Tucker Carlson examines the 9/11 Commission as a politically compromised cover-up
Tucker Carlson's documentary series on the 9/11 Commission, featuring 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser.
Summary
This is the second episode of Tucker Carlson's five-part documentary series, "The 9/11 Files." Carlson argues that the 9/11 Commission — the official body charged with investigating the September 11 attacks — was deliberately structured to fail, underfunded, and staffed with individuals who had deep conflicts of interest with the Bush administration. Kristen Breitweiser, one of the "Jersey Girls" — four 9/11 widows who became prominent advocates for a genuine investigation — describes her personal experience of losing her husband Ron and her subsequent fight for accountability.
The episode traces two investigative phases: first, the joint congressional inquiry led by Senator Bob Graham and Congressman Porter Goss, which discovered the NSA intercepts and was subsequently subjected to an FBI intimidation campaign directed by the Bush administration; and second, the independent 9/11 Commission that followed. The episode centers on two figures: Philip Zelikow, the Commission's executive director, who had extensive ties to Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove and who Carlson alleges pre-wrote the Commission's conclusions before the investigation began; and Henry Kissinger, Bush's first choice for Commission chairman, who resigned after widows questioned him about his Saudi and bin Laden family clients. Carlson contends that rather than investigating the attacks, the Bush administration used the Commission to suppress evidence, intimidate congressional investigators, and lay the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Background: The Political Climate Before 9/11
In January 2000, as the CIA was tracking two future hijackers as they journeyed to Los Angeles, George W. Bush was seven months into his presidential campaign. His campaign was working to take down his opponent at the time, Arizona Senator John McCain, by spreading rumors he'd fathered a black bastard child with a prostitute.
The following December, two other hijackers — Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot, and Marwan al-Shehhi — were finishing their pilot training in Venice, Florida, on the West Coast. In Washington, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the 2000 election. John McCain wanted to get political revenge. When he got his chance ten months later, it would have historic consequences.
The Official Story and Its Failures
The official story of what happened on 9/11 comes from a single report: the 9/11 final report of the National Commission. In the two decades since it was released, it has become the basis for all media coverage of the terror attacks that day. What the media never mentioned is that the commission itself was a farce. It was intentionally underfunded, it was poorly structured, and it was, from top to bottom, corrupt. Two years after the report was released, the Commission's own chairman admitted it was set up to fail.
Beginning in the first hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration began leveraging the tragedy to launch their next project — a so-called global war on terror. In a normal country, its leaders would insist on an answer to the simple question: how did a terror network closely monitored by the United States intelligence agencies, including a unit dedicated to following them at CIA headquarters in Langley, manage to pull off the 9/11 attacks in broad daylight? That's the question. But this is not a normal country. And it was never answered.
In fact, the Bush administration ferociously opposed any attempt to look carefully at what happened that day. And that presents a bigger question: why? What did they have to hide?
Kristen Breitweiser: A Personal Account
Kristen Breitweiser: My name is Kristen Breitweiser. My husband Ron was killed on September 11.
Breitweiser is one of four 9/11 widows who became famous at the time as the "Jersey Girls." They were some of the only people in public life in the United States who wouldn't let it go. They didn't believe the official 9/11 story, and they often said so. They were all over the media for several years, determined to identify government officials who may have been complicit in the tragedy. In the end, they were ignored.
Breitweiser: We were looking at a Bush administration that really was not interested in looking backwards. There was a push to immediately go to war. There was an invasion into Afghanistan, and then there was the cue-up for the war in Iraq.
Rather than get to the bottom of what actually happened, the Bush administration immediately exploited the crisis to push for what it really wanted, which was an invasion of Iraq. In his book Against All Enemies, George W. Bush's counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said that when he went back to the White House immediately after 9/11, he expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks would be and what their vulnerabilities were. Instead, he realized — with what he called almost sharp physical pain — that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. And that's exactly what they did.
On the afternoon of September 11th, Rumsfeld said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only bin Laden. The day after the attack, Bush asked Clarke to see if Saddam did this, to see if he was involved in any way. And while meeting with the President on September 15th at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.
