Gold9472
10-21-2006, 02:42 PM
9/11: TRUTH, LIES AND CONSPIRACY INTERVIEW: LEE HAMILTON
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911hamilton.html
August 21, 2006
CBC News: Sunday's Evan Solomon interviews Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission co-chair and co-author of the book "Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission" .
Evan Solomon: Tell me why you felt the need, with Thomas Kean, to write this book "Without Precedent"?
Lee Hamilton: We felt we had an important story to tell, 9/11 was a traumatic event in our history, every adult in America will remember exactly where they were on that day when they heard the news. We felt that the Commission’s work gave a lot of insights into how government works, and particularly how government in the national security area works. We had hundreds of people tell us, or ask us, how the Commission did its work, and so we responded by writing the book and tried to let people know the story, the inside story of the 9/11 Commission.
Solomon: Do you consider the 9/11 Commission to have been a success, and if so, under what ways do you measure that success? How do you call it a success?
Hamilton: The 9/11 Commission was created by statute. We had two responsibilities - first, tell the story of 9/11; I think we've done that reasonably well. We worked very hard at it; I don’t know that we’ve told the definitive story of 9/11, but surely anybody in the future who tackles that job will begin with the 9/11 Commission Report.
(Gold9472: Their mandate was to give a full and complete accounting of the attacks of 9/11. It was NOT to "tell the story of 9/11.")
I think we’ve been reasonably successful in telling the story. It became a best seller in this country and people showed a lot of interest in it.
(Gold9472: That's what happens when you have the best propaganda machine in the world promoting it. Why won't that same propaganda machine promote things like, "The New Pearl Harbor", "The 9/11 Report: Omissions & Distortions", "Crossing The Rubicon, The End Of The American Empire At The End Of The Age Of Oil", "The War On Truth", "Towers Of Deception", and so on?)
Our second task was to make recommendations; thus far, about half of our recommendations have been enacted into law, the other half have not been enacted. So we've got a ways to go. In a quantitative sense, we’ve had about 50% success there. In a qualitative sense, you could judge it many different ways. But we still have some very important recommendations that we think have not yet been enacted that should be.
(Gold9472: Several of their recommendations were the very attacks against our civil liberties that we are now fighting very hard against.)
Solomon: Now, one of the stipulations, you write in the book, one of the ways that you thought that this ought to be successful, this report, the Commission Report, is on page 23, you said if the American people would accept the results as authoritative, and the recommendations.
And when I measure that against a Zogby poll done in May, that says now 42% of Americans say that "the U.S. government, and its 9/11 Commission, concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts the official explanation of September 11th, saying there's a cover-up" - 42%, Mr. Hamilton - what does that say to you about the efficacy of the Commission's report?
Hamilton: Well, it’s dispiriting, it’s an unusually high number, but if you look at polls judging government reports in the past - the Warren Commission, the reports on Kennedy assassination, even the reports on Abraham Lincoln’s assassination - you find a very high level of people who are skeptical. And you have that in this case.
(Gold9472: Mr. Hamilton, the REASON why "a very high level of people who are skepitcal" over those accounts is because time and time again, certain facts were left out of those reports that tell a completely different story.)
When you conduct a major investigation, you cannot possibly answer every question, you just do the best you can. But for every question you leave unanswered, you create an opening to a conspiracy theory, and a good many of them have popped up here.
(Gold9472: No, I doubt that you could answer every question. However, why didn't you answer every question put forth by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee? Why did you not answer such simple questions as "why was there no military response on the morning of 9/11?")
The only thing I ask in the future is that the conspiracy theory people do not apply a double standard. That is to say, they want us to make an airtight case for any assertion we make. On the other hand, when they make an assertion they do it often on very flimsy evidence.
(Gold9472: "Flimsy evidence" you say? Because of all of the omissions, distortions, and lies of the 9/11 Report, it has become a piece of evidence against the true perpetrators of the crime. Our "flimsy evidence" is in fact, the evidence YOU put forward. Or lack thereof.)
But conspirators are always going to exist in this country. Tom Kean and I got a flavour of this everytime we'd walk through an audience - they would hand us notes, hand us papers, hand us books, hand us tapes, telling us to investigate this, that or the other. You cannot possibly answer all these questions, you just do the best you can.
