[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 23432-23434]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            THE 9/11 COMMISSION FINAL REPORT ONE YEAR LATER

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CYNTHIA McKINNEY

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 20, 2005

  Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I wish to enter the following into the 
Congressional Record:

               The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later


         A CITIZENS' RESPONSE: DId THE COMMISSION GET IT RIGHT?

   A Congressional Briefing Convened on the First Anniversary of the 
      Release of the 9/11 Commission Report, Friday, July 22, 2005


                      EXCERPTS FROM THE TESTIMONY

                            Opening Remarks

       Rep. CYNTHIA McKINNEY: Last year, we got the final report, 
     an extensive, prosaically impressive report, but as some of 
     us sat down to read it, the errors and omissions immediately 
     jumped out at us. How was it that it took over an hour after 
     the first transponder went off before planes were scrambled 
     to meet the threat, all of them too late? What happened to 
     those reports that surfaced within months of September 11th 
     stating that seven or more of the alleged hijackers had come 
     forward and claimed they were victims of stolen identities 
     and were alive and well, living in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and 
     Tunisia? Why did the Commission choose not even to address 
     this? What about Osama bin Laden and his role in the 
     Mujahedin backed by the CIA in the 1980s to fight the 
     Soviets? The Commission didn't go there . . . We cannot 
     afford to shy away from inconvenient truths. Many of you may 
     find what you hear today to be inconvenient information. Dr. 
     Martin Luther King, Jr. said the ultimate measure of a man is 
     not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, 
     but times of challenge and controversy. I encourage you to 
     engage with the issues that are raised. If you don't agree or 
     don't like what you hear, challenge it. I believe that we 
     should take in what every reasonable person has to say, to 
     inform our decisions, because that is the best way to find 
     the truth. In our pursuit of the truth, I encourage you to 
     emulate the courage and the determination of the September 
     11th families in their struggle to know what really happened.

                          9/11 Families Report

       Ms. LORIE VAN AUKEN: A thorough and definitive 
     investigation by the Commission . . . would have subpoenaed 
     for the information it required and examined the plethora of 
     information that other citizens and groups responsibly 
     provided. . . . it would have reported all of its findings 
     with its redactions blacked out and submitted to the American 
     people. In essence, the Commission could have produced a 
     final product where the resulting conclusions and 
     recommendations could be trusted. Instead, at the end of the 
     day, what we got were some statements that truly insulted the 
     intelligence of the American people, violated our loved ones' 
     memories, and might end up hurting us one day soon.
       One such statement was that 9/11 was a failure of 
     imagination: a failure of whose imagination? What exactly 
     does that mean? When you have a CIA Director with his hair on 
     fire, a system blinking red, 52 FAA warnings, an August 6, 
     2001 PDB entitled ``Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the 
     United States,'' leads on several 9/11 hijackers . . . 
     warnings from many foreign governments, a Phoenix memo, 
     warning of Islamic extremists taking flying lessons, the 
     arrest of would be terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui, facts 
     imparted to one agent, Agent Frasca, at the RFU of the FBI, 
     9/11 was truly a failure, all right, but I would certainly 
     not call it a failure of imagination. Another outrageous 
     statement made at the time of the release of the 9/11 final 
     report that got a fair amount of media coverage was the one 
     ``Everyone's to blame, therefore, no one's to blame.'' The 
     problem with that assumption is that it creates a no fault 
     Government, and a no fault Government does nothing to ensure 
     that things will be different or better in the future. When 
     you hold people accountable, it serves as a deterrent for 
     those that would repeat that same behavior in the future. For 
     the record, I would like to see that assumption restated to 
     read ``Everyone's to blame, therefore, everyone's to blame.'' 
     In fact, the fact that there has been no accountability for 
     the failures that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people is 
     truly unconscionable and irresponsible on the part of all of 
     our nation's leaders. The tools of democracy available to the 
     citizens of America to address these issues are incredibly 
     limited. We asked for an independent commission to 
     investigate 9/11 because that was the only tool that we, as 
     American citizens, had access to, and hoped that our leaders, 
     the members of Congress and the American public, would ensure 
     its validity and that its ensuing recommendations would make 
     us all safer, as safe as we could reasonably expect to be in 
     the event of another attack. Sadly, as Americans, we have all 
     been let down.

