The "Smoking Gun" Of 9/11

Jon Gold
9/23/2008

Recently, Kevin Fenton posted an update to the timeline available at www.historycommons.org entitled, "United 93, 9/11 Commission – Additions to the 9/11 Timeline as of September 21, 2008." In it, he stated that "as the commission was just beginning its work in early 2003, Executive Director Philip Zelikow had already completed an outline of its final report." When I read that entry, I was floored. As you'll read below, Kean, Hamilton, and Zelikow decided to keep this outline a secret from the 9/11 Commission staffers because it might be seen that they, "had predetermined the report's outcome." Now why on Earth would they think something ridiculous like that?

This is just another of many slaps in the faces to the people that lost loved ones that day, Americans, and the rest of the world. As I pointed out in my article about the allegation that the 9/11 Commission was bribed, Philip Zelikow was "someone who tried to insert false information into the 9/11 Report, someone who may have taken direction from Karl Rove, someone who was given a nice cushy job with his old friend Condoleezza Rice."

Why do we do what we do? Aside from wanting truth, accountability, and justice for the 9/11 attacks, why is it that we do what we do? Could it be that one of the reasons we do what we do is because the 9/11 Commission that was mandated to give a "full and complete accounting" of the 9/11 attacks failed miserably, and because of that, we are forced to take a stand, and point out the fact that we have been lied to, and that there are a multitude of cover-ups regarding the 9/11 attacks? Would we be here if they had done their job? I think not.

As I wrote back in 2006, "a lot of us within the 9/11 Truth Movement spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the crime that took place on 9/11. We want to figure out who, what, when, why, and where. Simply put, no one within this movement has the proper access to the information we need in order to do that. We don't have access to classified documentation, the Air Traffic Controllers, the pilots, the NORAD officers on duty that morning, the individuals within the PEOC, and many other facets that would need to be looked at in order to solve this crime."

The people that did have the "proper access," failed to make use of it, and now BECAUSE OF THEIR FAILURE, we are here today fighting for truth, accountability, and justice for the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, I believe that the 9/11 Commission itself, is the "smoking gun" of 9/11.

Ask yourself, if you lost a loved one to murder, would you accept an investigation like the one performed by the 9/11 Commission? Why do the 2,973 families affected by that day, Americans, and the rest of the world have to?

The following are excerpts from pages 388-389 of Philip Shenon's latest book, "The Commission":

After he was approached by Kean and Hamilton in January 2003 about running the investigation, Zelikow immediately telephoned May to discuss whether he should take the job. May was at home in Cambridge, Massachussetts, not far from his office on the Harvard campus, and he remembered that the call lasted more than an hour, with two men agreeing that it was an extraordinary opportunity to try to produce a "professional-quality narrative history" of a watershed moment in American history, "on par at least with Pearl Harbor."

After Pearl Harbor, both men knew, there had been no similar effort to explain the disaster to the public. There was an effort at accountability in the Pearl Harbor investigations--the navy's fleet commander in the Pacific and his army counterpart were both relieved of their commands in disgrace--but there had been no effort to put the 1941 attacks in historical context and explain the forces that had led the Japanese to launch a surprise attack and why the military had left itself so vulnerable. As a historian, it was exciting, May remembered, to think of producing a report that would remain the reference volume on the September 11 attacks and that would be "sitting on the shelves of high school and college teachers a generation hence."

Zelikow initially wanted May's advice on how the final report should be structured, and they went to work, secretly, to prepare an outline. May was given a desk in Zelikow's office on K Street in Washington, which he used on his occasional visits from Harvard. By March 2003, with the commission's staff barely in place the two men had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with "chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings."

He and May proposed a sixteen-chapter report that would open with a history of al-Qaeda, beginning with bin Laden's fatwa against the United States in 1998. That would lead to chapters about the history of American counterterrorism policy. The White House response to the flood of terrorist threats in the spring and summer of 2001 were left to the sixth chapter; the events of September 11 were left to the seventh chapters. Zelikow and May proposed that the tenth chapter he entitled "Problems of Foresight--And Hindsight," with a subchapter on "the blinding effects of hindsight."

