Astonishing CBC interview with Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission co-chair

[shiva2999]

Whew, Evan Solomon makes Lee Hamilton sweat bullets.

Too many interestin parts to exerpt.

You have to read it all.

http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911hamilton.html

9/11: TRUTH, LIES AND CONSPIRACY

INTERVIEW: LEE HAMILTON
August 21, 2006

CBC News: Sunday's Evan Solomon interviews Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission co-chair and co-author of the book "Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission".



Evan Solomon: Tell me why you felt the need, with Thomas Kean, to write this book "Without Precedent"?

Lee Hamilton: We felt we had an important story to tell, 9/11 was a traumatic event in our history, every adult in America will remember exactly where they were on that day when they heard the news. We felt that the Commission’s work gave a lot of insights into how government works, and particularly how government in the national security area works. We had hundreds of people tell us, or ask us, how the Commission did its work, and so we responded by writing the book and tried to let people know the story, the inside story of the 9/11 Commission.

Solomon: Do you consider the 9/11 Commission to have been a success, and if so, under what ways do you measure that success? How do you call it a success?

Hamilton: The 9/11 Commission was created by statute. We had two responsibilities - first, tell the story of 9/11; I think we've done that reasonably well. We worked very hard at it; I don’t know that we’ve told the definitive story of 9/11, but surely anybody in the future who tackles that job will begin with the 9/11 Commission Report. I think we’ve been reasonably successful in telling the story. It became a best seller in this country and people showed a lot of interest in it.

...more...

[sukie]

Not that eye opening really... He was badgered in my opinion

[35Pete]

Not that eye opening really... He was badgered in my opinion

Two words sukie.

Inside job.

[sukie]

Not from that interview

[35Pete]

Not from that interview

Ten seconds for a building to crumble onto itself.

That's unreal. Literally.

[shiva2999]

Not that eye opening really... He was badgered in my opinion

Of course he was. ****ing rude Canadians.

BTW, since you read the piece you must have noticed the number of times he mentioned information was filtered through the "staff" to the commissioners.

Well, who was the head of the staff?

A guy named Philip Zelikow...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_D._Zelikow

exerpt...

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 entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism," in which he 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."

Philip Zelikow served on President Bush's transition team in 2000-2001. After George W. Bush took office, Zelikow was named to a position on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and worked on other task forces and commissions as well. He directed the bipartisan National Commission on Federal Election Reform, created after the 2000 election and chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, along with Lloyd Cutler and Bob Michel. This Commission's recommendations led directly to congressional consideration and enactment into law of the landmark Help America Vote Act of 2002.(electronic voting)

In Rise of the Vulcans (Viking, 2004), James Mann reports that when Richard Haass, a senior aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell and the director of policy planning at the State Department, drafted for the administration an overview of America’s national security strategy following September 11, Dr. Rice, the national security advisor, "ordered that the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder, something that would represent a more dramatic break with the ideas of the past. Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, University of Virginia Professor Philip Zelikow." This document, issued on September 17, 2002, is generally recognized as a watershed document in the War on Terrorism.

Because Philip Zelikow's significant involvement with the administration of George W. Bush, some questioned the propriety of his position as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which examined the conduct of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Both the 9/11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch demanded his resignation, due to this apparent conflict of interest. The Commission co-chairs, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, shrugged off these criticisms, as did other 9/11 family representatives.

[coastal]

"What you had on this day, of course, was a lot of confusion, and a lot of confusion in communications, at the very highest levels. When the President went from the school in Sarasota to Air Force One, he was trying to get communications with the White House, he used a cell phone, in part. When he got to Air Force One, the communications didn’t work all that well. Well, this is all very disturbing, and I'm told has now been corrected.

Solomon: Disturbing in what way?

Hamilton: Well, disturbing that, at this particular time, the Commander in Chief lost communications with the White House, and with his chief aides there, right in the middle of a crisis - that's very disturbing. I hope that’s been corrected, I’ve been told that it has been. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at 9/11, all the way through, FAA communications, NORAD communications, White House communications, there was just a lot of confusion, and a lot of gaps."


WTF?

[jimmifli]

Evan Solomon has always been a good journalist.

[jimmifli]

Well, for a number of reasons: Tom Kean and I were substitutes - Henry Kissinger and George Mitchell were the first choices; we got started late; we had a very short time frame - indeed, we had to get it extended; we did not have enough money - 3 million dollars to conduct an extensive investigation.

Holy ****! I'd pick my dog to run the commission before I'd pick Kissinger!

[Meathead]

i didnt know your dog was russian

[coastal]

What's the deal with the phantom airliner over the Atlantic?

[jimmifli]

i didnt know your dog was russian
He's German.