War criminal to probe mass murder
Ex-Senator Bob Kerrey appointed to 9/11 panel
By Bill Vann
12 December 2003
In a change of personnel that signals a further tightening of the
Bush administration's reins on the supposedly independent probe into
what happened on September 11, 2001, former Nebraska Senator Robert
Kerrey was tapped Tuesday to sit on the 10-member panel investigating
the terrorist attacks.
The former Senator, who is currently president of the New School of
Social Research in New York City, is a consummate US intelligence
insider whose foreign policy views are closely aligned with those of
the Bush administration. In its report on the appointment, the
Washington Post described Kerrey as "an influential figure in
intelligence circles who has also been a strong supporter of CIA
Director George J. Tenet." In the Senate, Kerrey served as the
ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee.
Kerrey's appointment to the bipartisan panel, formally known as the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
follows the Bush administration's sudden expediting of the nomination
to a position on the Export-Import Bank of Max Cleland, like Kerrey a
former Democratic senator (from Georgia) and a veteran of the Vietnam
War.
Cleland, whose wounds in Vietnam left him a triple amputee, had
emerged as the panel's most caustic critic of the Bush
administration's stonewalling tactics. He is also an opponent of the
US war in Iraq. He was virtually the only member of the commission to
give voice to the intense frustration of 9/11 victims' family groups,
which have expressed increasing skepticism that the administration
will allow a genuine investigation.
Last month, Cleland denounced the agreement reached between the White
House and the commission's leadership to severely limit access to
documents that are key to determining what the administration knew
about the threat of terrorist attacks before September 11.
The deal, accepted by the panel's chairman, former New Jersey
Republican Governor Thomas Keane, and Democratic Vice-Chairman Lee
Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, governs access to
Presidential Daily Briefs. These are daily summaries of US
intelligence reports provided to the president.
According to press reports, one of these briefs, issued on August 6,
2001âa month before some 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagonâwarned the White House of plans by Al Qaeda
to mount terrorist attacks using hijacked airplanes.
Rather than issuing subpoenas demanding the full panel's unrestricted
access to these crucial documents, the leadership of the panel agreed
to a rigged procedure in which only one commissioner and one staff
member will be allowed to review selected portions of the briefs and
write summaries of them, with the White House then vetting the final
material, removing whatever it sees fit.
"If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot
look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims,
and say the commission had full access," Cleland said following the
announcement of the deal. "This investigation is now compromised....
This is `The Gong Show;' this isn't protection of national security."
In October, Cleland told the New York Times: "As each day goes by, we
learn the government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists
before September 11 than it has ever admitted."
Last month, in an interview with Salon, he went further, suggesting a
motive for the administration's failure to act on such
knowledge: "They had a plan to go to war [with Iraq] and when 9/11
happened, that's what they did; they went to war."
Less than two weeks later, the White House sent Cleland's nomination
to the Export-Import Bank to the Senate, which acted on it the same
day as Kerrey's appointment.
The Bush administration had strongly opposed establishing a panel to
investigate September 11 and has worked to keep the events of that
day shrouded in secrecy. When finally, in November 2002, it
reluctantly bowed to pressure from victims' families to form a
commission the White House attempted to install Henry Kissinger as
the panel's chairman.
The proposed nomination of Kissinger set off a firestorm of
criticism, first because of clear conflict of interest issues: the
former US secretary of state's privately held consulting firm
represents numerous corporations and foreign governments, and he
refused to submit to standard disclosure requirements. Second,
Kissinger is implicated in some of the greatest crimes and cover-ups
ever carried out by the US government. The period during which he
oversaw foreign policyâ1969-1976âwitnessed the escalation of the
Vietnam War and the fomenting of a series of fascist-military coups
in Latin America.
With the naming of Kerrey to the panel, similar questions are raised.
Kerrey is himself no stranger either to war crimes or cover-ups. His
entire political career has been founded on both.
In 1969, Kerrey, then a Navy lieutenant, led a SEAL unit in a death
squad attack on a Vietnamese village in which he and six enlisted men
under his command killed 21 women, children and elderly men. The
massacre was carried out as part of "Operation Phoenix," a CIA-run
program that targeted political supporters of the Vietnamese
liberation movement for assassination and claimed the lives of tens
of thousands of Vietnamese civilians.
