- Given the Commissioners' conflicts of interest, and their determination to consider only incompetence theory, exclude whistleblower testimony, rewrite timelines to excuse official lies, tolerate unsworn witnesses, and ignore most of the victim family questions, this report has been rightfully characterized as the biggest cover-up since Iran-Contra and the JFK Warren Commission Report.

References:
• David Ray Griffin: A National Disgrace
• Michael Kane: The Total Failure of the Kean Commission
• Nicholas Levis: The Rice/Zelikow Connection
• Peter Lance: Cover-Up
• Harpers: Whitewash as Public Service -- How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation

- For many, the most troubling aspect of 9/11 these many months after the 9/11 Commission closed up shop is how ignorant we still really are. Although the Commission was to provide the full and final explanation of the tragedy, they never even addressed let alone answered more than 70% of the victim family questions that Commissioners initially promised would be their "road map." Vital questions about surviving "hijackers," the bizarre WTC 7 collapse, the bin Laden/Pak/CIA relationship, the Afghan gas pipeline, known Bush/Cheney/Rice lies, which US parties, corporations and agencies profited most from 9/11, and countless more all remain unanswered to this day.

Although this ignorance abides, we have discovered many instances where our leaders flatly lied. Consider Bush insisting he saw the first WTC strike on television, Rice saying the August 6 "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US" presidential briefing contained only "historical info," Cheney's incessant Iraq/Al Qaeda linkage mantra or the dozens of other examples listed Here!. This pattern of deception went unchallenged by the public and mainstream press, and soon extended to the Iraq war marketing effort and most neocon policy spin today. The quite apparent lesson is that if you can repeatedly get away with 9/11 lies, you can now lie with impunity about damn near anything.

References
• The original 400+ Family Steering Committee questions that Commissioner Gorelick said would be the Commission's "road map"
• FSC co-founders Mindy Kleinberg & Lorie van Auken rate the Commission's performance
• A fine compendium of administration 9/11 lies, some aforethought, some afterthought, some cobbled on the fly.
• Rep. Henry Waxmann picks up the pattern downstream in his "Iraq on the Record" database of 237 subsequent Bush official lies about Iraq.
• For more specific indictments, see:
  • "NORAD Lied about 9/11" : Senator Mark Dayton
  • Lies A Sixth Grader Would Not Accept by Michael C Ruppert
  • An Open Letter To Condoleezza Rice: "You Are a Liar" by Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing
  • FBI Whistleblower Says Rice Is Lying - Bush knew al-Qaida was planning attack by Andrew Buncombe, The Independent [London, UK]

MOTIVE ISSUES: CUI BONO - WHO PROFITS MOST?

3) Instant Fulfillment of the Neocon Wish List

- In September 2000, one year before 9/11, the Bush team's neocon think tank PNAC (Project for a New American Century) published a plan for global domination called "Rebuilding America's Defenses". (Top Bush Administration figures like Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld et al. were signers of PNAC's Statement of Principles.)

Their plan called for a huge boost in defense spending, full spectrum dominance over all nations and regions (including outer space), long term petro-resource control with permanent Middle East bases, and a preemptive war policy against recalcitrant states. However, they openly conceded that such a huge "transformation" would take forever "absent some cataclysmic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

In 1999, two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, Mickey Herskowitz. Bush: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade... if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed."

Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounted that at their first Cabinet meeting in January, 2001, Iraq oil concession maps were circulated and discussed and that Bush baldly told them to "find me a way" to take Iraq.

Herskowitz recalls in wonder that after the September 11 attacks "suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker..."

- Besides the millions in profits still unknown traders made the week of 9/11 betting on a WTC and United and American airlines catastrophe, our massive military responses generated billions for Halliburton, Bechtel and Carlyle related corporations. (During just the first 2 years, Cheney's 433,000 Halliburton stock options jumped to $26 million in worth.) The emergency also immediately blacked out coverage or investigation of Rumsfeld's September 10th acknowledgment that money was hemorrhaging from the Pentagon. "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld finally admitted. But hey, we can't look into this now, it's "War on Terror" time!

- The persuasiveness of the official "incompetence theory" rests upon the valid public perception that the government screws up a lot. The challenge to would-be 9/11 "facilitators" would thus be limited to identifying and disabling the few key areas that might be working well. In light of which, consider:

6) Ignored Urgent Warnings

- In the months before 9/11, over 23 documented warnings of coming attacks from eleven foreign governments (including Presidents Putin and Mubarak personally) were received and ignored, many specifically mentioning the use of planes, symbolic urban targets, and Washington &.New York. The administration never explained what ever became of these alerts and the 9/11 Commission apparently forgot to ask.

During the same period the Federal Aviation Commission received 54 terrorist hijack warnings, including some that mentioned the "preferability" of domestic flights for hijacker who wanted "to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion."

7) Quashed Domestic Investigations

- FBI field probes into Al Qaeda activities were routinely quashed or obstructed, and after 9/11 the headquarters' officials most responsible for the interference were promoted to higher posts. (Attorney General Ashcroft simultaneously downgrades terrorism as a Justice Department priority (below accounting and prison reforms) and tells acting FBI director Tom Pickard "I don't want to hear about it [terrorism] anymore.")

8) Incapacitated Oversight

In May 2001 Cheney takes command of the Counterterrorism Task Force but never convenes a single meeting until September 8th. (Counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clark is gradually taken -- in Cheney's words -- "out of the loop" and ordered to focus on cyber-security instead). In August 2001 Bush responded to the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US" presidential briefing by vacationing for three more weeks in Crawford and cutting a lot of brush.