Zelikow shared the document with Kean and Hamilton, who were impressed by their executive director's early diligence but worried that the outline would be seen as evidence that they--and Zelikow--had predetermined the report's outcome. It should be kept secret from the rest of the staff, they all decided. May said that he and Zelikow agreed that the outline should be "treated as if it were the most classified document the commission possessed" Zelikow came up with his own internal classification system for the outline. He labeled it "Commission Sensitive," putting those words at the top and bottom of each page.

Kean and Hamilton were right to be wary. When it was later disclosed that Zelikow had prepared a detailed outline of the commission's final report at the very start of the investigation, many of the staff's investigators were alarmed. They were finally given copies of the outline in April 2004. They saw that Zelikow was proposing that the findings about the Bush Administration's actions before 9/11 would be pushed to the middle of the report, which meant that readers would have to go searching for them past long chapters of al-Qaeda history. Many assumed the worst when they saw that Zelikow had proposed a portion of the report entitled "The Blinding Effects of Hindsight." What "blinding hindsight"? They assumed Zelikow was trying to dismiss the value of hindsight regarding the Bush administration's pre-9/11 performance. A few staffers began circulating a two-page parody of Zelikow's effort entitled "The Warren Commission Report--Preemptive Outline." The parody's authorship was never determined conclusively. The chapter headings included "Single Bullet: We Haven't Seen The Evidence Yet. But Really. We're Sure."

You are absolutely correct,

You are absolutely correct, Jon. This is a smoking gun. This undeniable fact should go front and center in any presentation to newcomers or in any debates with phony "skeptics."

I would also point out that Kean and Hamlton's " we were set up to fail" line is clearly all part of the deception.

- omniadeo

Helping fund first responders medical and our groups

Create an online business, help fund the medical needs of first responders, get free stuff, spread the message of truth. Here is the group I've setup:

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Keith

Holy sh*t !

.............. Is this for real?

Americans, the ultimate innocents

"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."
Columist Sydney Schanberg as quoted in an article on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. See: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2261

Yes.


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

Zelikow is an underestimated operator in this I think

His role in producing this "precursor" paper : Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy By Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch and Philip D. Zelikow should show us that this man is fairly involved as an operator in this whole set-up. Someone should call some of these guys for interviews.

from wikipedia:
Terrorism
Zelikow has also written about terrorism and national security, including a set of Harvard case studies on "Policing Northern Ireland." In the November-December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article Catastrophic Terrorism, with Ashton B. Carter, and John M. Deutch, in which they speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently." [8]

“Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehoods school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.” –Plato

"We must speak the truth about terror." --George W. Bush

Thanks Jon

IMHO there were a stack of bombshells in the Commission that got ignored in the media when the book came out; the media focused solely on the calls between Rove and Zelikow. The secret outline is probably one of the biggest, but Tenet lying repeatedly about his authority to kill bin Laden (Clinton authorised the CIA to kill Osama using the tribals, Tenet buried the authorisation so deep not even Scheuer saw it) and Malaysia, and Zelikow cutting off the commissioners from the staff (the time when a female staffer had to corner Gorelick in the ladies room so Zelikow couldn't see her talking to a commissioner is priceless; the commissioners weren't even allowed to have offices in the staff building) are pretty astounding too.

Right on Jon.

While it is crucial that some researchers continue uncovering and putting together the facts that are available in terms of what actually happened and who did it and how. The main thrust of the truth movement in the case of 9/11, is that the cover-up itself is an act of treachery, Article III Section 3 treason, and disrespect to the family members, 1st responders and people of America and the world.

Beyond arguments of MIHOP/LIHOP/incompetence, US/Israel/Saudi Arabia/Pakistan or Bush Gang/New World Order/ Zionist Extremists, the cover-up itself must be recognized by the American people as a criminal act of aggressive and violent omission, distortion and general avarice.

As for "the Commission," there are some interesting things in there. The fact that he 'covers' the "conspiracy theories" in a quarter page, and that it ends up in the NSA archives with 'bombshell' undisclosed evidence about Iranian involvement with Al-Qaeda, pretty clearly shows that Shenon, despite his warm demeanor, is in a realm with Robert Baer, running another layer of cover-up and deception for some potentially unknown reason- treasonous I might add.