            Behind the 9/11 Commission: Flaws in the Process

       Mr. JOHN JUDGE: This Commission's report is not a rush to 
     judgment. It's rather a rush to exoneration. It fails to 
     really hold people to accountability . . . By approaching the 
     whole matter as an intelligence failure

[[Page 23433]]

     in the report, it obscured the evidence that what was 
     normally a standard operating procedure in the period prior 
     to 9/11 fell apart, apparently, in the months around and on 
     that day. It led to them pursuing leads and suspects, 
     basically accepting earlier reports without doing further 
     follow up, blaming certain suspects, even though the evidence 
     is we don't yet clearly know who the suspects were that got 
     onto the plane, and that's because several people have come 
     forward saying that their identity was stolen, basically, by 
     these people. We are left with a story that comes from people 
     that we can't get to, and we are left with a story that 
     perhaps is giving us the wrong direction in terms of how we 
     are looking. Until we open up the report and until we can 
     look at the actual evidence and compare it, and begin to 
     actually investigate further on many of the areas that the 
     Commission ignored, then we have a report that doesn't 
     eventually serve the mandate that this Commission was 
     required to take care of, looking at the truth of terrorist 
     acts upon the United States.
       Mr. MELVIN GOODMAN: The most important individual to me, 
     other than a commissioner, was the staff director, Philip 
     Zelikow. His conflicts of interest were so great that you do 
     have to wonder why this individual was appointed to head this 
     important staff of over 80 people. He had very strong ties to 
     the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration. Very strong 
     personal and political and policy ties to Condoleezza Rice. 
     More importantly, Philip Zelikow was running the case study 
     program at Harvard which took millions of dollars from the 
     Central Intelligence Agency over a ten year period to write 
     case studies on the CIA, to establish a record that was 
     essentially untrue with the facts about the work of the CIA. 
     Of course, the classic case study that Philip Zelikow 
     chaired, along with Ernest May, who was his patron at the 
     Harvard Kennedy School, was the case on the Soviet Union, how 
     the CIA got it right. You know, the politics of getting it 
     right. Of course, as we all know, one of the greatest 
     disasters of politicization of intelligence that occurred 
     even before the Iraq war was over the politicization of 
     intelligence on the Soviet Union. Who did Philip Zelikow 
     bring into the staff structure as a team leader on his staff? 
     None other than Douglas MacEachin, who was serving a tour up 
     at the Harvard Kennedy School. Who was Douglas MacEachin? 
     Douglas MacEachin was the head of the Soviet analysis job 
     during the 1980s . . . responsible for most of the 
     politicization of intelligence. Here you have Philip Zelikow 
     from Harvard and the case study program, and Douglas 
     MacEachin, as a team leader on Zelikow's staff, making 
     serious decisions about the need for change within the 
     intelligence community.

