Tag: 9/11 commission

Former Chief of Staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson is now adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. Wilkerson is also Professorial Lecturer in the Honors Program of the “National Security Decision Making” senior seminar at George Washington University.

His last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02).

Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army, including as Deputy Executive Officer to then-General Colin Powell when he commanded the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and as Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997.

Here Wilkerson discusses with Real News Network’s Paul Jay what he terms “the culpability, the negligence of the [Bush] administration” over what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Well, even though it’s now 9/12, I didn’t have time on 9/11 to do much of anything at all, so here’s my one-day-late 9/11 essay.

It is a direct copy of the piece that got me banned from DK.  It’s also a story of gross corporate media censorship, of a kind that should scare us all half to death.  

Okay, I’m not gonna copy it word for word.  Because that wouldn’t let me tell the story of how the book — and my piece was about a book that was written by a 9/11 Commission insider, John Farmer — has been “disappeared”.   I mean, this book seems to have simply vanished.

Here’s the original story I wrote over at Dailykos.  In it, I simply describe John Farmer, and his forthcoming book.  

John Farmer is pretty impressive:

John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where his areas of responsibility included assessing the national response to the terrorist attacks and evaluating the current state of national preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he also served as attorney general of New Jersey (1999-2002), as chief counsel to Governor Whitman, and as a federal prosecutor. He recently served as a subject matter/rule of law expert on security to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He is currently a partner of a New Jersey law form and an adjunct professor of national security law at Rutgers University Law School. His editorials and articles have appeared in “The New York Times” and elsewhere.

I have since discovered an amazing site called “History Commons”.   If you do a search for John Farmer over there, you discover that it was he who constantly brought attention to the bullshit the Commission was receiving from the Pentagon, the FAA, and many others.  It was he who asked the questions that nobody would answer.  

Here’s a link to that.

Well, he decided to write a book.  And being who he was, none other than Houghton Mifflin Harcourt decided to publish it.  

Here’s what the book was going to look like:

It was scheduled to have been released by now.

Today, most people know that the US tortured prisoners at Guantánamo and CIA black sites.  Experts have been clear that torture does not produce reliable information. The response is often yeah, torture is the only way to save Americans from a mushroom cloud tomorrow. Cripes, it works for Jack Bauer!  

Even if you believe torture is permissible for national security reasons, is torture an acceptable method for a Congressionally-established commission to obtain facts? News reports indicate that 25% of the information about the 9/11 attacks came from prisoners who were tortured. The 9/11 Commission was responsible for providing a complete accounting of the attacks, including “recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.” Just how safe is America when it is relying upon recommendations based upon facts obtained by torture?  

No, this isn’t a conspiracy theory diatribe.  This is from an editorial in the NY Times by the two lead investigators of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.

I’m sure this won’t get much press because it’s SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING to sit around and speculate about who’s going to win the Iowa Caucuses tomorrow.

But here’s the deal:  Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have written an op-ed in the New York Times accusing the CIA of nothing less than obstruction of justice in their 9/11 investigation.

Why?  Because the CIA lied to them, and they know the CIA lied to them.  Maybe I should let them explain it: