For consideration on the 9/11 Commission:

[edit] Criticism

[edit] General criticism
Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, said "There are not many editors eager for writers to explore the glaring defects of the 9/11 Commission Report. One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations. We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11."[4]
In a 2004 article entitled, 'Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation,' Harpers Magazine writer Benjamin DeMott stated, "The plain, sad reality — I report this following four full days studying the work — is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation . . . At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness of earnest, well-informed public debate."[

Alleged omissions
A Pakistani weekly paper wrote in March of 2006 that the Pakistan foreign office spent "tens of thousands of dollars" lobbying to get anti-Pakistan findings omitted from the final version of the Commission Report. The Pakistani newspaper also wrote, "Insiders . . . say the US Congress does not know about the fact that money was paid to the inquiry commission to silence it." [6]
In a 2004 interview, Bernard Gwertzman, of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated of the Report, "Again, one of the great problems in the commission report is that it looked at exactly one issue— counterterrorism— and none of the others. But [U.S.] intelligence users consist of more than 1 million people, many of them in uniform, and when you talk about budgeting and programming authority, you have to consider that. . . Many of these conclusions are probably very valuable. But this is a 13-chapter report. Eleven chapters are a masterful description of what happened and what went wrong that led to the 9/11 attack. There is no chapter that explains what people did after 9/11. There is no chapter that qualifies that this is only one of many problems in intelligence and intelligence reform."[7]
Theologian and 9/11 researcher David Ray Griffin wrote a critical book "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions".
The Report did not include testimony by secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta which describes the situation in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center with vice president Cheney as American Airlines flight 77 approached the Pentagon on 9/11/01: "There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And--" Yet despite such a detailed description of the events that day, the only mention of Mineta in the Commission Report is on p. 326, that Mineta was part of a group that met with Bush at the end of September 11 to review the events of the day.[8]
The Report did not include the testimony of FAA counter-terrorism expert Bogdan Dzakovic, who stated to the Commission, "We breached security up to 90 percent of the time. The FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead, we were ordered not to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities, to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be 'checking.' . . . What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system. Our airports are not safer now than before 9/11. The main difference between then and now is that life is now more miserable for passengers." He also described later, in an interview, the same situation which occurred for virtually all government officials following the 9/11 attacks: "Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration." [9]
The Report contains 28 blanked-out pages that the Village Voice speculated on the contents of in a Dec 2005 article[10].
The Report did not include the testimony of Former CIA director George Tenet to the Commission in January of 2004 in which he said that in a July, 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, he had warned of an imminent threat from Al Qaeda. Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton stated that they had not been told about the meeting. But the Boston Globe reported that "it turns out that the panel was, in fact, told about the meeting, according to the interview transcript and Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who sat in on the interview with Tenet."[11], [12]

[edit] Alleged inaccuracies
The Report states: "The threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners within the United States -- and using them as guided missiles -- was not recognized by NORAD before 9/11." (The Report repeats the assertion three times.) Yet a USA Today article, "NORAD had drills of jets as weapons" describes a pre-9/11 NORAD drill involving hijacked jetliners from airports in Utah and Washington state. [13] (As an aside, the Report does mention briefly on page 537 the case of Samuel Byck who attempted to hijack a jetliner to crash into the White House in 1974, resulting in the deaths of an airport police officer and a pilot as well as his own suicide.)
The Report states[citation needed]: "The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, 'vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,' where it could perform its mission to monitor the aircraft's flight path." Yet the order referenced by the footnote for this statement (Order 7610.4J: Special Military Operations), states[citation needed]:
7-2-1. FACILITY NOTIFICATION
The FAA hijack coordinator will advise the appropriate center/control tower of the identification of the military unit and location tasked to provide the hijack escort. The center/control tower shall coordinate with the designated NORAD SOCC/ROCC/military unit advising of the hijack aircraft's location, direction of flight, altitude, type aircraft and recommended flight plan to intercept the hijack aircraft. The center/control tower shall file the coordinated flight plan.

I'm sure there is no shortage of people wanting to criticize the report, but citing allegations from Wikipedia, as you did, doesn't show much.

Here is a link to the report itself. Anyone can read it without paying the $10 like I did!