Breitweiser: We learned quite quickly that we were not going to get the answers that we really wanted with regard to the murder — the homicide — of our 3,000 loved ones.
My husband Ron was 39 when he was killed. He was a really good man. He was smart and a good dad. And he had called me on the morning of September 11th. I was rushing out the door to take my daughter to speech therapy, and I had no idea what was going on. I didn't have the television on. And he was like, "Sweets, it's me. I'm okay." And I had no idea. I'm like, "Okay. I'm glad you're okay." And he was like, "No, no. Put the television on. It's not my building. I knew you would be worried. It's not my building."
And I put the television on. And I was still on the phone with him. And I was like, "Oh, my God! What is that?" And he was like, "There's an explosion in the building next to me, but it's not my building. I'm safe, I'm fine." And I was like, "It's really bad. It looks bad." And he was like, "That's why I called. Don't worry, it's not my building." And then his voice cracked and he was like, "Sweets — people are falling out the windows."
I'm like, "Just — what are you gonna do?" And he's like, "Well, I'm gonna go down to the trading floor and see if I can find a television to see what's going on. We don't know anything. But I didn't want you to worry. I love you. I'll call you back."
And that was the last I spoke to him. About three minutes after we got off the phone, I still had the TV on. And I saw his building explode right where he was.
I just wish I told him to run. I wish I told him to get out. I wish I told him, "It's not safe, something's wrong, get out." But I just didn't. I think feeling that way — feeling like, "Why didn't I know? Why didn't I have a woman's instinct to be like, 'Get out'?" — made me want to fight for the commission and for everything else, because I felt like the American public deserves to know.
The Push for an Independent Commission
The Bush administration, which at the time was enjoying a historic 90% approval rating, was pushing a very clear storyline. They told the country that Osama bin Laden had simply caught American authorities off guard. There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. That was a lie. And by May of 2002, more than two-thirds of Americans understood that it was a lie. They wanted an investigation into the so-called intelligence failures that led to the attack.
The initial effort to investigate 9/11 was a joint congressional commission led by Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida, and Congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA officer who would later become the agency's director, appointed by Bush.
Breitweiser: Cheney did not want anyone looking into his failures that day, the administration's failures. And more than anything, I think he and the political strategist Karl Rove were very focused on the President's reputation, on ensuring that he would get reelected.
The lengths that the Bush administration went to in order to kill the investigation into 9/11 are shocking. In the winter of 2002, Dick Cheney called the then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and made a threat. The Vice President told Daschle that the leaders of the war on terror would be too busy to get bogged down in preparing for and testifying in front of the committees. The strong implication was: "If you insist, we'll say you're interfering with the war effort."
The committee moved forward anyway. On June 19th, 2002, they discovered that the NSA had intercepted messages from al-Qaeda operatives from the day before the attacks, saying, "The match begins tomorrow," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." It couldn't have been clearer. Someone on the committee leaked those messages to the news media. CNN broadcast them. And in retaliation for this — for telling the truth — the Bush administration sicced the FBI, then run by Robert Mueller, on the committee.
Breitweiser: The FBI really came down hard on the joint inquiry. They polygraphed, they interviewed, they made all kinds of threats. And when the FBI comes after you, it's kind of scary, because you're looking at not only potentially losing your position in Congress but also imprisonment. It was pure intimidation. And so it had a very chilling effect, in my opinion, on the progress of the inquiry and their investigation.
In the end, Congress did make some interesting discoveries, most of which were redacted in the final report. The Jersey Girls continued to push for the truth. They were furious. They demanded an independent commission. George W. Bush's political enemies agreed. John McCain's revenge was an independent commission that would explore the truth about what happened on 9/11.
On November 27th, 2002, President Bush, fearing major political blowback if he vetoed the commission, signed the bill into law. But he managed to neuter the commission in the process. His allies in Congress gave the commission weak subpoena power and limited them to a strict 18-month timeline. They appropriated for the entire investigation just $3 million. By Washington standards, it was nothing. By comparison, Congress gave 13 times more funding to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It appropriated 11 times more funding for Robert Mueller's investigation into Russiagate. The administration and the Congress simply didn't want the public to know what happened on 9/11.
