The 9/11 Files: The Cover-up Commission | Ep 2

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In January 2000, as the CIA was tracking two future hijackers as they journeyed to Los Angeles, George W.

Bush was seven months into his presidential campaign.

What we're going to do is we're going to do something no other presidential candidate has been able to do.

The near impossible.

Remember what it was?

The near impossible turn like that?

One of the most exhilarating moments of my political career and yours too.

His campaign was working to take down his opponent at the time, Arizona Senator John McCain, by spreading rumors he'd fathered a black bastard child with a prostitute.

You should be ashamed.

The following December, two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot, and Marwan Al-Sheikhi, were finishing their pilot training in Venice, Florida on the West Coast.

In Washington, the Supreme Court ruled that George W.

Bush had won the 2000 election.

John McCain wanted to get political revenge.

When he got his chance 10 months later, it would have historic consequences.

The official story of what happened on 9-11 comes from a single report, the 9-11 final report of the National Commission.

In the two decades since it was released, it has become the basis for all media coverage of terror attacks that day.

What the media never mention is that the commission itself was a farce.

It was intentionally underfunded.

It was poorly structured.

It was, from top to bottom, corrupt.

Two years after the report was released, the commission's own chairman admitted that it was set up to fail.

Americans have many questions tonight.

Americans are asking,

who attacked our country?

Beginning in the first hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration began leveraging the tragedy to launch their next project, a so-called global war on terror.

The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations.

known as al-Qaeda.

In a normal country, its leaders would insist on an answer to the simple question, how did a terror network closely monitored by the United States intelligence agencies, including a unit dedicated to following them at CIA headquarters in Langley, how did a group like that manage to pull off the 9-11 attacks in broad daylight?

That's the question.

But this is not a normal country and it was never answered.

In fact, the Bush administration ferociously opposed any attempt to look carefully at what happened that day.

And that presents a a bigger question.

Why?

What did they have to hide?

My name is Kristen Breitweiser.

My husband Ron was killed on September 11th.

Breitweiser is one of four 9-11 widows who became famous at the time as the, quote, Jersey Girls.

They were some of the only people in public life in the United States who wouldn't let it go.

They didn't believe the official 9-11 story, and they often said so.

They were all over the media for several years, determined to identify government officials who may have been complicit in the tragedy.

In the end, they were ignored.

We were looking at a Bush administration that really was not interested in looking backwards.

There was a push to immediately go to war.

There was an invasion into Afghanistan, and then there was the queue-up for the war in Iraq.

I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people

and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

Rather than get to the bottom of what actually happened, the Bush administration immediately exploited the crisis to push for what it really wanted, which was an invasion of Iraq.

In his book, Against All Enemies, George W.

Bush's counterterrorism czar Richard Clark said that when he went back to the White House immediately after 9-11, he quote, expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks would be, what our vulnerabilities were.

Instead, he realized with what he called almost sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.

And that's exactly what they did.

On the afternoon of September 11th, Rumsfeld said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only bin Laden.

The day after the attack, Bush asked Clark to see if Saddam did this, see if he's involved in any way.

And while meeting with the president on September 15th at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.

We learned quite quickly that we were not going to get the answers that we really wanted with regard to the murder, the homicide of our 3,000 loved ones.

My husband, Ron, was 39 when he was killed.

He was a really good man.

He was smart and a good dad.

And he had called me on the morning of September 11th.

I was rushing out the door to take my daughter to speech therapy.

And I had no idea what was going on.

I didn't have the television on.

And he was like, sweets, it's me.

I'm okay.

And I had, I had no idea.

I'm like, okay, I'm glad you're okay.

And he was like, no, no.

He's like, put the television on.

And he's like, it's not my building.

I knew you would be worried.

It's not my building.

And I put the television on and I was so on the phone with him.

And I was like, oh my God, like, what, what is that?

And he was like, you know, there's an explosion in the building next to me, but it's not my building.

I'm safe.

I'm fine.

And I was like, it's really really bad.

You know, it looks bad.

And he was like, that's why I called.

Don't worry.

It's not my building.

