"Out, out damn spot!"
Joe Conason, Salon: The 9/11 widows' worries about Zelikow's impartiality were underlined by news that the Bush White House had withheld up to 80 percent of the relevant Clinton-era documents from the commission's investigators. Back in February, the commission learned from Clinton attorney Bruce Lindsey, who handles archival issues for the former president, that Bush officials were in fact holding back some 9,000 pages. Yet Zelikow appears to have done little to break the documents loose from the White House -- which has withheld some of them since last summer -- until Lindsey went public with his complaint last week. On Friday, after a day of bad publicity, the White House suddenly agreed to let the commission examine the withheld documents. Although Zelikow said that he had been "negotiating" with the
White House over the withheld Clinton documents since
February, he didn't tell commission members about the
ongoing dispute. At least two Democratic commission
members told the New York Times that they had been
"surprised" to learn about the withheld documents last
week.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/04/06/commission/index.html
Widows' watch Part II: If 9/11 commission director Philip Zelikow is impartial, why did he allow the Bush White House to sit on 9,000 pages of Clinton documents?
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By Joe Conason
April 6, 2004 | From the very beginning, the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States, known as the 9/11 commission, has
differed from the White House over funding, documents,
witnesses and secrecy. But as National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice prepares to testify publicly
on Thursday, the commission and the administration
agreed on at least one key issue: Both defended Philip
Zelikow, the Rice friend and colleague who serves as
the commission's executive director, from critics
concerned about his apparent conflicts of interest.
Those critics -- including the four World Trade Center
widows whose political activism spurred the
commission's creation -- have become increasingly
disturbed as they've discovered more about Zelikow's
close and continuing connections with Rice and the
Bush administration. They point to the Republican
academic's intense work on the Bush national security
transition team; his role in restructuring the
National Security Council; his 2001 appointment to the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; his
drafting of the president's National Security Strategy
in 2002; and his continuing contacts with White House
officials, including political strategist Karl Rove.
Asked about criticism of their top staffer by "Meet
the Press" host Tim Russert April 3, commission
co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton defended him
strongly. Kean, a former Republican governor of New
Jersey, lauded Zelikow as "one of the best experts on
terrorism in the whole area of intelligence in the
entire country" and "the best possible person we could
have found for the job," and insisted, "We haven't
found ... any evidence to indicate in any way that
he's partial to anybody or anything. In fact, he's
been much tougher, I think, than a lot of people would
have liked him to be." Hamilton, a retired Democratic
congressman from Indiana, agreed, adding that he saw
"no evidence of a conflict of interest of any kind."
Zelikow, they added, has "recused himself" from any
portion of the investigation that might reflect on his
work in the Bush White House.
Appearing immediately after Kean and Hamilton to
promote her new book, celebrated Bush advisor and
confidante Karen Hughes echoed their defense of
Zelikow, describing him in rather extravagant terms as
"one of the foremost experts in the world on
al-Qaida." In a virtuoso bit of spin, Hughes insisted
that Zelikow's role in the transition was in fact a
"refutation" of former counterterrorism chief Richard
Clarke, who says the Bush team minimized the Islamist
terror threat. "We were concerned enough that we
recruited one of the foremost experts to brief the new
administration about the threat of al-Qaida," Hughes
told Russert.
A brief examination of Zelikow's résumé reveals that
those endorsements of his expertise are exaggerated,
to put it politely.
Certainly he is a capable and experienced foreign
policy expert, administrator and author, respected by
both Democrats and Republicans. His interests have
ranged widely. His academic career focused on Cold War
issues, from the Cuban missile crisis to the fall of
the Soviet Union, and he isn't a partisan ideologue.
But the long list of his writings includes only one
article focused on terrorism, which he co-authored
with former CIA director John Deutsch. He is certainly
not among the world's "foremost experts" on al-Qaida,
a topic on which he appears to have written nothing,
and he is very unlikely to have briefed the new
administration on that threat. In fact, Zelikow was
present at the meeting where Clarke briefed Rice about
the Islamist terror network.
The 9/11 widows' worries about Zelikow's impartiality
were underlined by news that the Bush White House had
withheld up to 80 percent of the relevant Clinton-era
documents from the commission's investigators. Back in
February, the commission learned from Clinton attorney
Bruce Lindsey, who handles archival issues for the
former president, that Bush officials were in fact
holding back some 9,000 pages. Yet Zelikow appears to
have done little to break the documents loose from the
White House -- which has withheld some of them since
last summer -- until Lindsey went public with his
complaint last week. On Friday, after a day of bad
publicity, the White House suddenly agreed to let the
commission examine the withheld documents.
Although Zelikow said that he had been "negotiating"
with the White House over the withheld Clinton
documents since February, he didn't tell commission
members about the ongoing dispute. At least two
Democratic commission members told the New York Times
that they had been "surprised" to learn about the
withheld documents last week.
Why would Zelikow have failed to tell members of the
commission that the White House was holding back
potentially critical documents from the Clinton
archive? It's worth noting that he has repeatedly
betrayed contempt for the Clinton administration's
foreign policy record -- and expressed strong support
for Bush policies, including the invasion of Iraq --
in articles for conservative and mainstream
publications.
>From the White House perspective, those may be his
most important qualifications to oversee this
potentially devastating investigation. What's harder
to understand is why Kean and Hamilton are defending
Zelikow with superlatives about his status as a
terrorism expert. Hamilton went so far as to say he
doesn't think Zelikow's White House ties "will taint
the [commission's] report. Indeed, I think it'll let
him improve the report."
That's hard to imagine. Admittedly, both co-chairs are
in a politically difficult position as they try to
coax or coerce greater cooperation from the White
House, and perhaps going easy on Zelikow lets them
play rough in other areas. But echoing Karen Hughes
and touting his alleged terror expertise experience
costs them credibility with the victims' families --
and with the wider American public as the damning
details of what led to 9/11 become public.