Were some 9/11 commission members bribed ???

To clarify, the issue here is that 1) Thomas Kean sat on a board of directors 2) of a company that bought rights 3) from a company that was owned by 4) the sons of a man 5) who more or may not have funded 6) al Qaeda. Okay, six degrees. Not bad. I suppose that could be seen as a conflict of interest.

The issue, then, is whether Khalid bin Salim bin Mahfouz is actually guilty of the allegations, which were made in various reports, books, and journalistic pieces. Increasingly, the answer seems to be no. Of at least four lawsuits filed by bin Mahfouz in which libel is alleged, two have already been settled in his favor (the other two are in process). Both the Mail on Sunday (UK) and Pluto Press have issued public apologies and have agreed to pay damages in the cases brought against them.

There may be things about Kean that deserve criticism. The Cato Institute, for example, has called the National Endowment for Democracy a “Loose Canon”. A 1993 Cato policy briefing says “On a number of occasions, for example, NED has taken advantage of it alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of the AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation.

Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States.” Kean’s position in the NED, therefore, would seem a more obvious choice if one were to condemn the man based on affiliation. Of course, one would then have to acknowledge that Clinton was among NED’s biggest proponents; one would also have to concede that in politics nothing is black and white, and that Kean is not so easily classified as either conspiracy theorists or some well-meaning critics on the Left would have us believe.