U.S. Votes For 9/11-Style Commission To Probe Financial Crisis
Am I excited that “US lawmakers voted Wednesday to create a 9/11-style commission of experts to probe the causes of last year’s devastating financial meltdown and to draw lessons to prevent its recurrence“?
Of course.
The 9/11 Commission has – in retrospect – expressed confidence in the whole process:
- The co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission (Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton) now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations
- The co-chairs also said that the CIA (and likely the White House) “obstructed our investigation”
- Indeed, they said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements, yet didn’t bother to tell the American people (free subscription required)
- 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says “I don’t believe for a minute we got everything right”, that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only “the first draft” of history
- 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that “There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn’t have access . . . .”
- 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said “We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting”
- Former 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: “It is a national scandal”; “This investigation is now compromised”; and “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up”
- 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman said that “We purposely put together a staff that had – in a way – conflicts of interest“
- The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened”. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley has also expressed confidence in the process:
[The 9/11 Commission] was a commission that was really made for Washington – a commission composed of political appointees of both parties that ran interference for those parties – a commission that insisted at the beginning it would not impose blame on individuals. So it’s the ideal Washington commission – a commission that would investigate without any repercussions.
And the 9/11 Commission did everything possible to ensure that it received open, unbiased evidence from its witnesses, including being nice enough to provide “minders” to watch over the witnesses for their own protection.
Well, it is true (as explored in the book The Commission by respected journalist Philip Shenon), that the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was an administration insider whose area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of “public myths” thought to be true, even if not actually true. He wrote an outline of what he wanted the report to say very early in the process, controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission’s inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this article and this article).
And sure, the 9/11 Commission’s findings were almost entirely based on testimony extracted by torture from crazy guys.
So there were a few little problems, but who cares, right?
I bet that the outline for official Financial Commission’s report has already been written:
- No one could have foreseen it
- Different regulatory agencies didn’t coordinate very well and so things “fell through the cracks”
- There was no fraud by anyone except Madoff, just a lot of innocent mistakes
- No one is to blame
- Its a whole new world
- Give those in power more power and they’ll protect us
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