Criticism of The 9/11 Commission - Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of Interest

Members of the 9/11 Commission, as well as its executive director Philip Zelikow, had conflicts of interest. Philip Shenon, a New York Times reporter, in a book released in February 2008 entitled "The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation" claims that Zelikow had closer ties with the White House than he publicly disclosed and that he tried to influence the final report in ways that the staff often perceived as limiting the Bush administration’s responsibility and furthering its anti-Iraq agenda. According to the book, Zelikow had at least four private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, and appears to have had many frequent telephone conversations with people in the White House. The Commission staff kept a record only of calls Zelikow received, but Government Accountability Office records show his frequent calls to the 456 telephone exchange in the 202 area code used exclusively by the White House. Also, the book states that Zelikow ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls, although the Commission's general counsel overruled him. Zelikow had pledged to have no contact with Rove and Condoleezza Rice during his work for the 9/11 Commission.

The book also reports that some panel staffers believed Zelikow stopped them from submitting a report depicting Rice's and Bush's performance as "amounting to incompetence or something not far from it". Zelikow has denied discussing the commission's work with Rove and further added "I was not a very popular person in the Bush White House when this was going on" and remarked the staffers were disgruntled.

According to Shenon, Rove always feared that a commission report that laid the blame for 9/11 at the president's doorstep was the one development that could most jeopardize Bush's 2004 re-election. Therefore, White House lawyers attempted to stonewall the creation of the commission and to hamstring its work from the outset. As Shenon reports, when Bush terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke could no longer be prevented from testifying about his urgent warnings over the summer of 2001 to Rice about the imminent threat of terrorist attack on US soil, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and his aides feverishly drafted tough questions and phoned them in to Republican commissioners to undermine Clarke's credibility." According to Shanon, it was this defensive strategy that Zelikow may have been coordinating with the White House.

Further, according to Shenon's book, Zelikow attempted to bolster the Bush administration's false claim of a link between al-Qaida and Iraq by trying to change a 9/11 Commission staff report to state that the terrorist network repeatedly tried to communicate with the government of Saddam Hussein, a claim of cooperation the administration had cited to justify the war in Iraq. Zelikow backed down when the 9/11 Commission staff refused to go along with his attempted change.

In addition, other members had ties which could be viewed as conflicts of interest. Jamie Gorelick, while serving in the Department of Justice under the Clinton administration, developed the policy (the "wall memo") that prevented communication between various government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, specifically the FBI and CIA. She also is on the board of United Technologies. Gorelick's firm has agreed to represent Prince Mohammed al Faisal in the suit by the 9/11 families. The families contend that al Faisal has legal responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.