White House Whitewash

[jbfam4]

Published on Sunday, March 28, 2004 by The Sunday Herald (Scotland)
White House Whitewash

A conflict of interest at the heart of the US 9/11 Commission hearings has been exposed by the families of the Twin Towers victims

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0328-01.htm
by Neil Mackay

ANDREW Rice is angry with George Bush. His brother David was 31 years old when he died as United Airlines Flight 175 ploughed into the south tower of the World Trade Center where David worked as a financier with the investment firm Sandler O'Neill.

Andrew doesn't buy the rhetoric from the White House that Bush is a great war president who can make America stronger and safer. To Andrew, Bush is a charlatan making a mockery out of the deaths of his brother and the some 3000 other men, women and children who died on September 11, 2001.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Andrew Rice might then be glad to see the bloody battering that the Bush administration took this week during the ongoing commission hearings in Washington into whether or not the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.

Bush and his team were painted as a feckless, lazy and ill-informed bunch who had little clue about al-Qaeda, and were fixated on Iraq. Security seemed far from the top of their agenda while an ideological obsession with taking out Saddam appeared to obscure the real dangers posed by Osama bin Laden's network of fundamentalist killers.

But the hammering that Bush took during the hearings did little to appease Rice and other family members like him. To Rice, who chairs the 9/11 Commission Committee of the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows organization, the whole inquiry is one big fix that will do everything it can to hide the truth of what the US president and his closest advisors knew about the attacks.