And he's like, and then his voice cracked.

And he was like, sweets.

He's like, people are falling out the windows.

I'm like, just, you know, what do you, what do you, what are you going to do?

And he's like, well, I'm going to go down to the trading floor and see if I can find a television to see what's going on.

We don't know anything.

He's like, but I didn't want you to worry.

I love you.

He's like, I'll call you back.

And,

you know, that was the last I spoke to him.

And

like three minutes after we got off the phone, I still had the TV on and I saw his building explode right where he was.

And

I just, I wish I told him to run.

I wish I told him to get out.

I wish I told him, you know, it's not safe, something's wrong, get out.

But I just,

I didn't.

I think, you know, feeling that way, feeling like, why didn't I know?

Why didn't I have a woman's instinct to be like, get out made me want to fight for the commission and for for everything else because I felt like the American public deserves to know.

The Bush administration, which at the time was enjoying historic 90% approval rating, was pushing a very clear storyline.

They told the country that Osama bin Laden had simply caught American authorities off guard.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9-11 attacks.

That was a lie.

And by May of 2002, more than two-thirds of Americans understood that it was a lie.

They wanted an investigation investigation into the so-called intelligence failures that led to the attack.

The initial effort to investigate 9-11 was a joint congressional commission led by Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida, and Congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA officer who would later become the agency's director, appointed by Bush.

These public hearings are part of our search for truth.

Cheney did not want anyone looking into his failures that day, the administration's failures, and more than anything, I think he and the political strategist Karl Rove were very focused on the president's reputation, on ensuring that he would get reelected.

The lengths that the Bush administration went to kill the investigation into 9-11 are shocking.

In the winter of 2002, Dick Cheney called the then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschel of South Dakota and made a threat.

The VEEP told Daschel the leaders of the war on terror would be too busy to get bogged down in preparing for and testifying in front of the committees.

The strong implication of this, if you insist, will say you're interfering with the war effort.

The committee moved forward anyway.

On June 19th, 2002, they discovered that the NSA had intercepted messages from al-Qaeda operatives from the day before the attacks, saying, quote, the match begins tomorrow, and tomorrow is zero day.

It couldn't have been clearer.

Someone on the committee leaked those messages to the news media, seen and broadcast them.

And in retaliation for this, for telling the truth, the Bush administration sick the FBI, then run by Robert Mueller, on the committee.

The FBI, you know, really came down hard on the joint inquiry.

They polygraphed, they interviewed,

they made all kinds of threats.

And so, you know, when the FBI comes after you, it's kind of scary because you're looking at not only, you know,

potentially losing your position in Congress, but also imprisonment.

It was pure intimidation.

And so it had a very chilling effect, in my opinion, on the progress of the inquiry and their investigation.

In the end, Congress did make some interesting discoveries, most of which were redacted in the final report.

The Jersey girls continued to push for the truth.

They were furious.

They demanded an independent commission.

George W.

Bush's political enemies agreed.

John McCain's Revenge was an independent commission that would explore the truth about what happened on 9-11.

On November 27th, 2002, President Bush, fearing major political blowback if he vetoed the commission, signed the bill into law.

But he managed to neuter the commission in the process.

His allies in Congress gave the commission weak subpoena power.

and limited them to a strict 18-month timeline.

They appropriated for the entire investigation just $3 million.

By Washington standards, it was nothing.

By comparison, Congress gave 13 times more funding to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It appropriated 11 times more funding for Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia Gate.

The administration and the Congress simply didn't want the public to know what happened on 9-11.

But that wasn't the only thing they did to subvert the truth.

The White House, one of the ways that they controlled the commission was they were going to choose the chairman.

Their first choice was Henry Kissinger.

Today, I'm pleased to announce my choice for commission chairman, Dr.

Henry Kissinger.

At the time, I was like 30 years old, so I had known Kissinger, but I didn't really, you know, as a stay-at-home suburban housewife, it's not like I, you know, had dived into all of Henry Kissinger's horrible acts and his status as a war criminal.

Dr.

Kissinger is one of our nation's most accomplished and respected public servants.