However, all these cover-up agents are human beings, and supposedly Americans, who have hearts and could, God knows, potentially become loyal to their country and humanity at any moment of awakening.

p.s. there's a little more from this Shenon interview from a long time ago that will be put out soon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHUI8dOGdpg

“Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehoods school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.” –Plato

"We must speak the truth about terror." --George W. Bush

Why...

Would the Bush Administration at first fight against the creation of the 9/11 Commission, and then when they were forced to create one, make it so it had a "stacked deck" SPECIFICALLY in their favor? Why would they under-fund it, limit their amount of time to do their job, etc... etc... etc...?

Is there anyone here who can't completely rip apart the 9/11 Commission?

Who wants to take part in a good ripping? I'll start...

When it was revealed that the CIA destroyed interrogation tapes, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, released this memo to reassure everyone that they did their job. In that memo, he references "Document Request No. 4", and "Document Request No. 37."

As we've heard several times from the 9/11 Families, the "document requests" meant absolutely nothing to the agencies that received them, and more often than not, were ignored (as was the case with the two Zelikow mentioned).

What they should have done was use their power of subpoena that the families fought hard for them to get.

For a Commission that was mandated to give a "full and complete accounting" to make something like document requests "general policy" (according to Kean) when they had the ability to subpoena is absurd, and shows how "thorough" the investigation really was.


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

Excellent post, Jon

Your succinct description of the purpose of the 9/11 Truth Movement goes to the heart of what the majority of us feel: a bold statement which the deniers have a difficult time tearing down. I'm not hopeful that any real investigation will ever get off the ground regarding 9/11 (at least not during my lifetime), but I think this movement has been instrumental in exposing the lies and obfuscations that preceded it, and that have followed it, and that in some small way we're helping to keep these guys in the spotlight. In any case, more and more people know so much more than they ever did because of the truthers, and I'm proud to count myself among you all. Thanks, Jon!

On Pearl Harbor

Every American should read this article to understand what happened at Pearl Harbor:

Do Freedom of Information Act Files Prove FDR Had Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?
March 11, 2002
Robert B. Stinnett, Douglas Cirignano
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=408

70 Disturbing Facts About 9/11

John Doraemi publishes Crimes of the State Blog
http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

johndoraemi --at-- yahoo.com.

The reason...

I bolded that was to point out that people were held acountable. Unlike the 9/11 attacks.


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

Thanks Jon and Kevin

Shenon's book is so full of foul play, I forgot about this part. It's too bad we can't see the actual outline. It's possible that by 2003 there were enough mainstream reports about 9/11 (though not necessarily 100% true) that Zelikow could construct a rough outline without presuming much. That is (and I am not defending Zelikow), perhaps the outline simply said things like, "History of Al-Qaeda," "Inter-Agency Communication," "The Day of 9/11," and so on. I would like to know more details before I assume that Zelikow was constructing a corrupted outline. That said, we already know from comments made by the Steering Committee that the commission had a "script" in mind as it did its business.

If there was nothing to it...

They wouldn't have kept it a secret, and it really doesn't matter what the "mainstream" proposed about the 9/11 attacks because the 9/11 Commission's job was to do an investigation. An investigation that should have exposed all truths, but unfortunately, as you said, it was "scripted" so they didn't.


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

Excellent Post!

Thank-you Jon for drawing our attention to this. Just wish I had known sooner and could have included it in my free 5 minute candidate speech for local tv. I think this is a very strong bit of evidence which needs more public attention..

The points I was able to include were:

The most outrageous conspiracy theory about 9/11 was the one used to sell the war in Iraq.

The Bush Administration’s corruption of science to pursue political goals violates the health and well-being of all and clouds our ability to make rational, wise decisions. The White House directed the EPA to falsely reassure people about the air and water quality at Ground Zero in the wake of 9/11. As a result, people are still dying from their exposure to the toxic dust.