         Omissions and Errors in the Commission's Final Report

       Mr. PAUL THOMPSON: The 9/11 Commission claims it wasn't 
     until 9:20 when Indianapolis communicated with the FAA 
     command center and notified them that Flight 77 was missing, 
     and then the information started to get out to other command 
     centers, but still, NORAD wasn't notified. We are talking 
     over half an hour later, the plane has been missing, still no 
     one notifies NORAD, until finally 9:34, three minutes before 
     the plane crashes, and then it was only mentioned 
     inadvertently in passing when talked about with something 
     else.
       In order for this to be true, the 9/11 Commission is making 
     the claim essentially that the Indianapolis flight control 
     center and the local FAA center that they contacted were in 
     complete lack of contact with the outside world during this 
     time, that they were unaware, unlike the tens of millions of 
     people who had been watching CNN, that there was an ongoing 
     crisis, that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, 
     two planes. They are saying that all the way until 9:20, 
     there has been over half an hour now where this has been the 
     breaking news, that nobody in this entire Indianapolis flight 
     control center or the FAA center had any idea that any of 
     this had been happening.
       We know that just isn't true. In fact, there was one news 
     report saying that other centers such as theirs had been 
     notified of the crisis long before the first plane even 
     crashed into the World Trade Center. What we see is an 
     account coming from the 9/11 Commission that in my opinion is 
     just frankly impossible.
       Mr. JOHN NEWMAN: An FBI team working with cell phone 
     numbers provided by Indian intelligence uncovered a new 
     smoking gun. They learned that the chief of the ISI, Mahmood 
     Ahmed, had ordered Saeed Sheikh to send $100,000 of the 
     kidnapping ransom to Mohamed Atta a month before the 9/11 
     attacks. This ugly detail emerged when the FBI team ran 
     traces on Saeed Sheikh's cell phone number beginning in July; 
     the ISI chiefs number was among the regular people that Saeed 
     Sheikh communicated with. On October 7th, President Musharraf 
     sacked Ahmed for this notorious act. This story was widely 
     covered in the press around the world, not covered here in 
     the United States . . . It's hard to imagine a revelation 
     more damaging than the fact that Pakistan's intelligence 
     service and most powerful Army commanders were behind the 9/
     11 attacks and the paymaster, a known terrorist who had been 
     able to carry out his mission because the U.S. and U.K. had 
     set aside justice for his crimes . . . that a sovereign 
     government and supposed ally was so directly involved in the 
     9/11 atrocity must have stunned and deeply embarrassed the 
     American Administration . . . The story of Saeed Sheikh and 
     the generals are only lightly covered in western media, and 
     only one American newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, carried 
     it on October 10th.
       The 9/11 Commission report which carries Mustafa al-Hawsawi 
     as the paymaster and Sheikh Saeed as the al-Qaeda CFO, has 
     dodged the issue, and does not say if the two are the same or 
     not. Thus, technically, even if the Commission staff knew the 
     truth, they have not told a bald lie. The Administration 
     officials speak on terms of anonymity and were told that the 
     Justice Department had pressed the National Security Council 
     to have Saeed Sheikh extradited. One might be justified in 
     asking the question why would the National Security Council 
     have to be pressed to extradite a murderer of U.S. citizens? 
     By late February [2002], the issue was moot. Pearl was 
     murdered, and Musharraf swore he would personally hang him 
     [for Pearl's murder] before turning him over to the 
     Americans, unlike Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-
     Shibh, whom he did turn over. Of course, they had not been 
     western penetrators of al-Qaeda . . . We can no longer say we 
     are protecting sources and methods about a story known to the 
     rest of this planet. We are now mocked for our ignorance 
     about this story, and even members of Britain's Parliament 
     poke fun at us. It is long past time to come clean about 
     Saeed Sheikh.

           9/11 in Historical Perspective: Flawed Assumptions

       Ms. LORETTA NAPOLIONE: . . . we need to implement a forward 
     looking anti-terrorist policy, one which predicts the enemy's 
     next move. . . . a forward looking anti terrorist financing 
     policy should look at the situation in Congo, isolated as a 
     potential area where terrorist financing could take place. In 
     order to prevent that, it should dismantle this business of 
     smuggling gold . . . Of course, a forward looking approach in 
     the fight against terrorism will require the full 
     participation of the private sector, and a multilateral 
     policy. One country alone, not even if it is the United 
     States, can actually fight this war on terror alone. Among 
     other things, this policy, if implemented, will then cut the 
     link between crime and terror. Terror will not any longer be 
     a very profitable partner for crime. Breaking the link 
     between crime and terror would already be a step forward, 
     which you have not yet made.
       Ms. ANNE NORTON: Neoconservative foreign policy centers on 
     a fear of world government and the international institutions 
     that might lead to it, most notably, the United Nations, a 
     rejection of multilateralism, and as they say, above all, the 
     ability to distinguish friends from enemies. . . Europeans 
     regard neoconservatism with special skepticism, and they do 
     so, as you might have already realized, because they know its 
     progenitors all too well, the desire for the combination of 
     traditional values, the desire for an expansion of executive 
     power, the ambition to create a new world order, and the 
     identification of a providential enemy are all parts of a 
     very familiar past, the shadows of German national socialism 
     and 19th Century European empires fall very heavily on the 
     neo conservative project. As the Administration responded to 
     9/11, this influence became increasingly evident.
       Mr. PETER DALE SCOTT: The 9/11 report describes Ali Mohamed 
     as ``a former Egyptian Army officer who had moved to the 
     United States in the mid 1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, 
     and became an instructor at Ft. Bragg, as well as helping to 
     plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.'' In fact, Ali 
     Mohamed was a very important al Qaeda agent who, as the 9/11 
     Commission was told, ``trained most of the al Qaeda's top 
     leadership, including persons who would later carry out the 
     1993 World Trade Center bombing.'' Ali Mohamed clearly 
     enjoyed U.S. protection. In 1993, he was detained by the RCMP 
     in Canada, and a single phone call to the United States 
     secured his release. This enabled him to play a role in the 
     same year in planning the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in 
     Kenya in 1998. Eventually, he was allowed to plea bargain and 
     receive a secret sentence. We don't know what the sentence is 
     . . . The amazing thing, although he was named as a 
     conspirator in that bombing, he was not an indicted 
     conspirator, which itself is evidence of something going on 
     behind the scene. Congress should determine the true 
     relationship of the U.S. Government to Ali Mohamed, who was 
     close to Bin Laden and above all, al Zawahiri, who has been 
     called the main player in 9/11. This is very important, I 
     think, whereas the report focuses almost uniquely on Khalid 
     Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al Shibh. Many other sources 
     independently say the main figure and the top brains in al 
     Qaeda was al Zawahiri, who Ali Mohamed was clearly close to.
       Mr. NAFEEZ AHMED: In April 1991, according to a classified 
     U.S. intelligence report, then head of Saudi Intelligence 
     Services, Prince Turki al Faisel, struck a secret

