Joan Swirsky
Thursday, Apr. 15, 2004

Like Potter, TV viewers worldwide recognized a form of political pornography on April 8 as they witnessed the defilement of our government’s investigative process during the 9/11 Commission’s ostensibly objective inquiry into the genesis of Sept. 11.

This was when the oath-sworn testimony of the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice – unarguably the most powerful woman in the world – was subverted by blatant Democratic partisans more interested in continuing their jihad against the president than in seeking the light of truth.

The public knew it when they saw it!

Here was a duel between a giant with unflappable grace, flawless eloquence, encyclopedic knowledge and immense power, versus a host of pygmies who paled by comparison.

Dr. Rice not only put to rest the Democrat - and media - inspired canard that Bush "didn’t do enough" to prevent the Sept. 11 disaster but also exposed the flagrantly biased and therefore non-credible makeup of the Commission itself.

That’s not the way the Commission started out. In November of 2002, President Bush signed legislation creating an "independent" commission to investigate why Sept. 11 happened and how our country might prevent a similar disaster from happening in the future.

After former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger bowed out as its lead commissioner because he refused to disclose his company’s list of clients, the president named former Republican governor of New Jersey Thomas H. Kean to head the panel of investigators and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton as its vice chair.

The panel, composed of five Republicans and five Democrats, has been hearing testimony from high-level Bush and Clinton appointees for about 17 months, with the goal of determining which intelligence and leadership failures led to the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, the bombing of the Pentagon, and a near-miss in destroying The White House by the al-Qaeda terrorists bent on our destruction.

Unfortunately, this promising idea has been contaminated by bloodthirsty Donkeys and their media stable mates who – even when it comes to the safety and security of our nation – cannot resist attacking President Bush in their effort to make the American public believe that he and not his predecessor (who gutted our intelligence services and turned down bin Laden on a silver platter) was responsible for our nation’s most deadly catastrophe.

No wonder Americans are so disaffected that most high school students know nothing about American history (including the names of any of our country’s presidents) and why most eligible voters prefer not to vote!

In short, the Commission has become yet another venue for finger pointing and primed-for-TV "gotcha" moments – and the type of partisan politics that is guaranteed to produce not light but fog.

Richard Clarke, the former terrorism chief of the Clinton administration, stands out.

Kept on by President Bush because of his so-called expertise in counter-terrorism but ultimately demoted because of his ineffectualness, his self-serving but unsubstantiated testimony – including his soap-opera "apology" to 9/11 victims – stands in dramatic contrast to the testimony of Dr. Rice, who offered the panel not phony crocodile tears or spin but genuine emotion and empirically documented fact.

Of course, a good part of Clarke’s lack of credibility can be traced to his lavish praise – in interviews and written documents – of President Bush’s leadership. Before, that is, he was kicked downstairs and denied one of the top spots in the Homeland Security Department.

Wow! There’s an objective guy!

Then there is the former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey – yet another Democrat in desperate need of anger-management therapy – who couldn’t control his testiness during his questioning of Dr. Rice.

The same day Rice testified in public, Bill Clinton testified behind closed doors. The day after that, Kerrey told Fargo, N.D., radio host Scott Hennen that Clinton’s audiotaped denial of his opportunity to arrest Osama bin Laden was a falsehood.

Hennen: “Bill Clinton, in his own words, at a fund-raiser in 2002, talked about being offered, from the Sudanese, Osama bin Laden. And he said, and I quote, ‘At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.’"

Kerrey: "That was a misquote."

Right. And there was no blue dress. And Clinton’s finger-wagging protestations were the truth!

Then there is Richard Ben-Veniste, the affluent Democrat and former chief of the passionately anti-Republican Watergate Task Force. Not to omit his key role in the Enron scandal for which he and his law firm received a $3 million retainer (with $200 million more to come by court order).

Wow! Another objective guy!

