An open letter to the former 9/11 commissioners: Another whitewash won't do

By Mike Mejia
Online Journal Contributing Writer

August 12, 2005?With the recent revelation that the Pentagon may have known as early as 1999 that Mohammed Atta and three other of the 9/11 hijackers were part of an al Qaeda cell operating in the United States, you, the former 9/11 Commission members, working in your new capacity as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, are looking for an excuse to reopen your investigation. Some in the progressive community have even suggested that your Commission be given more federal dollars.

Please, ex-Commission members (that includes you too, Lee "Hear No Evil, See No Evil" Hamilton), do not hoist upon the American people any more "favors." Our people's national security cannot afford any more of this type of "generous public spirit" on your part. Unless, of course, you are ready to start conducting a real and thorough investigation, a possibility about which I have grave doubts.

The 9/11 families and the American public looked to you for answers as to how a handful of alleged Islamic radicals, using box cutters as weapons, could bring the worlds' only remaining superpower to its knees. And what did you tell them? It was all a 'failure of imagination.' Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Kean said this with a straight face not once, but several times on national television, even though there was ample proof given to your committee that U.S officials had mulled planes being used as weapons for not months, but years, before 9/11. Furthermore, no one in the U.S. government, according to your Commission, should be fired or held criminally liable for this alleged "imagination" breakdown.

Even worse than your analysis of the pre-9/11 intelligence screw-ups was your prescription for curing the American government employees of the dreaded 'imagination deficit' disease: creating a new level of government bureaucracy called an "intelligence czar." Few of us Americans realized at the time your final report was released just how much contempt the Bush administration had for your findings; but when we found out that John Negroponte, the man responsible for covering up the torture and murders of the Honduran military in the '80s, would be appointed to this new position, those of us who still cared about 9/11 issues knew that the 'fix' was in. America, frankly, is worse off than ever before because of your "investigation" and not a single American is sleeping safer because Mr. Negroponte is sitting in some smoke-filled Washington office examining 'intelligence' undoubtedly related to the ACLU and peace activists.

One would think that a group of folks such as you, Mr. Kean, Mr. Hamilton and all the rest, would at least have the decency to ride off into the sunset quietly and not do any more damage to the cause of the real 9/11 truth seekers. But you insist on getting your mugs on C-SPAN day after day after day. What you typically say on these televised appearances reminds me of the grownups in all those Charlie Brown TV Specials: "Blah, blah, blah . . . the Saudis . . . blah, blah, blah . . . Islamic charities . . . blah, blah, blah . . . intelligence failures." Frankly, I learn more truth about 9/11 watching Seventh Heaven reruns than I do from your canned symposiums.

Despite the lack of value you all brought to the process while you had the power of subpoena, you, the 9/11 commissioners, are not interested in going away or disbanding yourself. And I can only ask myself why. Why would a commission that had already released a grossly distorted report, which resulted in an apparatchik like Negroponte being appointed to a dubious bureaucratic position, continue to try to muddle the 9/11 debate? Why would such miserable failures, such as you, continue to compound the problems caused by your lack of intestinal fortitude and intellectual curiosity? I can only think of two likely explanations.

The first reason could be that you ex-commissioners realize just how badly your incomplete and illusory report had distorted the full truth about September 11, 2001. Perhaps you are thusly trying to rectify your previous error. I would really embrace these renewed efforts if I believed that to be the case. But I suspect you are out there in the public domain again for a different, more nefarious reason. Your real purpose is to continue to distract and dissuade a real investigation from being initiated; one that might result, as former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has stated, in high-level prosecutions of government officials.

So until you, our beloved ex-9/11 commissioners, start proving to be truth-seekers instead of truth-hiders, I will unfortunately have to agree with the Bush administration for the first time in its dreaded five-year existence: you deserve not one more dollar from the hard-working American taxpayer. Not one red cent.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Citizen

PS: Please also do not bother to give us your input on the aforementioned allegations of Pentagon's knowledge of Atta and his cronies pre-9/11. We already know what your investigation will find "blah, blah . . . connect the dots . . . blah, blah . . . imagination failure."

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