The 9/11 Files exposes how the 2004 Commission—funded with just $3M, led by Bush insiders like Philip Zelikow (pre-writing its outline) and stacked with Kissinger/Rove allies—was a farce. Widows like Kristen Breitweiser were ignored as the administration suppressed NSA intercepts warning of "zero day" attacks while pushing Iraq War lies. Zelikow’s White House ties, 61 "no evidence found" gaps, and blocked congressional files reveal a cover-up to justify war over truth, leaving key questions—like Saudi ties and pre-9/11 warnings—buried under political manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
In January 2000, as the CIA was tracking two future hijackers as they journeyed to Los Angeles, George W. Bush was seven months into his presidential campaign.
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What we're going to do is we're going to do something no other presidential candidate has been able to do.
His campaign was working to take down his opponent at the time, Arizona Senator John McCain, by spreading rumors he'd fathered a black bastard child with a prostitute.
The following December, two other hijackers, Muhammad Ada, the ringleader of the plot, and Marwan Al-Sheikhi, were finishing their pilot training in Venice, Florida on the West Coast.
In Washington, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the 2000 election.
John McCain wanted to get political revenge.
When he got his chance 10 months later, it would have historic consequences.
The official story of what happened on 9-11 comes from a single report, the 9-11 final report of the National Commission.
In the two decades since it was released, it has become the basis for all media coverage of terror attacks that day.
What the media never mentioned is that the commission itself was a farce.
It was intentionally underfunded.
It was poorly structured.
It was from top to bottom corrupt.
Two years after the report was released, the commission's own chairman admitted that it was set up to fail.
Beginning in the first hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration began leveraging the tragedy to launch their next project, a so-called global war on terror.
In a normal country, its leaders would insist on an answer to the simple question, how did a terror network closely monitored by the United States intelligence agencies, including a unit dedicated to following them at CIA headquarters in Langley, how did a group like that manage to pull off the 9-11 attacks in broad daylight?
That's the question.
But this is not a normal country and it was never answered.
In fact, the Bush administration ferociously opposed any attempt to look carefully at what happened that day.
Rather than get to the bottom of what actually happened, the Bush administration immediately exploited the crisis to push for what it really wanted, which was an invasion of Iraq.
In his book, Against All Enemies, George W. Bush's counterterrorism czar Richard Clark said that when he went back to the White House immediately after 9-11, he, quote, expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks would be, what our vulnerabilities were.
Instead, he realized with what he called almost sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.
And that's exactly what they did.
On the afternoon of September 11th, Rumsfeld said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only bin Laden.
The day after the attack, Bush asked Clark to see if Saddam did this, see if he's involved in any way.
And while meeting with the president on September 15th at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.
We learned quite quickly that we were not going to get the answers that we really wanted with regard to the murder, the homicide of our 3,000 loved ones.
My husband Ron was 39 when he was killed.
He was a really good man.
He was smart and a good dad.
And he had called me on the morning of September 11th.
I was rushing out the door to take my daughter to speech therapy and I had no idea what was going on.
I didn't have the television on and he was like, sweets, it's me.
I'm okay.
And I had, I had no idea.
I'm like, okay, I'm glad you're okay.
And he was like, no, no.
He's like, put the television on.
And he's like, it's not my building.
I knew you would be worried.
It's not my building.
And I put the television on and I was still on the phone with him.
And I was like, oh my God, like, what, what is that?
And he was like, you know, there's an explosion in the building next to me, but it's not my building.
I'm safe.
I'm fine.
And I was like, it's really bad.
You know, it looks bad.
And he was like, that's why I called.
Don't worry.
It's not my building.
And he's like, and then his voice cracked and he was like, sweets, he's like, people are falling out the windows.
I'm like, just, you know, what are you going to do?
And he's like, well, I'm going to go down to the trading floor and see if I can find a television to see what's going on.
We don't know anything.
He's like, but I didn't want you to worry.
I love you.
He's like, I'll call you back.
And, you know, that was the last I spoke to him.
And like three minutes after we got off the phone, I still had the TV on and I saw his building explode right where he was.
And I just, I wish I told them to run.
I wish I told him to get out.
I wish I told him, you know, it's not safe.
Something's wrong.
Get out.
But I just, I didn't.
I think, you know, feeling that way, feeling like, why didn't I know?
Why didn't I have a woman's instinct to be like, get out, made me want to fight for the commission and for everything else because I felt like the American public deserves to know.
And by May of 2002, more than two-thirds of Americans understood that it was a lie.
They wanted an investigation into the so-called intelligence failures that led to the attack.
The initial effort to investigate 9-11 was a joint congressional commission led by Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida, and Congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA officer who would later become the agency's director, appointed by Bush.
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These public hearings are part of our search for truth.
Cheney did not want anyone looking into his failures that day, the administration's failures.
And more than anything, I think he and the political strategist Karl Rove were very focused on the president's reputation, on ensuring that he would get reelected.
The lengths that the Bush administration went to kill the investigation into 9-11 are shocking.
In the winter of 2002, Dick Cheney called the then Senate Majority Leader Tom Dashel of South Dakota and made a threat.
The VEEP told Daschell the leaders of the war on terror would be too busy to get bogged down in preparing for and testifying in front of the committees.
The strong implication of this, if you insist, we'll say you're interfering with the war effort.
The committee moved forward anyway.
On June 19th, 2002, they discovered that the NSA had intercepted messages from al-Qaeda operatives from the day before the attacks saying, quote, the match begins tomorrow and tomorrow is zero day.
It couldn't have been clearer.
Someone on the committee leaked those messages to the news media, CNN broadcast them.