(Gold9472: You're right. Conspirators are always going to exist in this country. People like Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, Scooter Libby, Ken Lay, and many other people who took part in a conspiracy. You use the word as if to say those who are asking questions about the official account of 9/11 should be ignored. Something tells me you need to pick up a dictionary every once in a while.)
Solomon: Some of the families have joined that chorus. We’ve talked to one father who says, 'my son was killed by George W. Bush', as if the government had foreknowledge of the attacks. What would you say to someone like him and other family members who have been dissatisfied with the explanation?
Hamilton: Many families supported the report - very strongly - and have been instrumental in helping us on the implementation stage. A lot of the people that have doubts about the report - not all of them - are strongly anti-Bush, for a variety of reasons. Many of them are just anti-government, in other words, they don't believe anything the government says.
(Gold9472: You say many families supported the report. Those same family members who originally supported your report, before they had a chance to read it, now question the "veracity" of the entire thing. It has nothing to do with being "Anti-Bush." It has to do with wanting to know how their loved ones died, and the Government that was asked to tell them, FAILED miserably.)
All I ask of these people is: give me your evidence. If you thought George Bush or Lee Hamilton or Tom Kean blew up those buildings, let’s see the evidence.
(Gold9472: Our evidence has been given to you several times. You just said people hand you, "notes, hand us papers, hand us books, hand us tapes, telling us to investigate this, that or the other", and now you're essentially saying we haven't done that. We have asked for you to debate members of this movement, and you have declined. What more would you like us to do?)
Solomon: I wouldn't mind just.. there's a few things, but I want to know, interestingly enough, if you've seen a film that’s so popular now on the internet, ten million people apparently have seen a film called Loose Change, which makes some startling allegations. It's a film made by three very young students out of a New York University. Have you seen that movie, and if so, what are your thoughts on it?
Hamilton: I have not seen it.
Solomon: Yeah... 10 million people, I mean, some of them.. now, and it's interesting that you write in one of your chapters, I think it's Chapter 12, deals specifically with conspiracy theories. One of them, as you know - probably one of the most persistent - is that the buildings were brought down by controlled explosion, controlled demolition. One of the bits of evidence that is often cited is the collapse of World Trade Center Building Number 7, which was not hit by any plane. One question that people have is: why didn’t the Commission deal with the collapse Building 7, which some call the smoking gun? Why did this collapse at all?
Hamilton: Well, of course, we did deal with it. The charge that dynamite, or whatever, brought down the World Trade Towers, we of course looked at very carefully - we find no evidence of that. We find all kinds of evidence that it was the airplanes that did it.
Don’t take our word on that: the engineers and the architects have studied this thing in extraordinary detail, and they can tell you precisely what caused the collapse of those buildings. What caused the collapse of the buildings, to summarize it, was that the super-heated jet fuel melted the steel super-structure of these buildings and caused their collapse. There’s a powerful lot of evidence to sustain that point of view, including the pictures of the airplanes flying into the building.
Now, with regard to Building 7, we believe that it was the aftershocks of these two huge buildings in the very near vicinity collapsing. And in the Building 7 case, we think that it was a case of flames setting off a fuel container, which started the fire in Building 7, and that was our theory on Building 7.
Now we’re not the experts on this, we talked to the engineers and the architects about this at some length, and that's the conclusion we reached.
(Gold9472: I'm not smart enough to know how those buildings came down, however... You said you did deal with it. That is not the case. You said during your appearance on the Washington Journal that "The emphasis at the site of course, were on the towers" proving that you didn't "deal with" Building 7.)
Solomon: Let me just ask you one more question on that. One counter-argument - or there's two, I guess - one is that that fire very rarely, and has never, forced buildings constructed like the World Trade Centers to ever collapse, because steel doesn’t melt at temperatures that can be reached through a hydro-carbon fire, and that there's other.. in other words, there are countless cases of other buildings that have been on fire that have not collapsed.
Hamilton: - but not on fire through jet fuel, I don’t think you have any evidence of that. But here again, I’m not the expert on it. We relied on the experts, and they’re the engineers and the architects who examined this in very great detail.
(Gold9472: Again, this isn't my thing, but isn't jet fuel essentially the same thing as kerosene? Don't people say that kerosene couldn't burn hot enough?)