9) Disabled Air Defenses

- In June 2001 Rumsfeld rewrites the NORAD/FAA air emergency response protocols to require his office's permission in the interceptor launch authorization chain. In the year before this revision the NORAD/FAA emergency response had worked flawlessly 67 times. On 9/11 the system missed four out of four.

- Three overlapping air war games were scheduled and run on September 11th that diverted NORAD air assets to Alaska, simulated an East Coast hijacking, and inserted phantom objects into FAA radar screens that confused air controllers on the ground. See more on war games here!

10) The Amazing Disappearing National Chain of Command

- If we are to believe the 9/11 Commission's account nearly 40 million Americans were watching the attacks on TV before word ever got to our Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. George Bush heard much earlier but was busy with a pet goat story and stuck around the school for photo ops for a half hour more. The behavior of our top defense officials on 9/11 morn remains inexplicable to this day. See Gail Sheehy's "Who's in Charge Here?" and George Bush's "Interesting Day."

- In early September, three weeks after wiring $100,000 to "lead hijacker" Mohammed Atta, Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt Gen Mahmoud Ahmed was in Washington conferring with George Tenet and breakfasting on 9/11 morn with the new CIA chief Porter Goss. After his peculiar web of friendships surfaced he was encouraged to step down, but he has never been subpoenaed or even questioned about it by the 9/11 Commission or journalists to this day. But then we must remember that the Commission Report did conclude that, "Ultimately the question [of who funded 9/11] is of little practical significance" and thus assure us that the classic investigatory follow-the-money technique is now obsolete and we shouldn't trouble our little heads with such details today.

12) The Bitter Fight against Investigations

- The Bush administration repeatedly refused and resisted attempts to launch investigations and consistently underfunded and obstructed those that managed to get underway. The National Transportation Safety Board which ALWAYS investigates every airplane crash was totally shut out by the FBI and told to stay away. The 9/11 Commission was given less than a quarter of the funds of Clinton's Whitewater investigation, and many high official (including Bush & Cheney) would not testify under oath. The FBI anthrax inquiry lost all momentum once the strain was identified as a US military brand. And Ashcroft urged all federal agencies to ignore all the Freedom of Information requests that they possibly can.

Short sampling: The FBI claimed all four WTC black boxes were destroyed and missing (but rescue workers claim that three were found), the FAA air controller tapes were systematically destroyed within hours of the attack, the WTC steel was immediately shipped abroad before it could be tested, the last three minutes of the Shanksville crash tape have never been released, and all court cases regarding the attacks have been denied access to vital evidence because of "national security concerns"

- Although the government's entire 9/11 fable and its Commission apologists depend on the incompetence defense, no one in any agency has ever been reprimanded, let alone fired or punished for that same murderous level of "incompetence." Although to be fair, neither has the government ever successfully prosecuted ANYONE ANYWHERE for their role in the attacks. American whistleblowers who have come forward with proof of government misconduct and deceit, however, have been quite efficiently fired, persecuted, and discredited in the public eye.

15) The Ripley Believe It or Not Sideshow of 9/11 Miracles

- Brief sampling: The symmetrical demolition-like collapse of the 47-story WTC building without any major fires or damage (also pronounced inexplicable by the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] investigation team); the five surviving "hijackers" who still noisily protest that FBI claims about their murderous suicides are premature at best; the magic hijacker passport that floated threw the WTC fireball and building collapse to land totally unscathed in the New York street below; the miles of debris from Flight 93 in Shanksville, a plane that supposedly flew straight into the ground; the WTC first responder testimony that "there were bombs going off all around" - so many odd mysteries, so much still left to know...

Despite the current mountains of circumstantial evidence, many Americans still find it hard to believe their leaders would sacrifice thousands of innocent lives for political or economic ends, even ends as grandiose as PNAC's plans for global energy control and worldwide military dominion. To those who still find the passage from incriminating facts to suspicions of guilt a difficult crossing, we ask that they consider the hundreds of 9/11 first responders, cleanup workers and WTC area employees, residents, and children now dying needless painful deaths in the city of New York. These are not victims of foreign terrorists, but of administration lies, which current studies now estimate will kill more people than the attacks themselves. These lies were orchestrated by the Rove-dominated White House Council on Environmental Quality, which blocked EPA air quality warnings, falsified or suppressed pollution reports, and voided OSHA protections for workers on the ground. The thousands of lives this deceit will cost were also sacrificed for political and economic ends, but this time simply for the trivial goal of getting the Stock Exchange up and running again.

So here is the question that must finally be confronted: would the same men who willingly sacrificed thousands of lives for a Wall Street PR stunt be unwilling to sacrifice an equal number to solidify their rule and dominate the world?

References
For documentation, see the Sierra Club's August 21, 2004 report, "Air Pollution (and Deception) at Ground Zero." This is the most comprehensive and damning study to date on this creeping mass homicide, and documents the horrific toll of the asbestos, PCBs, dioxin and many other carcinogenic and genetic toxins that blanketed lower Manhattan for months after the attack. In its own words, "This report explains how the federal administration's reckless disregard for the toxic hazards generated by the attack had disastrous consequences for many people who served on the front line of terror response and lower Manhattan's recovery... [and] demonstrates why the federal government's failures cannot be excused by ignorance or surprise."

See also 9/11 Pollution Could Cause More Deaths Than Attack by Geoffrey Lean, The Independent (UK), September 12, 2004 and the heroic work of the WTC Environmental Organization, which is representing stricken victim families both in suits against the EPA and in the Citizens' Complaint to the NY Attorney General demanding an immediate criminal probe into 9/11 as a whole.

Still evolving...