FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley was interviewed by Scott Horton, professor at Columbia Law School and Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine.

Rowley said that in her testimony to the Joint Intelligence Committee regarding 9/11, she was "minded". Specifically, she said that "FBI minders" listened to her every word, to trail her and make sure that she didn't tell government personnel with top secret clearance even higher than her own anything which the FBI did not want to be told.

While this might sound fantastic, it is nothing new.

Rowley said the same had happened to Daniel Ellsberg went to members of Congress with the Pentagon papers.

As I wrote a year ago:

9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean points out that if "minders" had been present during the Commission's investigation, that would have been intimidation, which would have stemmed the flow of testimony from the witnesses:

I think the commission feels unanimously that it's some intimidation to have somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency. You might get less testimony than you would.

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All too often, official inquiries are conducted by the very people who should themselves be under investigation.

In this respect, Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war bears a distressing similarity to the 9/11 Commission.

In a remarkable symmetry, both inquiries involve a Jewish Zionist historian, who not only advised his country’s leader to go to war against Iraq, but actually provided the ideological justification for that unnecessary war.

Preemptive Wars

Perhaps Philip Zelikow was one of the few people who was not surprised by his appointment as executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. After all, the Professor of History at the University of Virginia had shown uncanny prescience in foreseeing an event such as 9/11 itself. In 1998, as project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism Group, Zelikow had written:

By Stephen C. Webster
May 13, 2009
RawStory.com

Much of the material cited in the 9/11 Commission's findings was derived from terror war detainees during brutal CIA interrogations authorized by the Bush administration, according to a Wednesday report.

"More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques," writes former NBC producer Robert Windrem in The Daily Beast. "In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks."

"... [Information] derived from the interrogations is central to the Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks," reported NBC. "The analysis also shows - and agency and commission staffers concur - there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the Commission.

Should the members of the 9/11 Presidential Commission not have been informed that two of the "key witnesses" upon whom their report was based had provided the information critical to the report's conclusions only after being waterboarded a total of 266 times? ... In short, the basic narrative of the origins and conduct of the 9/11 attack that so fundamentally perverted American politics relied on cherry-picked information that the White House and its operative in the field chose to release to the commission.

May 12, 2009
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig.com

April 27, 2009
History Commons Groups

A recently released 9/11 Commission memo highlights the role of government "minders" who accompanied witnesses interviewed by the commission. It was added to the National Archives' files at the start of the year and discovered there by History Commons contributor paxvector.

The memo, entitled "Executive Branch Minders' Intimidation of Witnesses," complains that:

• Minders "answer[ed] questions directed at witnesses;"
• Minders acted as "monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staffs lines of inquiry and witnesses' verbatim responses." The staff thought this "conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution;" and
• Minders "positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions."

The bipartisan panel that investigated the terrorist attacks was widely praised. But did its final report rely on suspect information?

Philip Shenon
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 23, 2009

Powerful Democrats on Capitol Hill are clamoring for creation of a bipartisan "9/11 style" commission to investigate the legality of the Bush administration's antiterrorism tactics--especially its use of harsh interrogation techniques.

President Obama has been notably cool to the idea. But the case for a "truth" commission was bolstered by the disclosure this month that the CIA had destroyed 92 videotapes of the interrogations and confinement of Al Qaeda suspects. A dozen showed the use of "enhanced" techniques routinely described by human-rights groups as torture.

Lawmakers say the obvious model for such an inquiry would be the 9/11 Commission--an independent bipartisan body praised for its authoritative account of the attacks.

But as a reporter who covered the commission from start to finish and later wrote a history of its investigation, I wonder if Congress understands the deep irony of establishing a "new 9/11 Commission" on these issues. Former commission investigators have acknowledged to me over the past year that the panel had a serious blind spot on questions about torture.

11/11/2008
Filed by Peter Lance
RawStory.com

(911truth.org Editor's note: Following are only a few snippets of this excellent, thorough article. Please follow the link at the end to read the full story at Rawstory.com.)

Monday's New York Times reported that former Deputy A.G. and 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick was a candidate for Attorney General in the new Obama Administration. Five-time Emmy winning investigative reporter Peter Lance details a shocking, but little known story about Gorelick involving the loss of a key al Qaeda operative. This is an excerpt from his 2006 HarperCollins book TRIPLE CROSS soon to be published in trade paperback.

by Jon Gold
8/27/2008

Recently, Mike Berger from 911Truth.org was interviewed by the "Conscience of Kansas" Conservative Paul Ibbetson. During the interview, Mike mentioned the alleged bribery of the 9/11 Commission by Pakistan to omit any incriminating information about them. I figured a lot of people weren't familiar with this story, so I was inspired to write this "recap."

Aug. 15, 2008
by Les Jamieson

Petitioners for the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative have now gathered in excess of 27,000 signatures of NY City registered voters who are in favor of the creation of a new, independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks. Anyone who has participated in a petition drive will recognize that reaching this number is a monumental accomplishment. Approaching the general public with the controversial questioning of 9/11 makes it even more so. However, since a minimum of 30,000 valid signatures is required plus an extra margin of several thousand is recommended, it appears that time has run out to meet the Sept. 4th deadline for getting this public referendum onto the Nov. 2008 ballot. Even if another 10,000 signatures were to come in by that date, the City Clerk as well as NY City Council would have needed time to review the petitions and deliberate.

Although this is a great disappointment to the dozens of dedicated people working on the Initiative, they have also accepted that it may be a blessing in disguise. The presidential race would have drawn so much media attention as to overshadow this effort to establish a new, independent, and impartial “truth commission”. Also, more time to educate the public about the faults of the official account and shortcomings of the government’s investigation will be beneficial.

A 911blogger user named Orangutan writes:

"I didn't understand the concept of linking an article in multiple places means higher search ranking. That makes sense."

This is an important concept. How does a Google search actually work? How do they determine what websites get higher rankings in search results? Well it turns out that they invented a mathematical formula to determine website rankings. Wikipedia explains:

"PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E)."

AGENDA FOR THE "JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON CONFERENCE":

PLANNING FOR THE PROSECUTION OF HIGH LEVEL AMERICAN WAR CRIMINALS

September 13 - 14, 2008

Andover, Massachusetts

Registration details available at http://war-crimes.info

"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched."

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