Former 9/11 Commission Chief Philip Zelikow has gone on the Democracy Now! radio show to answer serious allegations of misconduct raised in Philip Shenon's new book, including revelations that Zelikow repeatedly spoke to both Rove and Condi while leading the commission, that he pressured members to minimize criticism of Condi and link 9/11 with Iraq, and that he ordered his secretary not to keep phone logs.
He refuses to flatly deny his former secretary's claims that he called
her into his office and told her not to keep logs of his phone calls,
instead insisting that nobody on
the Commission kept phone logs. He says Max Cleland resigned for "very
personal reasons" and deflects further enquiries to "either Max or Tom
Daschle or the commissioners involved". And he more or less denies
everything else in Sheldon's book with a standard line: "Go ask the
people who were on the commission."
It doesn't seem to bother
Zelikow too much that the information which formed the cornerstone of
his Commission's findings was based on information extracted by
torture. What bothers him is whether or not he is the one who is going
to be blamed for this huge mess.
NBC analysis shows that "more than a quarter of all footnotes in the
9/11 Commission Report refer to controversial interrogation techniques". This suggests that information extracted by torture formed the foundation for the official explanation for 911. And now the Pentagon want to execute the prisoners who provided that information, before they can have their day in a free and fair court!
Zelikow repeatedly insists that he did have concerns about prisoners being tortured for information, and boasts that he pressured the administration (unsuccessfully) to let him talk directly with the prisoners. He says he has always advocated bringing the prisoners involved to trail:
"I've
been an advocate both inside and outside of the government of bringing
these people to trial in every possible way. And perhaps a little bit
due to my efforts, a couple of years ago the President decided that
those people would be brought out of the black sites and brought to
trial. And my hope is that when they are eventually brought to trial,
we'll have a chance to gather more information, perhaps through a more
adversarial process, and check on some of the assertions."
But this bit of damage control does not synch up very well with what Zelikow told
the Annual Lecture, Houston Journal of International Law, on April 26, 2007. On that occasion, he insisted that "
good intelligence can be gained by physically tormenting captives".
He said improved interrogation methods have been developed through "a process of
painful trial and error"! He said it was " tempting for some local governments to let the Americans do the
distasteful things that protect their people too." He called for such governments to abandon the rule of "traditional" law. And he argued in favour of "the quite defensible policy of renditions".
Now he's a hero of the resistance, doggedly pressuring the White House on torture??? Is this the same guy???