Ben-Veniste appeared at the hearing dressed to the nines like Nathan Detroit, armed not for a good crap game but for bear. Although he has recently been described as having "a well-earned reputation as a partisan attack dog," he is quite unlike his fulminating fellow Democrats in that he specializes in the kind of modulated vocal tones that naive people interpret as dispassionate but most people accurately identify as burning rage.

Acting as if he were in criminal court instead of a hearing and "the defendant" were his for the destroying, he asked Dr. Rice a question, insisting on a yes-or-no answer. When she began her answer with a yes, he said "Thank you" and cut her off.

But giants are accustomed to pygmies, and Dr. Rice – in spite of her inquisitor’s strenuous objections – calmly but firmly completed her answer, an answer that all but negated what Ben-Veniste imagined would be his slam-dunk question.

Jamie Gorelick had her own ax to grind. After her lengthy stint in the Clinton administration as deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Defense Department, she certainly had an interest in making sure that her former boss’s feeble anti-terrorism policies were kept on the back burner and that – this is vintage! – someone else would take the blame for them!

And what did she know about the 1996 PDB that Clinton received – but failed to pass along to his successor – – that detailed specifics of the Al Qaida threat, including the presence of Bin Laden’s terror cells in our country and his plans to highjack airliners and crash them into buildings or blow them up over populated areas using trained terror pilots!

This fact has been scrupulously documented in the 2003 book, “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson, USAF (Ret.). And Peterson should know. For two years, he was within yards of Clinton at all times, carrying the briefcase (the “football”) that contains our nuclear codes.

Apparently Clinton was sufficiently alarmed to ask his vice president to look into the problem, which he did. But the investigation went nowhere as a number of federal agencies failed to coordinate their efforts and the whole issue sank in the muck and mire of Monica and Paula and Kathleen and perjury.

And come to think of it, I wonder what role Gorelick played when Clinton let the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists out of prison in 1999 and granted clemency (about one minute before his term ended) to Marc Rich, the billionaire who escaped to Switzerland to avoid 50 counts of criminal activity, including income tax evasion and illegally trading oil with Iran during the hostage crisis. Objective? Why isn’t she being questioned?

Or for that matter, why isn’t Sen. John Kerry on the “witness list”? In May of 2001, Kerry received an official letter marked “urgent” from Brian Sullivan, a retired special agent from the Boston area, informing him that Logan Airport – from which two of the three September 11 three terror planes departed – was vulnerable to terrorists who wanted to overpower airline crews and passengers and use planes as weapons.

Sullivan dispatched a senior agent from the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington to hand deliver a videotape to Kerry, showing undercover operatives successfully penetrating Logan’s security 10 times with lethal weapons!

But Kerry ignored the letter and tape for three months before responding to Sullivan in late July, only to inform him that he was passing the agent’s warning to the Transportation Department's inspector general. Then Kerry dropped the ball and never picked it up again!

Why isn’t Kerry being questioned about his own egregious lapse of judgment and for not considering the terrorist threat against our country urgent (as the letter to him was marked)?

Then again, both Gorelick and Kerry would add nothing to the travesty of this so-called "truth-seeking" hearing – punctuated as it has been by applause from a few wildly partisan 9/11 families that have turned the entire charade into what appears to be a staged pep rally.

A few days after the hearing, President Bush declassified – for the first time in American history – a Presidential Daily Briefing document (of Aug. 6, 2001) that confirmed the truth of Dr. Rice’s testimony and exposed the image-protecting, reality-distorting version proffered by the likes of Richard Clarke and company.

With the high-class and good-natured presentation that is emblematic of all members of the Bush administration, Dr. Rice told the Commission – and the public – what the fight against terrorism was really all about:

"After the September 11 attacks," she explained, "our nation faced hard choices: We could fight a narrow war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban or we could fight a broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory or we could work for a lasting peace and a better world. President Bush has chosen the bolder course." Amen.

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com