Solomon: A question which has remained: Why did the debris of World Trade Center 7, of which nobody died there, so there was no real urgency to move the debris away, and that there have been questions: why wasn't it examined closer? Why was essentially evidence from what could have been a crime scene - or was a crime scene - removed very quickly from there?
Hamilton: You can’t answer every question when you conduct an investigation. Look, you've to got to remember that on this day, chaos and confusion were the mark, and peoples’ overwhelming concern was to try to save as many lives as possible, not to explain why a particular building collapsed. So it’s not unusual to me that we, and the Commission - and anybody else, for that matter - cannot answer every question. I go back to what I say earlier: whenever you conduct an investigation, you cannot answer every question.
Solomon: But should the Commission have .. I guess the question some people keep asking, should the Commission have asked more questions about the removal of the debris?
Hamilton: Look, you can say that about almost every phase of our investigation, 'you should have asked this, you should have asked that, you should have spent more time' - you’re conducting an investigation, you have a time limit, you don’t have unlimited time, you have a budget limit, you cannot go down every track, you cannot answer conclusively every question.
The members of the families that you referred to a minute ago submitted 150 questions to us - we answered a good many of them, we didn’t answer them all. You come to a point in an investigation where you have to say to yourself, 'what’s our responsibility, given the resources we have, how much can we do?' And you end up with a lot of questions unanswered. Look, I 've got a lot of unanswered questions in my mind.
(Gold9472: All he asked is why was the evidence removed? Why? Thank you for proving my point that you didn't bother to answer all of the questions put forth by the family members.)
Solomon: What are yours? What are your unanswered questions?
Hamilton: Well, at the top of my list happens to be a personal one, and that is, I could never figure out why these 19 fellas did what they did. We looked into their backgrounds. In one or two cases, they were apparently happy, well-adjusted, not particularly religious - in one case quite well-to-do, had a girlfriend. We just couldn’t figure out why he did it. I still don’t know. And I think one of the great unanswered questions - a good topic for investigative reporters - would be: why did these 19 do what they did? We speculated in the report about why the enemy hates us, but we simply weren’t able to answer the questions about the 19.
(Gold9472: They hate us because of our freedom. Didn't you get the memo?)
End Part I
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911hamilton.html
August 21, 2006
CBC News: Sunday's Evan Solomon interviews Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission co-chair and co-author of the book "Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission" .
Evan Solomon: Tell me why you felt the need, with Thomas Kean, to write this book "Without Precedent"?
Lee Hamilton: We felt we had an important story to tell, 9/11 was a traumatic event in our history, every adult in America will remember exactly where they were on that day when they heard the news. We felt that the Commission’s work gave a lot of insights into how government works, and particularly how government in the national security area works. We had hundreds of people tell us, or ask us, how the Commission did its work, and so we responded by writing the book and tried to let people know the story, the inside story of the 9/11 Commission.
Solomon: Do you consider the 9/11 Commission to have been a success, and if so, under what ways do you measure that success? How do you call it a success?
Hamilton: The 9/11 Commission was created by statute. We had two responsibilities - first, tell the story of 9/11; I think we've done that reasonably well. We worked very hard at it; I don’t know that we’ve told the definitive story of 9/11, but surely anybody in the future who tackles that job will begin with the 9/11 Commission Report.
(Gold9472: Their mandate was to give a full and complete accounting of the attacks of 9/11. It was NOT to "tell the story of 9/11.")
I think we’ve been reasonably successful in telling the story. It became a best seller in this country and people showed a lot of interest in it.
(Gold9472: That's what happens when you have the best propaganda machine in the world promoting it. Why won't that same propaganda machine promote things like, "The New Pearl Harbor", "The 9/11 Report: Omissions & Distortions", "Crossing The Rubicon, The End Of The American Empire At The End Of The Age Of Oil", "The War On Truth", "Towers Of Deception", and so on?)
Our second task was to make recommendations; thus far, about half of our recommendations have been enacted into law, the other half have not been enacted. So we've got a ways to go. In a quantitative sense, we’ve had about 50% success there. In a qualitative sense, you could judge it many different ways. But we still have some very important recommendations that we think have not yet been enacted that should be.
(Gold9472: Several of their recommendations were the very attacks against our civil liberties that we are now fighting very hard against.)
