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9/11 panel Dems promote own agendas
Formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, and "officially" neutral, many of the 10 commissioners are concerned with their own agendas and the goals of the Democratic Party rather than with discovering facts. Their mandate increasingly appears to be to answer Hillary Rodham Clinton's insulting question, "What did President Bush know about the attack on America, and when did he know it?"
The chairman of the commission, Tom Kean, 69, former governor of New Jersey and a moderate Republican, is an affable guy, president of a small university and an authority on education with no experience of the smoke and mirrors of intelligence. He deserves to have been left to his fireside rocking chair.
The vice-chairman is Lee Hamilton, 72, whose 34 years as a Democrat congressman have included the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a stint on the Intelligence Committee. His years were spent in the smoke and using mirrors.
Both Kean and Hamilton were second choices, replacing Henry Kissinger and former Sen. George Mitchell, who quickly found conflict of interest problems. Not that any such inhibitions were considered by Jamie Gorelick, Richard Ben-Veniste, Bob Kerrey and Tim Roemer -- Democrats all - and ambitious ones at that.
Tim Roemer, who will claim credit for persuading his fellow legislators (he was in Congress, representing northern Indiana for five terms) to fund the commission, has now slipped his leash and replaced Madeleine Albright as the president of the Center for National Policy, a Clinton think-tank in Washington. Tim's goal is to secure a role in a Kerry administration.
Bob Kerrey, once a Navy SEAL and a U.S. senator, is another guy who would like to change his job. He is now president of New York's New School. In 1998, Kerrey was doing well at the polls in a run for the presidency, when suddenly he withdrew. This was because of a Newsweek story in which, after a lot of evasions and contradictions, he admitted that the citation for his Bronze Star was incorrect. Quickly, the story disappeared -- but you can bet that if Bob Kerrey had been a Republican, there would have been a media circus to rival that surrounding Abu Ghraib prison.
Here's Jamie!
And, then we have Jamie Gorelick, appointed by Bill Clinton to act as Janet Reno's brain with the title of deputy attorney general. She became the mistress of the conflict of interest. She began with the Whitewater scandals, moved on to Vince Foster's still unsolved death, and took no action against her colleagues in the Justice Department for divulging information in the Hillary Clinton Travelgate investigation.
With the Democrats out of office, Gorelick needed a job to supplement her private practice and went to the Federal Mortgage Authority. This year, even her fellow commissioners were shocked to discover that Gorelick had written the orders that prevented inter-agency cooperation. But, nothing happened, as nothing has happened about her law firm representing Saudi princes against the 9/11 families in our courts and little has been said about her debriefings to Tom Daschle. If Gorelick can't be attorney general she will settle for director of the CIA.
Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste enjoys being identified as a former Watergate prosecutor. But more recently he was Bill and Hillary's man on the Senate's Whitewater hearings and in the Vince Foster cover-up. He has represented the Clinton's ""banker," Terry McAuliffe, and Barry Seal, the man alleged to have made some $29 million smuggling weapons for cocaine by way of Mena Airfield in Bill's Arkansas. Seal was one of about 30 people associated with the Clintons -- who died mysteriously at that time.
Now, in an attempt to discredit the administration, the 9/11 commission is saying it lacks "credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks." Quickly, both the president and vice president challenged this finding. But, the mass media created a calumny fiesta against George Bush.
Meet Douglas MacEachin
They ignored the source of the commission's wisdom. It was provided by a Douglas MacEachin, who for years as the CIA's deputy director of intelligence consistently got his information muddled. He was reluctant to accept that the Soviet Union would support terrorism; he refused to accept that Moscow was developing biological weapons -- he had intelligence estimates produced that matched Clinton's false picture of the world.
MacEachin, for his own good reasons, would never admit that there was a threat from Moscow. Today, he pretends to believe that Saddam Hussein would do no wrong. Now, from the 9/11 commission he supports his and Bill Clinton's friends -- Richard Clarke, Rand Beers and Morty Halperin -- on the John Kerry campaign.
Just more good reasons for not voting Democrat.
Dateline D.C. is written by Washington-based British journalist and political observer.
