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