Solomon: Now, one of the stipulations, you write in the book, one of the ways that you thought that this ought to be successful, this report, the Commission Report, is on page 23, you said if the American people would accept the results as authoritative, and the recommendations.
And when I measure that against a Zogby poll done in May, that says now 42% of Americans say that "the U.S. government, and its 9/11 Commission, concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts the official explanation of September 11th, saying there's a cover-up" - 42%, Mr. Hamilton - what does that say to you about the efficacy of the Commission's report?
Hamilton: Well, it’s dispiriting, it’s an unusually high number, but if you look at polls judging government reports in the past - the Warren Commission, the reports on Kennedy assassination, even the reports on Abraham Lincoln’s assassination - you find a very high level of people who are skeptical. And you have that in this case.
(Gold9472: Mr. Hamilton, the REASON why "a very high level of people who are skepitcal" over those accounts is because time and time again, certain facts were left out of those reports that tell a completely different story.)
When you conduct a major investigation, you cannot possibly answer every question, you just do the best you can. But for every question you leave unanswered, you create an opening to a conspiracy theory, and a good many of them have popped up here.
(Gold9472: No, I doubt that you could answer every question. However, why didn't you answer every question put forth by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee? Why did you not answer such simple questions as "why was there no military response on the morning of 9/11?")
The only thing I ask in the future is that the conspiracy theory people do not apply a double standard. That is to say, they want us to make an airtight case for any assertion we make. On the other hand, when they make an assertion they do it often on very flimsy evidence.
(Gold9472: "Flimsy evidence" you say? Because of all of the omissions, distortions, and lies of the 9/11 Report, it has become a piece of evidence against the true perpetrators of the crime. Our "flimsy evidence" is in fact, the evidence YOU put forward. Or lack thereof.)
But conspirators are always going to exist in this country. Tom Kean and I got a flavour of this everytime we'd walk through an audience - they would hand us notes, hand us papers, hand us books, hand us tapes, telling us to investigate this, that or the other. You cannot possibly answer all these questions, you just do the best you can.
(Gold9472: You're right. Conspirators are always going to exist in this country. People like Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, Scooter Libby, Ken Lay, and many other people who took part in a conspiracy. You use the word as if to say those who are asking questions about the official account of 9/11 should be ignored. Something tells me you need to pick up a dictionary every once in a while.)
Solomon: Some of the families have joined that chorus. We’ve talked to one father who says, 'my son was killed by George W. Bush', as if the government had foreknowledge of the attacks. What would you say to someone like him and other family members who have been dissatisfied with the explanation?
Hamilton: Many families supported the report - very strongly - and have been instrumental in helping us on the implementation stage. A lot of the people that have doubts about the report - not all of them - are strongly anti-Bush, for a variety of reasons. Many of them are just anti-government, in other words, they don't believe anything the government says.
(Gold9472: You say many families supported the report. Those same family members who originally supported your report, before they had a chance to read it, now question the "veracity" of the entire thing. It has nothing to do with being "Anti-Bush." It has to do with wanting to know how their loved ones died, and the Government that was asked to tell them, FAILED miserably.)
All I ask of these people is: give me your evidence. If you thought George Bush or Lee Hamilton or Tom Kean blew up those buildings, let’s see the evidence.
(Gold9472: Our evidence has been given to you several times. You just said people hand you, "notes, hand us papers, hand us books, hand us tapes, telling us to investigate this, that or the other", and now you're essentially saying we haven't done that. We have asked for you to debate members of this movement, and you have declined. What more would you like us to do?)
Solomon: I wouldn't mind just.. there's a few things, but I want to know, interestingly enough, if you've seen a film that’s so popular now on the internet, ten million people apparently have seen a film called Loose Change, which makes some startling allegations. It's a film made by three very young students out of a New York University. Have you seen that movie, and if so, what are your thoughts on it?
Hamilton: I have not seen it.
Solomon: Yeah... 10 million people, I mean, some of them.. now, and it's interesting that you write in one of your chapters, I think it's Chapter 12, deals specifically with conspiracy theories. One of them, as you know - probably one of the most persistent - is that the buildings were brought down by controlled explosion, controlled demolition. One of the bits of evidence that is often cited is the collapse of World Trade Center Building Number 7, which was not hit by any plane. One question that people have is: why didn’t the Commission deal with the collapse Building 7, which some call the smoking gun? Why did this collapse at all?
