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| Philip Zelikow loves you. |
Divided and Destabilized
As we all know, the U.S. government could have decided in the wake of the attacks to mount a politically motivated coverup rather than a full and impartial investigation.
It's a good thing that didn't happen because it might have divided and destabilized our entire society.
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| Henry Kissinger loves you. |
Exit Henry Kissinger
We got a lucky break when Henry Kissinger recused himself from leading the independent investigation, evidently for fear that his company's client list would be exposed, revealing enormous but lucrative conflicts of interest.
yes, there are two paths you can go by
It could have turned out much worse because the conspiracy theorists would have had a field day with the idea that Kissinger had been appointed to hide something which the administration didn't want us to see.
Enter Philip Zelikow
Our run of good luck continued when somebody in the administration discovered that Philip Zelikow was available to fill the position Kissinger had abandoned.
Zelikow was perfect for the job, since he was not only a specialist in "the creation and maintenance of public myths", but had also written a paper about "catastrophic terrorism and the political uses to which it could be put". It would be tough to imagine a candidate more perfectly suited to the task at hand.
Unaffiliated
It's difficult to overestimate not only how lucky the administration was to find him, but also how fortunate we were that Zelikow was unaffiliated with any officers of the Bush administration by virtue of having written a book with national security advisor Condoleeza Rice.
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| George Bush and Karl Rove love you. |
This meant that Zelikow could confer on a daily basis with Karl Rove, himself unaffiliated with the Bush administration in his role as Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff, without even hinting at any political interference in the fully independent investigation.
Starting with the Outline
We were even luckier, in my view, that Zelikow started the investigation by preparing an outline of the final report, complete with chapter names, section headings, and sub-sections. He hid it from his staff, not wanting to spoil their impression that they were doing something patriotic.
And it's a good thing he did that because it would have been demoralizing for the staffers to find out that they weren't doing anything of the sort. Who needs to be demoralized in the middle of an important project?
Much More Efficient
It goes without saying that starting with an outline of the report made the investigation much more efficient. Zelikow's staff knew whom to interview, what questions to ask, and what answers to accept, before the investigation even got rolling.
And that was very fortunate because they had hardly any time or money to complete their very important work.
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| The traditional French method. |
Smooth and Coherent
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the anonymous teacher who showed Philip Zelikow the advantages of starting with an outline.
As the Commission's Report showed, an outline is useful in ways other than helping to organize an investigation.
It can also help to make the report appear to be smooth and coherent, and therefore almost partially credible, even if nothing the report actually says is actually true.
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| The traditional American method. |
Straight and On Track
When you consider how complicated the 9/11 attacks were, and how important it was to keep the story straight and the staff on track, it's difficult to see how he could have approached it in any other way.
But we've had 20 years of hindsight to figure this out. And Zelikow had the outline written before his first day on the job.
He must have been a Boy Scout. They're always told to be prepared, are they not?
Bush and Cheney Testify
Most loyal patriotic clueless Americans felt it would have been inappropriate for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to testify before the 9/11 Commission, since forcing them to do so would show a lack of respect for the offices they held at the time, even though they had not been legitimately elected.
But most of the misgivings were allayed when the Commission agreed to allow Bush and Cheney to testify together (rather than separately), behind closed doors (rather than in public) and not under oath (so that, unlike the other witnesses, they were in no danger of perjuring themselves).
The only remaining grounds for complaint were removed when the Commission agreed that no recordings of their testimony could be made, and no notes taken during their session could be kept.
Making History
America's status as the world leader in the democratic art of jurisprudence was greatly enhanced when the whole world realized that the 9/11 Commission had made history by running the first mass-murder investigation in which the suspects who potentially had the most secrets to conceal were allowed to dictate the terms under which they would cooperate.
This benign decision will pay off in the future because the precedent set by the Commission can now be used to compel testimony from any government official, no matter how high the office, should such an investigation ever become necessary.
No Disrespect Intended
Previously it had been thought that any attempt to compel any high-ranking officials to testify before any investigation would show disrespect, not only to the official in question but also to the office in which the official officiated, and that it could also jeapordize national security by forcing said official to reveal sensitive state secrets.
But the trail-blazing 9/11 Commission showed that all such objections could be overcome if the official in question were shown a modicum of respect.
And of course, by allowing him to set the terms under which his testimony might be taken, any concerns about revealing state secrets could be rendered moot.
Good Timing
We tend to forget how lucky we were that the investigation didn't begin until the retaliatory attack against "terrorists of global reach and those who harbor them" had already been rolling for more than a year.
Otherwise the attempt to positively identify the perpetrators could have delayed the swift retribution they deserved.
Benefiting From One Thing
If the investigation had been a sham, there would have been people who were smart enough to see that something was amiss and brave enough to say so.
Those people would have been marginalized or worse, and nobody wanted to see anything like that happen, so in the long run we're all benefiting from one thing, namely the independent investigation and the comprehensive report it produced.
Doubts and Suspicions
If that report hadn't been entirely credible, people might have been open to the idea that the government's story was a deliberately (if shabbily) concocted lie, and they might have suspected that maybe somebody other than Osama bin Laden had been behind the attacks.
Similar doubts could have been raised if any members of the 9/11 Commission later said the Commission had been set up to fail, or that it probably got the story wrong, or if one of the original appointees had refused to be associated with it, calling it a "national disgrace". So we're very lucky that nobody ever did that, including U.S. Senator Max Cleland.
A Desperate Waste
In the final analysis, it was a desperate waste of time and money. Rather than going through this great national rigamarole, spending millions of dollars on lawyers who have more than enough money anyway and learning nothing, we could have just spent four minutes listening to one song which could have told us what had gone wrong and who was responsible and what ought to be done about it.
And even though the song was written 25 years before the attacks, I don't take it as a sign of foreknowledge because the details are so vague. (We'll look at some more compelling signs of foreknowledge in the next chapter.)
Instead I take this as a sad sign of non-knowledge. We should have been able to figure out we were in trouble a long time ago. I mean: If a Canadian can figure it out ... But then again, it's not just any Canadian. It's Bruce Cockburn, and he's pretty smart for a foreigner!
Listen: Bruce Cockburn: Burn
Look away across the bay
Yankee gunboat come this way
Uncle Sam gonna save the day
Come tomorrow we all gonna pay