For more than 30 years, Kerrey remained silent on the 1969 massacre.
When it was exposed by the publication of a New York Times magazine
article in April 2001, he continued to evade responsibility, speaking
only in the vaguest terms about his actions. Last year, he published
an autobiography, When I Was a Young Man, that amounted to yet
another attempt to cover up his own role in the massacre.
The appointment of an individual who is himself responsible for a war
crime against unarmed civilians in Vietnam to investigate the
greatest act of mass murder ever conducted against civilians in the
US is a measure of the cynicism of the entire US political
establishment, and its contempt for the right of the public to learn
what really happened on September 11.
The selection of Kerrey was made not by Bush, it should be pointed
out, but rather by the Senate minority leader, Thomas Daschle
(Democrat of South Dakota).
Kerrey's own conflicts of interest are myriad. As vice-chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kerrey is a veteran of political
cover-ups. While Kerrey was no longer a senator at the time, the
committee on which he had served as the highest-ranking Democrat
carried out a whitewash of the government role in 9/11, together with
its House counterpart, in their toothless joint investigation of the
terrorist attacks last year.
Kerrey was also one of the key figures who approved the nomination of
CIA Director Tenet and has remained his defender and political ally.
What the CIA knew before September 11 is one of the key questions
facing any legitimate investigation into the events.
The former senator is also complicit in the Bush administration's
manipulation of the September 11 events to justify a war, already
decided upon, against Iraq. Little more than a year ago, Kerrey
surfaced as a leading member of an outfit known as the "Committee for
the Liberation of Iraq," formed to promote an unprovoked invasion of
the Middle Eastern country.
The group, in which Kerrey was the only prominent Democrat, was
essentially an offshoot of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), a Republican think tank that served as a virtual
administration-in-waiting. Its principals included Richard Cheney
(now vice president), Donald Rumsfeld (now defense secretary), Paul
Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy secretary), George Bush's younger
brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief
of staff). The PNAC elaborated a blueprint for achieving US global
hegemony by means of military force, beginning with a war against
Iraq.
Kerrey had himself been a proponent of a war against Iraq since 1998,
joining right-wing Republicans in sponsoring the "Iraqi Liberation
Act" and forging close political ties to the Iraqi National Congress,
which is headed by the convicted bank embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
In September of last year, Kerrey wrote an opinion column for the
Wall Street Journal entitled "Finish the War: Liberate Iraq," in
which he echoed the Bush administration's attempts to justify the war
by falsely linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks. He repeated the
phony claim that the alleged 9/11 hijackers' ringleader, Mohammed
Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague five months
before the attacks. The allegation has been discredited repeatedly by
US and foreign intelligence agencies, which say there is no evidence
that Atta was ever in the Czech Republic or left the US during this
period.
Max Cleland has now surrendered his seat on the September 11
commission to a Vietnam-era war criminal who participated directly in
exploiting the 9/11 terrorist attacks to foster the war in Iraq.
Cleland has done so to assume a comfortable position at the Export-
Import Bank. His own role, alongside that of Daschle and Kerrey,
underscores the complicity of the Democratic Party in the Bush
administration's cover-up of the events of September 11. The
Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are particularly determined
to conclude a whitewash well before the 2004 presidential election
campaign goes into high gear.
The political establishment enjoys the full collaboration of the
media in this endeavor. The September 11 commission has been ignored
by the major television networks and cable news channels, and the
controversies swirling around its deliberations have been minimally
reported by the major newspapers. The supposed attempt to uncover the
facts about the worst act of mass carnage in US history has received
not even a fraction of the coverage lavished upon any number of
celebrity scandals.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/kerr-d12.shtml
-----
See Also:
Terrorism commission caves in to White House over 9/11 documents
[24 November 2003]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/911-n24.shtml
September 11 commission complains of "intimidation" and stonewalling
[18 July 2003]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/911-j18.shtml
The case of Robert Kerrey: war crimes and their supporters in Vietnam
and Afghanistan
[4 January 2002]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/kerr-j04.shtml
Robert Kerrey and the bloody legacy of Vietnam
[4 May 2001]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/may2001/kerr-m04.shtml
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