Hamilton: Well, of course, we did deal with it. The charge that dynamite, or whatever, brought down the World Trade Towers, we of course looked at very carefully - we find no evidence of that. We find all kinds of evidence that it was the airplanes that did it.
Don’t take our word on that: the engineers and the architects have studied this thing in extraordinary detail, and they can tell you precisely what caused the collapse of those buildings. What caused the collapse of the buildings, to summarize it, was that the super-heated jet fuel melted the steel super-structure of these buildings and caused their collapse. There’s a powerful lot of evidence to sustain that point of view, including the pictures of the airplanes flying into the building.
Now, with regard to Building 7, we believe that it was the aftershocks of these two huge buildings in the very near vicinity collapsing. And in the Building 7 case, we think that it was a case of flames setting off a fuel container, which started the fire in Building 7, and that was our theory on Building 7.
Now we’re not the experts on this, we talked to the engineers and the architects about this at some length, and that's the conclusion we reached.
(Gold9472: I'm not smart enough to know how those buildings came down, however... You said you did deal with it. That is not the case. You said during your appearance on the Washington Journal that "The emphasis at the site of course, were on the towers" proving that you didn't "deal with" Building 7.)
Solomon: Let me just ask you one more question on that. One counter-argument - or there's two, I guess - one is that that fire very rarely, and has never, forced buildings constructed like the World Trade Centers to ever collapse, because steel doesn’t melt at temperatures that can be reached through a hydro-carbon fire, and that there's other.. in other words, there are countless cases of other buildings that have been on fire that have not collapsed.
Hamilton: - but not on fire through jet fuel, I don’t think you have any evidence of that. But here again, I’m not the expert on it. We relied on the experts, and they’re the engineers and the architects who examined this in very great detail.
(Gold9472: Again, this isn't my thing, but isn't jet fuel essentially the same thing as kerosene? Don't people say that kerosene couldn't burn hot enough?)
Solomon: A question which has remained: Why did the debris of World Trade Center 7, of which nobody died there, so there was no real urgency to move the debris away, and that there have been questions: why wasn't it examined closer? Why was essentially evidence from what could have been a crime scene - or was a crime scene - removed very quickly from there?
Hamilton: You can’t answer every question when you conduct an investigation. Look, you've to got to remember that on this day, chaos and confusion were the mark, and peoples’ overwhelming concern was to try to save as many lives as possible, not to explain why a particular building collapsed. So it’s not unusual to me that we, and the Commission - and anybody else, for that matter - cannot answer every question. I go back to what I say earlier: whenever you conduct an investigation, you cannot answer every question.
Solomon: But should the Commission have .. I guess the question some people keep asking, should the Commission have asked more questions about the removal of the debris?
Hamilton: Look, you can say that about almost every phase of our investigation, 'you should have asked this, you should have asked that, you should have spent more time' - you’re conducting an investigation, you have a time limit, you don’t have unlimited time, you have a budget limit, you cannot go down every track, you cannot answer conclusively every question.
The members of the families that you referred to a minute ago submitted 150 questions to us - we answered a good many of them, we didn’t answer them all. You come to a point in an investigation where you have to say to yourself, 'what’s our responsibility, given the resources we have, how much can we do?' And you end up with a lot of questions unanswered. Look, I 've got a lot of unanswered questions in my mind.
(Gold9472: All he asked is why was the evidence removed? Why? Thank you for proving my point that you didn't bother to answer all of the questions put forth by the family members.)
Solomon: What are yours? What are your unanswered questions?
Hamilton: Well, at the top of my list happens to be a personal one, and that is, I could never figure out why these 19 fellas did what they did. We looked into their backgrounds. In one or two cases, they were apparently happy, well-adjusted, not particularly religious - in one case quite well-to-do, had a girlfriend. We just couldn’t figure out why he did it. I still don’t know. And I think one of the great unanswered questions - a good topic for investigative reporters - would be: why did these 19 do what they did? We speculated in the report about why the enemy hates us, but we simply weren’t able to answer the questions about the 19.
(Gold9472: They hate us because of our freedom. Didn't you get the memo?)
End Part I