Congress failed to investigate 9/11. The 9/11 Commission, overseen by the author of the pre-emptive war doctrine, used their report, with its omissions and distortions, based on unreliable tortured confessions, to justify the construction of Homeland Security, and to pave the path for future wars. Yet, Congress approved its flawed recommendations, to expand a police state that has been used to violently suppress and criminalize us.

Why were those most responsible for the failures of the military and the intelligence agencies on September 11th, rewarded with promotions and increased budgets?

The Project for a New American Century, called for the U.S. to extend its power, through a “Revolution in Military Affairs,” including the domination of space, cyberspace, military technologies, and information systems. Their “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” report says: “The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a New Pearl Harbor.”

Who had the ability to carry out 9-11, to destroy the evidence, to cover it up, and who benefited? Cheney and Rumsfeld had worked for twenty years on “Continuity of Government plans” which were partially implemented on the morning of 9/11. The emergency measures have been renewed annually by the President, although the details have been kept secret. We do know that within the Continuity of Government plans, Congress is viewed as an impediment that can be discarded in favor of unelected, unknown appointees.

Cheney and Bush must be asked to testify “What were the orders that they issued that morning?” and “Who was overseeing the multiple war exercises that were being conducted?”

In August, the government released a report on World Trade Center 7. Not hit by a plane, its rapid disintegration into a neat pile exhibited all the characteristics of a controlled demolition. Yet, the report claims this 47-story steel-framed high rise collapsed on 9/11 due to normal office fires--a first in history. It's farcical Bush science, denying reality.

Carol Brouillet
http://www.communitycurrency.org

Well done, Jon

This indeed one of the most important smoking guns in a while.

Well...

Just so everybody is clear, I'm not saying the outline is a "smoking gun." I'm saying the entire 9/11 Commission, their investigation, and the report that they produced are. The outline is just one of many reasons why it is a smoking gun. As I said, another "slap in the face."


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

Here you go

From http://911proof.com/6.html

BUT THE 9/11 COMMISSION SHOWED THAT SEPTEMBER 11TH WAS A REAL TERRORIST ATTACK, RIGHT?

Whether or not you believe that governments carry out "false flag" terror, you might reasonably assume that the 9/11 Commission investigated September 11th, and concluded that Osama Bin Laden and his group of terrorists were solely responsible.

Unfortunately, a quick look at the government's investigations reveals that -- not only has there never been a real investigation -- but the behavior of government representatives in willfully obstructing all attempts at investigation comprises evidence of guilt. Specifically, in all criminal trials, evasiveness, obstruction, and destruction of evidence all constitute strong circumstantial evidence that the accused is guilty or, at the very least, not to be believed. 9/11 is no different.

For example, the former director of the FBI says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission.

And the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements, yet didn't bother to tell the American people (free subscription required).

Indeed, the co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations.

9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only "the first draft" of history.

9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ."

9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"

Former 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up".

The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry, said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."


But let's back up and look at the 9/11 Commission in more detail. Preliminarily, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney took the rare step of personally requesting that congress limit all 9/11 investigation solely to "intelligence failures", so there has never been a congressional probe into any of the real issues involved.


The administration also opposed the creation of a 9/11 commission. Once it was forced, by pressure from widows of 9-11 victims, to allow a commission to be formed, the administration appointed as executive director an administration insider, whose area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of "public myths" thought to be true, even if not actually true, who was involved in pre-9/11 intelligence briefings, and who was one of the key architects of the "pre-emptive war" doctrine. This executive director, who controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission's inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this article and this article).

The administration then starved the commission of funds, providing a fraction of the funds used to investigate Monica Lewinsky, failed to provide crucial documents (and see this article also), refused to share much information with the Commission, refused to require high-level officials to testify under oath, and allowed Bush and Cheney to be questioned jointly.