Henry Kissinger and the Commission Chairmanship
But that wasn't the only thing they did to subvert the truth. One of the ways that the White House controlled the commission was by choosing the chairman. Their first choice was Henry Kissinger.
Breitweiser: At the time, I was like 30 years old. So I had known of Kissinger, but as a stay-at-home suburban housewife, it's not like I had dived into all of Henry Kissinger's horrible acts and his status as a war criminal.
Kissinger had served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon. He pushed a massive expansion of the Vietnam War, including secret bombings in Cambodia and Laos. There were questions about his role in Vietnam and his role in the coup in Chile.
Breitweiser: When we first met him, he gave us this long talk about how honored he was — how it was not just an opportunity but a responsibility of a lifetime.
In 2002, Kissinger was running a lucrative consulting business called Kissinger Associates.
Breitweiser: I really spent a bit of time researching him, predominantly his clients. And we had grave concerns that he was chosen by the Vice President and the President and Karl Rove because he was really good at what he does. We were also concerned about his clients and that he had a huge conflict of interest.
We were invited to meet with him at his offices on Park Avenue. We were put into his office. It was kind of close quarters. It was really, really hot. He had the heat turned up to like a hundred degrees, and it was the winter. So we had turtlenecks on and sweaters and stuff. We're sitting there sweating, and he's just sitting there calmly.
Cranking up the thermostat is a well-known manipulation strategy. If you make a room uncomfortably hot, the discomfort puts pressure on the other negotiating party to make concessions more quickly.
Breitweiser: So at one point, after we got through the niceties, one of the widows asked him who his clients were. "Do you represent any Saudi royals? Do you represent anyone in the bin Laden family?" At the time, it wasn't that outrageous a question, because there were members of the bin Laden family who had relationships with the Bush family and others. And he immediately got flustered. He went to pick up a cup of tea or coffee and spilled it on the table. He feigned that it was his fake eye — which we didn't know he had a fake eye. And we immediately went to clean it up like moms, like, "Oh, it's okay." And then he just never answered the question. And then the very next day, he resigned.
Philip Zelikow: The Commission's Executive Director
Scrambling to find a new chairman, Bush's top political advisor Karl Rove called former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean and offered him the job. Why was George W. Bush's political bagman making this phone call? No one has ever explained.
Breitweiser: Tom is the nicest guy on the planet. He's very much a gentleman. He does not go for the jugular.
After he accepted the job, Kean was dragged to the White House, where the President's top advisors told him, "We want you to stand up. You've got to have courage. We don't want a runaway commission." In other words: do what we say.
The White House's fingerprints were certainly all over the commission. Chairman Kean ultimately admitted the commission was, quote, "set up to fail." And that's absolutely true. But in addition to a meaningless budget, the tight timeline, and weak subpoena power, there was another problem: the man Kean selected to run it.
On January 27th, 2003, the commission issued a press release announcing they'd selected an academic called Philip Zelikow to be the commission's executive director.
Breitweiser: He was sold to us as a historian. I was responsible for the research on Zelikow to make sure that he didn't have any conflicts of interest. He had a lot of conflicts of interest.
The release described Zelikow as, quote, "a man of high stature who had distinguished himself as an academician, a lawyer, author and public servant." The release did not note that Zelikow was an active Bush administration official. He served on a White House intelligence advisory panel. It also failed to note his extensive ties to Condoleezza Rice. He'd served on her transition team. He'd co-authored a book with Rice in 1995. In 2002, at Rice's behest, Zelikow authored a policy paper championing preemptive invasions — cementing his role as a key architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Zelikow was the perfect person to keep the commission from finding the truth.
Breitweiser: I believe he was placed there to play the gatekeeper, to ensure that the commission would not unearth the truth, and more than anything, to protect the Bush administration and also lay the groundwork for the war in Iraq.
Zelikow's Methods: Pre-Writing the Report and Consolidating Control
Zelikow's first move was to pre-write the entire report before the facts were in. In March of 2003, before the investigation had even begun, Zelikow had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings. He kept all of this a secret from the rest of the staff.
