The New York Post has a scathing editorial on the September 11 Commission, stating that it is little more than an exercise in partisan politics. Indeed, the facts match that conclusion.
- Richard Clarke was portrayed as some brave truth teller, despite the fact that his book is riddled with factual errors and mischaracterizations. At the same time, he admits to Richard Ben-Veniste that September 11 could not have been prevented in his opinion.
- Condoleezza Rice is grilled by the commission for not being proactive enough on al-Qaeda despite the fact that the Clinton Administration did nothing to remove bin Laden for over eight years – a time period in which US interests were repeatedly attacked and hundreds of Americans lost their lives.
- The August 6, 2001 briefing paper is being treated as some smoking gun when it offered no actionable intelligence and was ordered at the behest of the Bush Administration rather than as a warning given to him by the bureaucracy.
- Now we have learned that commission member Jamie S. Gorelick was personally responsible for creating a wall of separation between counterintelligence assets and law enforcement. One of the primary reasons why the attack was not stopped was in large part to these procedural barriers. Yet the mainstream press has conveniently shoved this information down the memory hole – one of the most appalling cases of blantant media bias I’ve seen.
It is clear that the commission is a joke. The only thing most of the commissioners and the media want to see is something that they can use to blame Bush for September 11. When a real piece of substantive information appears – implicating one of the members of the commission no less – that information is ignored. It only goes to show that tasks that involve such important issues are simply too crucial to be left open to the destructive influences of temporal partisan politics.
