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Some
relief is to be derived from the decision by Henry
Kissinger to stand down as chairman of the anything
but independent commission to investigate 9/11. In
his letter of resignation to President Bush he stated
that:
It
is clear that, although specific potential conflicts
can be resolved in this manner, the controversy
would quickly move to the consulting firm I have
built and own. I have, therefore, concluded that
I cannot accept the responsibility you proposed.
Pretty
mundane, but at the same time almost imperceptibly
caressing the reader into sensing something even mildly
honourable about the man they call Henry the K - as
if he was endeavouring, hand on heart, to resolve
a conflict of interest and ensure no gain for himself.
And certainly not transparent enough to let us know
that Kissinger was primarily concerned with not having
to disclose the identity of his dubious client regimes.
Perhaps
the one honest defence for the Kissinger appointment
- even if deployed only to parry criticism - was that
put forward by Clifford May, a former Republican Party
spokesperson: ‘sometimes it takes a thief to
catch a thief.’ But what faith could anyone have
in this ‘toady to power and lackey of the Establishment’,
as Molly Ivins described him, catching any ‘thief’
from his own community of power mongers?
Previous
to his decision to quit, the vice-chair George Mitchell
had likewise stood down ostensibly as a result of
having to leave his law firm if he continued in his
panel post. The real reason may have been that he
did not want his reputation tarnished by participating
in a truth commission presided over by a serial liar.
The thought may have occurred to him that it was a
bit rich to try Milosevic and serve with Kissinger.
Kissinger
was hardly going to break with the tradition of a
lifetime and begin to search for truth at the end
of enquiry. His appointment in the first place seriously
questions the claims of George Bush to be seeking
the facts behind the 9/11 attacks. With Kissinger
in command findings rather than the facts were to
be released a matter of months prior to Bush seeking
re-election as president. Bush, regretting the Kissinger
decision to stand down, said ‘his chairmanship
would have provided the insights and analysis the
government needs to understand the methods of our
enemies and the nature of the threats we face’.
The US electorate may be excused for thinking it was
itself Bush was referring to in this statement.
As
Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times put
it ‘the truth is, the administration doesn't
want a commission looking into what went wrong on
Sept. 11 because its focus might turn too close to
Home’. Judged against this, Kissinger’s
appointment made establishment sense. Again as Scheer
puts it he is ‘the last guy who has the right
to ask someone in government, "What did you know
and when did you know it?".’
Into
the place vacated by Kissinger has stepped former
New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. Amongst other
things Kean is a a director for the petroleum giant
Amerada Hess. But because of Hess business links with
Saudi Arabia this has raised concerns amongst the
9/11 families. From their point of view this coupled
with the omission of former Senator Warren Rudman
is portentous and is likely to compromises the inquiry.
Rudman alone, they believed, had the ‘fierce
independence’ from the Republican Party necessary
to make the investigation credible. His record includes
having served on a range of senior government study
and advisory groups, including one that warned of
US vulnerability to the type pf attack that eventually
occurred on 9/11.
Stephen
Push, a spokesman for the families summed up their
perspective:
At
issue is whether this commission is going to have
any teeth… having one independent Republican
will make all the difference… for some reason
the administration has been fighting this from day
one.
Their
greatest fear lies in what Willim Ruvers Pitt summed
up as ‘it appears that Bush has nominated someone
who will be easily controlled.’
To
make matters worse, in a recently published book by
Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works, the
US lawyer advocates torture as a means of extracting
information. But if his thesis is correct, and were
we to acquiesce in it solely for the sake of discussion
- that an injection administered under the finger
nail of the would-be victim for the purpose of inducing
excruciating pain would rapidly lead to badly needed
information being acquired - why not test it out on
Kissinger? Given the number of countries that wish
to question him - Chile, Argentina and France; he
fears travel to Britain and Brazil among others for
similar reasons - his knowledge of terrorist murders
may be vast. But the double standard of the rich and
powerful automatically kicks in. There are some truths
no matter how revealing which are not to see the light
of day, it seems in the worldview of people like Dershowitz.
Just like the scalpel of the International Criminal
Court the Dershowitz needle is not to be applied to
the US no matter what it might bring to public attention.
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