[[Page 23434]]

     deal with Bin Laden, despite his being under house arrest for 
     his opposition to the presence of U.S. soldiers. Under this 
     deal, although the regime would publicly disown him, Bin 
     Laden was permitted to leave Saudi Arabia with his funding 
     and supporters. Moreover, the regime would continue to fund 
     his activities on the condition that he does not target the 
     Saudi kingdom himself. Posner's accounts of a secret 
     agreement between Bin Laden and Saudi intelligence is 
     significant because he argues this was known to U.S. 
     intelligence, this wasn't something that we didn't know. 
     Levivier also interviewed a CIA analyst about the role of the 
     Mujahedin. This CIA agent said ``The policy of guiding the 
     evolution of Islam and of helping them against our 
     adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against 
     the Red army. The same doctrines can still be used to 
     destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to 
     counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.'' When I read 
     this, I was quite surprised. Could this really be possible?
       Suffice it to say in conclusion, this is a phenomenon I 
     have discovered to be paraded throughout many regions in the 
     Middle East and Central Asia. It is a very worrying 
     phenomenon. It fundamentally challenges the whole paradigm of 
     the war on terror. If we are allying ourselves in some manner 
     with al Qaeda in this rather direct way, how can we fight a 
     war and win? It just doesn't make any sense.

         Foreign Policy: Immediate Response and Recommendations

       Mr. WAYNE SMITH: The 9/11 Commission report says that the 
     United States should engage its friends to develop a common 
     coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment 
     of captured terrorists. New principles might draw upon 
     Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the law of armed 
     conflict. That article was specifically designed for those 
     cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply. In other 
     words, these cases in which our Government tells us the 
     Geneva Conventions don't apply. The minimum standards are 
     generally accepted throughout the world as customary 
     international law. What does Article 3 call for? Well, among 
     other things, it prohibits outrages . . . upon personal 
     dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment. 
     All these practices of stripping the prisoners naked, putting 
     women's underwear or perhaps even men's underwear on their 
     heads, is degrading treatment. It is prohibited by 
     international law. . . . I'm not ageless, but I have lived a 
     long time, and I don't remember ever having been ashamed of 
     what we were doing to foreign prisoners. In World War II, we 
     treated prisoners well, let's say soldiers. Even German spies 
     arrested in the United States were not treated in a degrading 
     manner . . . This is not an intelligent way to proceed in our 
     struggle against terrorism. We ought to get back to full 
     respect for international law, and fully humane treatment of 
     all prisoners, without any exception.
       Mr. ROBERT McILVAINE: I had an unbelievable opportunity to 
     go to Bogota. I haven't flown since 9/11. Not that I'm 
     necessarily afraid, but I just won't fly. I've learned too 
     much about the shoe bomber. I'm just not going to leave the 
     country. Bogota, they have an international conference on 
     violence and terrorism, and they called me to speak down 
     there. I decided to do it. There were probably about 2,000 
     people in the auditorium, the first two rows were all 
     victims. 13 year olds with legs missing. Burn victims. I had 
     dinner with one burn victim, 75 percent of her body, an 
     African/Columbian. She lost her three children and her 
     husband. I said, I feel sorry for myself sometimes. That 
     woman could sit there and laugh with me, because you have a 
     bond with people who have suffered. That is what we have to 
     think about. It's the civilians, the 25,000 civilians in Iraq 
     that have died, and 500,000 people in Iraq that have died in 
     the 1990s. What is this foreign policy that we have? We talk 
     about Pax Americana. In Latin, does that not mean American 
     peace? Have we perpetrated peace in this world? Have we, 
     since 1945? I think not.