Kissinger had served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon.

He pushed a massive expansion of the Vietnam War, including secret bombings in Cambodia and Laos.

There are questions about his role in Vietnam, his role in the coup in Chile.

When we first met him, he gave us this long talk about how honored it was and it was like the, you know, opportunity, not the opportunity, but like a responsibility of a lifetime.

It is a great honor.

to be appointed by the president to be chairman of the non-partisan independent commission.

In 2002, he was running a lucrative consulting business called Kissinger Associates.

I really spent a bit of time researching him, predominantly his clients.

And we had grave concerns that he was chosen by the vice president and the president and Karl Rove because he was really good at what he does.

And so we were also concerned about his clients and that he had a huge conflict of interest.

And so we were invited to meet with him at his offices on Park Avenue.

We were put into his office.

It was kind of close quarters.

It was really, really hot.

He had the heat turned up to like 100 degrees.

And, you know, it was the winter.

So we had like turtlenecks on and sweaters and stuff.

So we're like sitting there like sweating.

And he's just sitting there calmly.

Cranking up the thermostat is a well-known manipulation strategy.

If you make a room uncomfortably hot, the discomfort puts pressure on the other negotiating party to make concessions more quickly.

So at one point after we got through through the niceties, one of the widows had asked him whose clients were.

Do you represent any Saudi royals?

Do you represent anyone in the bin Laden family?

And, you know, at the time, it wasn't that much of an outrageous question because there were members of the bin Laden family

who had relationships with

the Bush family and others.

And so it wasn't like it was an outrageous question.

And he immediately got flustered and, you know, went to pick up a

cup of tea or coffee and spilled it on the table.

He feigned that it was his fake eye, which didn't know that he had a fake eye.

And we immediately went to like clean it up like moms, you know, like, oh, it's okay.

And then he just never answered the question.

And then the very next day, he resigned.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down from the position Friday.

Scrambling to find a new chairman, Bush's top political advisor, Carl Rove, called former New Jersey Governor Tom Kaine and offered him the job.

Why was George W.

Bush's political bag man making this phone call?

No one's ever explained.

Tom is the nicest guy on the planet.

He's very much a gentleman.

He does not go for the jugular.

After he accepted the job, Kaine was dragged to the White House where the president's top advisors told him, we want you to stand up.

You've got to stand up.

You've got to have courage.

We don't want to run away commission.

In other words, do what we say.

The White House's fingerprints were certainly all over the commission.

Chairman Kaine ultimately admitted the commission was, quote, set up to fail.

And that's absolutely true.

But in addition to a meaningless budget, the tight timeline, and weak subpoena power, there was another problem, the man Kaine selected to run it.

On January 27, 2003, the commission issued a press release announcing they'd selected an academic called Philip Zelico to be the commission's executive director.

He was sold to us as a historian.

I was responsible for the research for Zelico to make sure that he didn't have any conflicts of interest.

He had a lot of conflicts of interest.

The release described Zelico as, quote, a man of high stature who had distinguished himself as an academician, a lawyer, author, and public servant.

The release did not note that Zelico was an active Bush administration official.

He served on a White House intelligence advisory panel.

It also failed to note his extensive ties to Condoleezza Rice.

He'd served on her transition team.

He'd co-authored a book with Rice in 1995.

In 2002, at Rice's behest, Zelico authored a policy paper championing preemptive invasions.

And this cemented his role as a key architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Zeliko was the perfect person to keep the commission from finding the truth.

I believe he was placed there to, again, play the gatekeeper, to ensure that the commission would not not unearth the truth and more than anything to protect the Bush administration and also lay the groundwork for the war in Iraq in addition to other things.

Zelico's first move was to pre-write the entire report before the facts were in.

In March of 2003, before the investigation had even begun, Zelico had already prepared a detailed outline complete with chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings.

He kept all of this a secret from the rest of the staff.

As it it turned out, his outline is nearly verbatim to what the final book looks like.

And so what I believe is that he just basically had the outline, knew that it was a quote-unquote safe outline.

It was probably approved by the Bush administration.