Breitweiser: As it turned out, his outline is nearly verbatim to what the final book looks like. And so what I believe is that he just basically had the outline, knew that it was a, quote unquote, safe outline. It was probably approved by the Bush administration.
His second move was to consolidate his power. Zelikow gave himself total control over the hiring process. He at first tried to block the staffers from communicating with the commissioners. In a now-public memo, Zelikow cut off his staff's access to the commissioners, writing: "If you are contacted by a commissioner with questions, please contact Deputy Director Chris Kojm or me."
Zelikow restricted access to documents. He divided the staff into separate teams. He siloed them from each other and he closely supervised Team 3 — the group that dealt with classified information from the White House and the CIA. One of Zelikow's first moves was a secret agreement with the Justice Department to block access to the files of the congressional inquiry until the White House had had a chance to review them first.
Breitweiser: Zelikow was limiting access to documents when people were requesting specific things. Zelikow would block it.
Notably, the final report contains a full 61 references to finding no evidence of certain claims about 9/11.
Breitweiser: The cute way of explaining why Zelikow uses that phrase is that if you don't look for the evidence, you don't find the evidence. And so you're not lying when you say, "We found no evidence."
At one point, a staffer overheard Zelikow pressuring a CIA employee to accept Condoleezza Rice's recollection of intelligence briefings before the 9/11 attacks. Most damning of all, phone logs kept by Zelikow's assistant show that he was regularly taking calls from both Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove — George W. Bush's top political advisor in the White House.
We reached out to Karl Rove for an explanation of this, and he denied having been in regular contact with Zelikow. But that is untrue. Even Zelikow himself acknowledges he received multiple calls from Karl Rove, but he claims they did not discuss the commission. He doesn't say what they did discuss.
Breitweiser: None of it is plausible. It wasn't even like he was on the National Security Council. He didn't really have any information that would be helpful to the commission. Why is the commission's staff director having communications with the White House's political strategist?
Zelikow's Attempts to Link al-Qaeda to Iraq
From the outset, the commission started to advance the interests of Bush's neocon foreign policy agenda. When Team 3, the counterterrorism group, submitted their draft to Zelikow, he inserted sentences that tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq — to suggest the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9/11, and that bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq. In the end, those sentences were removed after staffers alerted the commissioners.
But the commissioners did not prevent Zelikow from stacking public hearings with discredited neocons who toed the White House line about Iraq's connections to al-Qaeda — none of which were real. The first outside expert to testify to the commission was the Hoover Institution's Abraham Sofaer. His written remarks to the commission included eight references to Iraq and five references to Saddam Hussein. Keep in mind this was a hearing on 9/11, which had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or Iraq. Sofaer spent most of his time at the public hearing talking about the need for preemptive invasions.
At the third hearing, Zelikow produced a widely discredited neocon called Laurie Mylroie from the American Enterprise Institute. She appeared as a witness and testified: "There is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds are Iraqi intelligence agents."
Condoleezza Rice's Testimony and Zelikow's Hidden Role
By April of 2004, former Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat, confronted Rice about Zelikow's ties to the administration.
Senator Bob Kerrey: Let me just ask you directly — since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelikow any questions about terrorism during transition? Since he was a second person detailed in the National Security Office and had considerable expertise?
Condoleezza Rice: Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing. Philip had, as you know, worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plan. So yes.
Kerrey: So yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?
Rice: Philip and I, over a period of — we worked closely together as academics during the transition. Did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism? To help us think about the structure of the terrorism — the Clarke operations. Yes.
Incredibly, the man in charge of the official story of 9/11 — Philip Zelikow — was the Bush administration advisor who decided to demote the White House's counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, in the months before 9/11. Yet somehow these details, central though they are, were left out of the commission's final report.
Conclusion
Breitweiser: The 9/11 Commission report was a cover-up from beginning to end. That is true. And that's the most important starting point for those seeking to understand what actually happened on September 11th.
The official story is a lie. What isn't clear is why our government — and subsequent governments under subsequent presidents — would want to continue that lie and cover up what actually happened on 9/11. What exactly were they hiding? And more importantly, who were they protecting? We found out. That's in the next installment of our 9/11 series.