More importantly, the 9-11 Commission refused to examine virtually any evidence which contradicted the administration's official version of events. As stated by the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, who was the point man for the U.S. government's international counterterrorism policy in the first term of the Bush administration, "there were things the [9/11] commission[s] wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

For example, the 9-11 Commission report fails to mention the CIA director's urgent warnings to top administration officials in July 2001 of an impending attack (indeed, the 9-11 Commission was briefed on these warnings, but denied they knew about them until confronted with contrary evidence). Moreover, numerous veteran national security experts were turned away, ignored, or censored by the 9/11 commission, even though they had information directly relevant to the commission's investigation. And the 9/11 Commission Report does not even mention the collapse of World Trade Center building 7 or any explosions in the buildings (the word "explosion" does not appear in the report). There are literally hundreds of other examples of entire lines of evidence which contradict the government's account which were ignored by the Commission.

A very well-documented book by a distinguished professor shows that the 9-11 Commission was a whitewash. According to law professor Richard Falk of Princeton, the author of this book "establishes himself, alongside Seymour Hersh, as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths" (Seymour Hersh, as you might know, is the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal). See a synopsis of the book here; and a summary of a portion of the book here.

Indeed, the very 9-11 widows who had pressured the administration to create the 9/11 Commission now "question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report", and have previously declared it a failure which ignored 70% of their detailed questions and "suppressed important evidence and whistleblower testimony that challenged the official story on many fronts".

Moreover, the former head of the fire science and engineering division of the agency now investigating the world trade center disaster, who is a professor of fire protection engineering, wrote that the world trade center buildings could not have collapsed due to jet fuel fires, that evidence was being destroyed, and that there was no real investigation into the collapses. He has called for a new investigation.

And a leading firefighters' trade publication called the investigation concerning the world trade center a "half-baked farce". In addition, the official investigators themselves were largely denied funding, access to the site and the evidence contained there, or even access to such basic information as the blueprints for the world trade center.

Indeed, the blueprints for the world trade center are apparently STILL being withheld from reporters and the public, and the government agency in charge of the investigation has grossly mischaracterized the structure of the buildings.

And the government agency tasked with examining the collapse of the World Trade Centers did NOT investigate any anomalies in the collapse of the buildings, failing to even examine any of the following evidence: the buildings’ impossible near free-fall speeds and symmetrical collapses; the unexplained fact that the core of the North Tower failed first; the apparent demolition squibs; the fact that the buildings turned to dust in mid-air; the presence of molten metal in the basement areas in large pools in all of the buildings; the unexplained presence of unusual compounds in the steel; the unexplained swiss-cheese like holes in the steel; and the unexplained straightening out of the upper 34 floors of the South Tower after they had precipitously leaned over and started toppling like a tree.

Indeed, an article from a respected civil engineering trade journal states:

"World Trade Center disaster investigators are refusing to show computer visualizations [i.e. models] of the collapse of the Twin Towers despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers".

The article goes on to state "a leading U.S. structural engineer said 'By comparison [to the modeling of fires] the global structural model is not as sophisticated' . . . The software used has been pushed to new limits, and there have been a lot of simplifications, extrapolations and judgement calls . . . it would be hard to produce a definitive visualization from the analysis so far.'”. In other words, the government refused to release a visual model of the collapses, and even the non-visual computer models which the government used to examine why the trade centers collapsed are faulty.

The same journal points out that "Some engineers . . . have accused NIST of repeatedly changing its explanation of the collapse mechanism."

See also this question and answer exchange at a recent government press conference (skip to 1 minute and 23 seconds into the video). And this short video on building 7 and the subsequent investigation (you may wish to disregard brief partisan portion).

And did you know that investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House?

Or that a former FBI translator who Senators Leahy and Grassley, among others, have claimed is credible, and who the administration has gagged for years without any logical basis -- has stated that "this administration knowingly and intentionally let many directly or indirectly involved in that terrorist act [September 11th] go free – untouched and uninvestigated"?

Or have you heard that the FBI long ago found and analyzed the "black box" recorders from the airplanes which hit the Twin Towers, but has consistently denied that they were ever found?

Or did you know that the tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by this NY Times article (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) and by this article from the Chicago Sun-Times?

And amazingly, many years after the FBI stated it did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute Bin Laden for 9/11, that agency apparently still does not have hard evidence linking Bin Laden to the crime.

Still think the government really investigated and disclosed what happened on 9/11?

Indeed, there are even indications that false evidence may have been planted to deflect attention from the real perpetrators.