His second move was to consolidate his power.

Zelico gave himself total control over the hiring process.

He at first tried to block the staffers from communicating with the commissioners.

In a now public memo, Zelico cut off his staff's access to the commissioners.

Quote, if you are contacted by a commissioner with questions, please contact Deputy Director Chris Kojim or me.

Zelico restricted access to documents.

He divided the staff into separate teams.

He siloed them from each other.

And he closely supervised Team 3.

That was the group that dealt with classified information from the White House and the CIA.

One of Zelico's first moves was a secret agreement with the Justice Department to block access to the files of the congressional inquiry until the White House had had a chance to review them first.

Zellico was sort of limiting access to documents when people were requesting specific things.

Zellico would block it.

Notably, the final report contains a full 61 references to finding no evidence of certain claims about 9-11.

The cute way of explaining why Zelico uses that phrase is that if you don't look for the evidence, you don't find the evidence.

And so you're not lying when you say we found no evidence.

At one point, a staffer overheard Zelico pressuring a CIA employee to accept Condoleezza Rice's recollection of intel briefings before the 9-11 attacks.

Most damning of all, phone logs kept by Zelico's assistant show that he was regularly taking calls from both Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove, George W.

Bush's top political advisor in the White House.

We reached out to Karl Rove for an explanation of this.

and he denied having been in regular contact with Zelico.

But that is untrue.

Even Zelico himself acknowledges he received multiple calls from Karl Rove, but he claims they did not discuss the commission.

He doesn't say what they did discuss.

None of it is plausible.

It wasn't even like he was on the National Security Council.

He didn't really have any information that would be helpful to the Commission.

Why is the Commission's staff director having communications with the White House's political strategist?

From the outset, the Commission started to advance the interests of Bush's neocon foreign policy agenda.

When Team 3, the counterterrorism group, submitted their draft to Zeliko, he inserted sentences that tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq to suggest the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9-11, and that bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq.

In the end, those sentences were removed after staffers alerted the commissioners.

But the commissioners did not prevent Zeliko from stacking public hearings with discredited neocons who towed the White House line about Iraq's connections to al-Qaeda, none of which were real.

The first outside expert to testify to the commission was the Hoover Institute's Abraham Sofar.

His written remarks to the commission include eight references to Iraq and five references to Saddam Hussein.

Keep in mind, this was a hearing on 9-11, which had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or Iraq.

Sofar spent most of his time at the public hearing talking about the need for preemptive invasions.

The need for preemptive actions stems ultimately from the conditions of modern life.

At the third hearing, Zelico produced a florid and widely discredited neocon called Lori Milroy from the American Enterprise Institute.

She appeared as a witness.

There is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds are Iraqi intelligence agents.

By April of 2004, former Senator Bob Kerry of Nebraska, a Democrat, confronted Rice about Zelico's ties to the administration.

Let me just ask you directly, and you can just give me a, to keep it relatively short, but I wanted to get it on the record.

Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelico any questions about terrorism during transition, since he was a second-person carded in the National Security Office and had considerable expertise?

Philip and I had numerous conversations about

the issues that we were facing.

Philip was, in fact, as you know, had worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plan.

So, yes.

Yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?

We talked.

Philip and I over a period of, you know, we worked closely together as academics.

Just talked about.

During the transition, did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?

Oh, to do anything on terrorism.

To help us think about the structure of the terrorism,

Dick Clark's operations, yes.

Incredibly, the man in charge of the official story of 9-11, Philip Zelico, was the Bush administration advisor who decided to demote the White House's counterterrorism czar Dick Clark in the months before 9-11.

Yet somehow these details, central though they are, were left out of the Commission's final report.

The 9-11 Commission report was a cover-up from beginning to end.

That is true.

And that's the most important starting point for those seeking to understand what actually happened on September 11th.

The official story is a lie.

What isn't clear is why our government and subsequent governments under subsequent presidents would want to continue that lie and cover up what actually happened on 9-11.

What exactly were they hiding?

And more important, who were they protecting?

We found out.

That's in the next installment of our 9-11 series.