        Domestic Policy: Immediate Response and Recommendations

       Ms. ELAINE CASSEL: Four years since September 11th, almost 
     four years, and one year since the 9/11 Commission's report, 
     critical infrastructures and resources are unprotected, and 
     protections are unplanned, as far as I know. Co-Chair of the 
     panel, Lee Hamilton, mentioned that this morning in a press 
     briefing. He was very frustrated by that, and he mentioned 
     these are difficult tasks to take on. Yes . . . it's hard to 
     try to assess the risk to our critical infrastructure and to 
     intervene and prevention . . . It's easy to open a file on 
     demonstrators against the Administration's policies and 
     conduct surveillance on the ACLU and Greenpeace, as the 
     Washington Post reported last week. I seriously doubt that 
     the ACLU and Greenpeace are terrorist organizations. In fact, 
     if they were, the Government would have shut them down. Why 
     are we paying the FBI's counterterrorism unit to amass 
     thousands of files on these organizations and individuals?
       Mr. C. WILLIAM MICHAELS: I still do not think the case has 
     been made that civil liberties of any sort must be 
     compromised so we can get to the bottom of what terrorist 
     conspiracies may or may not be operating within the United 
     States. All of this plus the scope and approach of the 9/11 
     Commission recommendations, which deal with everything from 
     the FBI, passports, driver's licenses, airline passengers, 
     brings me to the final points. And that is the effect we may 
     be seeing as these varied parallel developments, including, 
     of course, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 
     situation in military commissions in Camp Delta, Guantanamo 
     Bay, which continue to unfold as we dispense with the legal 
     preliminaries, and U.S. citizens held as enemy combatants, 
     come to a single point, which should be considered as we 
     continue with this national debate as what might be on the 
     horizon at that point. Here they are, 12 common 
     characteristics of a national security state:
       1. Visible increase in uniformed security personnel.
       2. Lack of civil accountability for the actions of law 
     enforcement and security personnel.
       3. Reduced role of the judiciary and executive treatment of 
     suspects.
       4. Secrecy of ruling authority and momentum of the threat.
       5. Media in the service of the state.
       6. Public and national resources called to service against 
     security threat.
       7. Patriotism moving to nationalism.
       8. Lack of critical response by religious denominations.
       9. War time mentality and permanent war economy.
       10. Targeted individuals or groups.
       11. Direct attack against dissent.
       12. Increased surveillance of citizenry.

      Intelligence Reform: Immediate Response and Recommendations

       Mr. DAVID MacMICHAEL: the quote I want to give you is from 
     a book written by a very interesting man, now deceased, 
     Arthur Macy Cox, who was George Kennan's principal assistant 
     when George Kennan, post World War II, was head of the State 
     Department's Planning Office . . . His book is called The 
     Myths of National Security, the Peril of Secret Government . 
     . . published by Beacon Press in 1975:
       ``The drafters of the Constitution provided us with an 
     ingenious system of Government based on machinery to check 
     and balance the use of power, but they did not anticipate the 
     problem of secret Government, nor has that problem been dealt 
     with in subsequent constitutional amendments. Despite a lack 
     of safeguards, a large consensus of the American public since 
     World War II, has granted to succeeding presidents 
     extraordinary secret powers to protect the security of the 
     nation. The people felt that in matters of national survival, 
     the President should be given total trust. He should be 
     allowed to make decisions in secret to protect our national 
     security, but democracy and secrecy are incompatible and it 
     has now become clear that secret powers should never have 
     been delegated without guarantees of accountability to the 
     people's representatives in the Congress.''
       Mr. JOHN NUTTER: As I listened to David, I was struck by 
     the various documents that I've read in my scholarship, 
     documents like the Tower Commission report on Iran Contra, 
     the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and its 
     recommendations, the Taylor Committee, which some of you may 
     recognize as the postmortem on the Bay of Pigs . . . One 
     could very easily take the recommendations from any of those 
     reports, cut and paste them into the 9/11 Commission, and you 
     wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

                            Closing Remarks

       Rep. CYNTHIA McKINNEY: I would just like to say after we 
     have heard all of the testimony that has been presented to us 
     today, there is one thing that is very clear, and that is 
     that we must know what our Government is doing in our name. 
     The American people have to inform themselves, despite the 
     failure of the corporate press, to investigate the 
     information in the public domain that provides answers to our 
     questions. Today is a very special day because we have 
     brought truth to Capitol Hill.

                          ____________________