9/11 report

Wikipedia gives link citations to the criticisms. YOUR simple act of writing these criticisms off so nonchalantly lacks any and every bit of rigor necessary to debate or defend positions. Thank you, but I for one will not blindly accept the 9/11 Commission's ommission of George Tenets' testimony, Norman Minetta's testimony, nor the ommission of blank pages in the report (reported by the liberal Village Voice No Less)-----> To ignore these very elements only further raises questions as to the full veracity of the report's conclusions.

What's he done to show he won't? What's he done to show he will, Ronno?

By the way, thanks for the link. I could not find it at first.

he hasn't said that islamic terrorists are not a problem, that's for sure. now, what has he done that shows he won't try to prevent the next 9/11? (we can continue back and forth as much as you'd like. so far you have presented the classic "liberal legacy" argument. thanks for that mr gillespie.)

Conservative publication = truthful

Liberal publication = agenda.

We get it.

Oh, good. There for a minute, I thought he might not have done anything. Other reasons Ron wants to vote for Obama:

1. He hasn't said that he won't continue to respect the peaceful transfer of power following lawful US elections.

2. He hasn't said that he will end our peaceful relationship with Canada.

3. He hasn't said that he won't be concerned if San Diego gets nuked.

4. He hasn't said that he won't respect freedom of religion.

5. He hasn't said that he won't pardon the Thanksgiving turkey.

I guess he's the guy for me, too!



Wow, living up to your name, Strawman. I didn't say that the fact it was conservative made it truthful. I said it didn't prove the reverse. Nice try, though.

I think what you are saying comes through loud and clear. Too bad you aren't very good at nuance.

Wait am minute - I make a clear statement such as



which you interpret to mean



and I'm the one who isn't very good at nuance? Jiminy.

No you are not very good at reading your own nuances. You made a clear statement, a statement you would never make about a liberal magazine, which must have an agenda.

Doubt the liberal magazine, benefit of the doubt to the conservative magazine.

At least admit it. Geesh.

Straw, I hereby concede forever and all of time that the fact that a magazine is liberal does not necessarily mean that it is reporting a fraud. The fact that a magazine is liberal or conservative is definitely something to keep in mind when evaluating what motives might exist for slanting their reporting, but it certainly would not follow that all reporting by them is therefore fraudulent.

Sheesh. Or, as you might say, geesh.

Geesh is how my younger daughter says it, but unfortunately you can't concede that.

We all have our own biases and see the world through them. You sometimes lose sight of that, when you make statements like Fox News is less biased than this or that organization.

You perceive that because you agree with their slant and disagree with the other slant. You would read the conservative magazine, agree with the slant and not see it at all, where a liberal would read the conservative magazine disagree with the slant and have it hit them square in the face. The reverse is equally true.

This is not a moral play where right and wrong is clear. These are subtle shades of gray, where there is no right or wrong, only left or right on a spectrum that we control how and where the colors are laid out.

I bet she says it with a "J" as in Jack and not a "G" as in Gerald, but I'm sure you're too stubborn to admit it.

I understand that we all have biases, and I understand that Fox has its own slant. I think it's less than the slant of most of the other news outlets, but, as I said, I don't have hard evidence. I didn't come on here bitching about NBC, I only bring it up when someone is doing their normal Fox bashing.

Further, I want to say that I respect you, Straw, and I think that you generally try to be intellectually honest. I think that our conversations would be a lot less contentious if there weren't underlying accusations to the contrary about me. I can't make you think I'm trying to deal with the issues fairly if you don't, of course. I just hope that you do, or would at least give me the benefit of the doubt.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no; depends on my mood Just kidding. I hope you know I respect your posts too, just sometimes get tired of seeing the woo is me attitude from either the left or right on here.

Everyone wants to feel vicitmized over something lately.

"the woo is me attitude" - is that the breezy, devil-may-care air one assumes when no matter how bad your action flicks are, someone's always willing to let you make the next $100 million mediocre movie?

yup; doesn't he have another on in the works? Find his movies to be nothing but action sequences strung together. No plot at all.

I know we all like to keep things neat and tidy on BOL. It's "woe is me" not "woo is me".

Carry on.

Thanks Suzy. J was making a joke about that above with a twist on John Woo the director.