to all my buddies around the world!
(heh my husband and my boss)

Happy holidays!

where I read this but I do remember reading that he had huge debts to pay from his Senate campaign. That may not be the only reason he accepted the position but it may be a contributing factor.

Chair Thomas Kean: Like Bush, has Texas oil business ties to Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law and al Qaeda financier, Khalid bin Mahfouz.

Vice-Chair Lee Hamilton: A history of covering-up for the Bush family. He led a congressional inquiry into the "October Surprise" of Bush Sr, and found no evidence of wrong doing.

Jamie Gorlick: joined the legal defense team of Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, the two top officers of First American Bank, which had been taken over by the corrupt BCCI, which laundered money for Intelligence agencies, criminals and terrorists.

Richard Ben-Vaniste: represented Barry Seal, the drug-running Iran/Contra CIA asset. Told The Wall Street Journal: "I did my part by launching him (Seal) into the arms of Vice President Bush who embraced him as an undercover operative."

Fred Fielding: deputy counsel under John Dean in the Nixon WH. Helped clean out Howard Hunt's safe and dispose of evidence. Served on the Bush* transition team.

Jim Thompson: longtime Illinois Governor and currently chairman of the Chicago-based law firm Winston and Strawn. Subject of allegations of complicity in CIA drug smuggling.

Slade Gorton: Appointed by Trent Lott to Senate Intelligence Committee. Told the Seattle Times two days after 9/11, that there was nothing Intelligence agencies could have done to prevent the attacks, and "I doubt we can expect to get too much inside information no matter what we do."