And in retaliation for this, for telling the truth, the Bush administration sick the FBI, then run by Robert Mueller, on the committee.
The FBI, you know, really came down hard on the joint inquiry.
They polygraphed, they interviewed, they made all kinds of threats.
And so, you know, when the FBI comes after you, it's kind of scary because you're looking at not only, you know, potentially losing your position in Congress, but also imprisonment.
At the time, I was like 30 years old, so I had known Kissinger, but I didn't really, you know, as a stay-at-home suburban housewife, it's not like I, you know, had dived into all of Henry Kissinger's horrible acts and his status as a war criminal.
When we first met him, he gave us this long talk about how honored it was and it was like the, you know, opportunity, not the opportunity, but like a responsibility of a lifetime.
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It is a great honor to be appointed by the president to be chairman of the non-partisan independent commission.
So at one point after we got through the niceties, one of the widows had asked him whose clients were.
Do you represent any Saudi royals?
Do you represent anyone in the bin Laden family?
And, you know, at the time, it wasn't that much of an outrageous question because there were members of the Bin Laden family who had relationships with, you know, the Bush family and others.
And so it wasn't like it was an outrageous question.
And he immediately got flustered and, you know, went to pick up a cup of tea or coffee and spilled it on the table.
He feigned that it was his fake eye, which didn't know that he had a fake eye.
And we immediately went to like clean it up like moms, you know, like, oh, it's okay.
And then he just never answered the question.
And then the very next day, he resigned.
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Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down from the position Friday.
Chairman Kaine ultimately admitted the commission was, quote, set up to fail.
And that's absolutely true.
But in addition to a meaningless budget, the tight timeline and weak subpoena power, there was another problem, the man Kaine selected to run it.
On January 27, 2003, the commission issued a press release announcing they'd selected an academic called Philip Zelico to be the commission's executive director.
I believe he was placed there to, again, play the gatekeeper, to ensure that the commission would not unearth the truth, and more than anything, to protect the Bush administration and also lay the groundwork for the war in Iraq, in addition to other things.
Zelico's first move was to pre-write the entire report before the facts were in.
In March of 2003, before the investigation had even begun, Zelico had already prepared a detailed outline complete with chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings.
He kept all of this a secret from the rest of the staff.
In a now public memo, Zelico cut off his staff's access to the commissioners.
Quote, if you were contacted by a commissioner with questions, please contact Deputy Director Chris Kojim or me.
Zelliko restricted access to documents.
He divided the staff into separate teams.
He siloed them from each other.
And he closely supervised Team 3.
That was the group that dealt with classified information from the White House and the CIA.
One of Zelico's first moves was a secret agreement with the Justice Department to block access to the files of the congressional inquiry until the White House had had a chance to review them first.
At one point, a staffer overheard Zelico pressuring a CIA employee to accept Condoleezza Rice's recollection of Intel briefings before the 9-11 attacks.
Most damning of all, phone logs kept by Zelico's assistant show that he was regularly taking calls from both Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove, George W. Bush's top political advisor in the White House.
We reached out to Karl Rove for an explanation of this, and he denied having been in regular contact with Zelico.
But that is untrue.
Even Zelico himself acknowledges he received multiple calls from Karl Rove, but he claims they did not discuss the commission.
From the outset, the commission started to advance the interests of Bush's neocon foreign policy agenda.
When Team 3, the counterterrorism group, submitted their draft to Zeliko, he inserted sentences that tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq to suggest the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9-11 and that bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq.
In the end, those sentences were removed after staffers alerted the commissioners.
But the commissioners did not prevent Zelico from stacking public hearings with discredited neocons who towed the White House line about Iraq's connections to al-Qaeda, none of which were real.
The first outside expert to testify to the commission was the Hoover Institute's Abraham Sofar.
His written remarks to the commission include eight references to Iraq and five references to Saddam Hussein.
Keep in mind, this was a hearing on 9-11, which had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or Iraq.
Sofar spent most of his time at the public hearing talking about the need for preemptive invasions.
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The need for preemptive actions stems ultimately from the conditions of modern life.
By April of 2004, former Senator Bob Kerry of Nebraska, a Democrat, confronted Rice about Zelico's ties to the administration.
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Let me just ask you directly, and you can just give me a, to keep it relatively short, but I wanted to get it on the record.
Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelico any questions about terrorism during transition, since he was a second person carded in the National Security Office and had considerable expertise?
Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing.
Philip was, in fact, as you know, had worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plan.
So yes.
Yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?
We talked.
Philip and I over a period of, you know, we worked closely together as academics.
Just in the transition.
During the transition, did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?
Oh, to do anything on terrorism.
To help us think about the structure of the terrorism, Dick Clark's operations, yes.
Incredibly, the man in charge of the official story of 9-11, Philip Zelico, was the Bush administration advisor who decided to demote the White House's counterterrorism czar, Dick Clark, in the months before 9-11.
Yet somehow these details, central though they are, were left out of the Commission's final report.
The 9-11 Commission report was a cover-up from beginning to end.
That is true.
And that's the most important starting point for those seeking to understand what actually happened on September 11th.
The official story is a lie.
What isn't clear is why our government and subsequent governments under subsequent presidents would want to continue that lie and cover up what actually happened on 9-11.
What exactly were they hiding?
And more important, who were they protecting?
We found out.
That's in the next installment of our 9-11 series.
The next episode drops next week, or you can unlock the entire five-part series right now, ad-free, by becoming a TCN member.
Members also get access to the Watch Companion, a guide to the timeline, the key figures, the primary sources that we went to to bring you this documentary.
You can read along as you watch.
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