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18 October 2010 By Maidhc Ó Cathail
In an interview on the Fox Business Network, a
retired U.S. intelligence officer accused the official
in charge of the 9/11 Commission of a cover-up of
intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist
attacks on September 11, 2001. Appearing on the political talk
show Freedom Watch, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a
former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and the
author of Operation Dark Heart, a much-hyped
new book on the war in Afghanistan, spoke about his
mid-October 2003 encounter with Dr. Philip Zelikow,
then executive director of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the
United States. During a fact-finding mission to
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Zelikow's team was
briefed by Shaffer on Able Danger, a
DIA data mining project that had allegedly identified
Mohammed Atta as a threat to the U.S. a year before
9/11. Parenthetically,
the "Mohammed Atta" identified by Able Danger may have
been an imposter operating under a stolen identity, as
occurred in the assassination of a senior Hamas
official in Dubai. In an interview with a German
newspaper, reported by the Guardian, Mohammed
Atta's father claimed that his son had nothing to do
with the attacks and was still alive a year after
9/11. Whichever
Mohammed Atta was referred to by Shaffer in Bagram,
Zelikow reportedly "fell silent with shock at the
news." According to Shaffer, Zelikow
came to him at the end of the meeting, gave him his
card, and said: "What you said today is critically
important, very important. Please come see me when you
return to Washington D.C." On his return to Washington in
January 2004, Shaffer immediately contacted Zelikow's
office and was told to "stand by." After a week
passed, Shaffer called again, and this time was told
by Zelikow's staff: "We don't need you to come in. We
have all the information on Able Danger we need. Thank
you anyway." None of the information provided
by Shaffer appeared in the 9/11 Commission's 585-page report, however.
In September 2005, more than a
year after the publication of the 9/11 report, Shaffer
said he met with one of the 9/11 commissioners in
Philadelphia. Over lunch, he told the commissioner
what he had told Zelikow in Afghanistan. The
commissioner said that "he had never heard any of
this," adding that, "had he heard of it, it would have
been something that was very much of interest to he
[sic] and the commission." "So there's a lot of things that
never made it in that 9/11 report?" asked Judge Andrew
Napolitano, the host of Freedom Watch. "Things were either by negligence
left out, or, and I believe, by purpose left out,"
Shaffer replied. Another guest on the show,
Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit
from 1996 to 1999, spoke of a similarly frustrating
experience with the 9/11 Commission staff director. Describing the 9/11 Commission
Report as "a whitewash, and a lie from top to bottom,"
Scheuer said he provided Zelikow with over 400 pages
of official government documents detailing
intelligence failures before 9/11. "I never heard one word back from
Zelikow," he said. "They all seemed very interested
in what you had to say," the former CIA officer added,
referring to meetings he had with Zelikow and his
staff, "but at the end of the day, it didn't make it
into the report." This is not the first time that
questions have been raised about Zelikow's handling of
the 9/11 Commission. In his 2009 book, The
Commission, Philip Shenon, an investigative
reporter for the New York Times, wrote about
"how tightly Zelikow was able to control the flow of
information on the commission," and that "everything"
was "run through" him. While Zelikow's tight control of
the commission excluded disturbing evidence from
national security experts like Shaffer and Scheuer, a
dubious scholar like Laurie Mylroie was afforded ample
opportunity to promote the most spurious justification
for the Iraq war. Mylroie, whose major booster in
government was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
argued that Iraq had been involved in every major
terrorist attack against the United States since the
early 1990s, including 9/11. During commission
hearings on al-Qaeda, Zelikow, writes Shenon, "made
sure that she had a prominent place at the witness
table." And why wouldn't he? After all,
Zelikow had an important role in, as Shenon puts it,
"developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq
war." It was Zelikow who had authored a
thirty-one-page "preemptive war" doctrine which George
W. Bush announced to the world in 2002 as "The
National Security Strategy of the United States."
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published
writer based in Japan.
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