Charles Pierce: Why Do We Keep Learning New Secrets About 9/11?

[truedelphi]

91. I found C Span's televising of the Nine Eleven Commission very eye

opening.


At first, the hearings seemed rather mundane and boring. But as a person listened and watched, it was amazing. The Commission was holding hearings to interview so many of the top dogs of the military and in the Government and most of what was being said by these important officials was the most absolute claptrap.

Imagine being the head of Strategic Air Command, and not being able to offer up the Commission anything pertinent relating to the tragic day's events, because "I have been transferred from my position with SAC to a different commission with Naval Intelligence, and when I left SAC, I inadvertently left my journal and organizer in my desk at SAC. So I don't have any idea of what the particulars of my day there were."

These kinds of statements were made by one official after another. I mean, I used to get nervous if I left my HS French homework at home on the day of an oral exam. Yet none of these people seemed able to make any intelligent comments about the events of the day. Yet they didn't seem nervous about this inability. And even more amazingly, they were totally unconcerned about their lack of being able to intelligently testify.

Wouldn't you think the Nine Eleven Commission would have someone on their panel to respond, "Well, now surely Mr Former SAC commander,you could have called up SAC headquarter and asked that one of their people courier over your left behind journal?" But no, no matter how outrageous the non-statements were, no one on the Commission seemed that interested. And the person offering up non-statements had no nervousness at all. People not at all remembering what they were doing. People making the most nonsensical statements. Above and beyond belief.

When one military official was queried as to why the planes summoned by Cheney to fly to protect the Pentagon were not made available by Andrews AFB, an Air Force base some eleven miles from the WH, but instead came from Langley AFB some 130 miles away, the Commission was told, "Well, the closer AFB can only be contacted by Secret Service and they didn't have the phone number at hand to call them!" I mean, at the time, my eighty year old mother had every phone number she could ever need in her Rolodex, but the President, Vice President and Secret Service didn't have the phone number for Andrews AFB handy?

When a person considers that between 1950 and 2001 the nation had spent some thirty one TRILLION dollars to provide for our defense and yet the nation's top officials didn't have phone numbers handy? And none at the Commission seemed perplexed our concerned, nor did anyone say, "Let's at least make sure that from now on the President, Vice President and the Secret Service have up to date Rolodexes..."