9/11: TRUTH, LIES AND CONSPIRACY
INTERVIEW: LEE HAMILTON
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".
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911hamilton.html
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 im****tant 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 Re****t. 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.
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 im****tant recommendations that we think
have not yet been enacted that should be.
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 re****t, the
Commission Re****t, 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 re****t?
Hamilton: Well, it's dispiriting, it's an unusually high number, but if
you
look at polls judging government re****ts in the past - the Warren
Commission, the re****ts on Kennedy assassination, even the re****ts on
Abraham Lincoln's assassination - you find a very high level of people who
are skeptical. And you have that in this case.
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.
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.
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.
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 sup****ted the re****t - very strongly - and have
been
instrumental in helping us on the implementation stage. A lot of the
people
that have doubts about the re****t - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 re****ters - would be: why did these 19 do what
they
did? We speculated in the re****t about why the enemy hates us, but we
simply
weren't able to answer the questions about the 19.
Solomon: You know, just on that point, and again, there are so many of
these
questions about the 19. There have been some questions about - and I'm
talking about sources here like the London Times and Le Figaro, sort of
major newspapers - that some of these guys, some of these hijackers were
still alive after the day of the event, that there are re****ts of their
whereabouts. What did the Commission make of those kind of re****ts?
Hamilton: (Laughs) What's the evidence? Look, I had a woman come up to me
who said she was a lover of Mohammed Atta. And I said, 'do you know that
he's
dead?' And she said, 'I'm his lover.' .. (raises eyebrows)
You get all kinds of comments like this, you can't trace everything down.
Solomon: Where there any notion there was... The NTSB recently released
the
flight path of United Flight 93 in the past two weeks. One of the
interesting things that that showed was, during the flight path, and I
think
the flight path of that, I think that plane crashed, according to the
Re****t, at 10:03 am.
And one of the interesting things it showed - this is just recently
declassified - that it flew well over 10,000 feet - 30,000, 40,000 feet -
from about 9:30 onward. Now, a lot of the cell phone calls that were made
from that plane, that ended up being in the movie, were from, you know,
people phoning from the plane. And one allegation that's recently come out
since the release of that is: cell phones don't work above 10,000 feet, so
how could people get on their cell phone on a plane and phone their
relatives?
Hamilton: I'm no expert on that. I've been told cell phones work -
sometimes - above 10,000 feet, and as high as 30,000 feet. So it may have
been that some of the calls went through and some didn't, I just don't
know.
Solomon: Let me ask you another thing. I'm just asking because, you know,
in
the wake of this, there's lots of these questions.
Hamilton: There surely are.
Solomon: The Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University,
which
is about 20 odd miles away from New York, they released a re****t on
seismic
data coming from Manhattan on that day. And they released a spike in
seismic
data at 8:46:26, and they thought that was the moment of impact of the
plane
on the first World Trade Center, of American Airlines 11. But the plane
didn't
hit until 8:46:40, and there are several of the same kind of early seismic
spikes for the second flight. I guess the question is: how do we explain
those discrepancies? When the public looks at that, how can we explain
that
kind of thing?
Hamilton: I haven't seen that re****t. I don't know the answer to your
question. They didn't come forward with that evidence while we were at the
Commission - so far as I know. Now, staff filtered a lot of these things,
so
not necessarily would I know. I don't know what happened with regard to
the.... What did they conclude? I don't know what they concluded.
Solomon: They had no conclusion; the evidence is sitting out there. You
write about, in Chapter 12 of the book - and again it's one of those
allegations that have come up - about who had foreknowledge of it? One
piece
of evidence that many critics have said is: 'well, there is lots of 'puts'
-
which is a form of financial stock trading. In other words, people are
buying up stock, hoping that the airline stock would plunge, and there was
an unusually large number of puts on American Airlines and United stock,
and
therefore people profited from this. What did you make of that theory?
Hamilton: That's one we did investigate. We looked at that pretty
carefully,
and all I can indicate at this point is that we do not think anybody
profited from manipulation of airline stock prior to 9/11, there's no
evidence of that, I don't think.
Solomon: Even though there's unusual, high...
Hamilton: That's correct. It's not unusual in the stock market to have a
lot
of activity in a given stock, or industry, as you did here. The question
is:
did any of them have foreknowledge and profit from it? We don't think so;
we
looked at it pretty carefully.
Solomon: There's also allegations that the Pakistani Secret Service,
called
the ISI, the head of which met here in the United States right before
9/11,
and there's some allegations and evidence to show that they paid Mohammed
Atta $100,000. The reason this is im****tant is: who funded the people who
conducted the attacks, the terrorist attacks? What did the Commission make
of payment from the ISI to Mohammed Atta of $100,000?
Hamilton: I don't know anything about it.
Solomon: Was there any connection between.. Did the Commission investigate
any connection between ISI, Pakistani intelligence, and..
Hamilton: They may have; I do not recall us writing anything about it in
the
re****t. We may have but I don't recall it. We did estimate that Osama bin
Laden spent about $500,000 for the 9/11 attacks. We did not identify all
the
sources of that money.
Solomon: And how it got to the .
Hamilton: That's right, you simply can't trace it, so far as I know,
because
$500,000 in international financial markets is not even a blip on the
radar
screen. So we do not know precisely where that money came from.
Solomon: Questions about foreknowledge, especially as to when Vice
President
Dick Cheney knew when he went down to the protective bunker: there was
some
suggestion that the Secretary of Trans****t Mineta testified in front of
the
Commission that he in fact talked to Dick Cheney at 9:20 am. Cheney claims
he hadn't been there.. gotten down there until close to 10 am. That was
eventually omitted from the final re****t,. Can you tell us a bit about
about
what Secretary of Trans****t Mineta told the Commission about where Dick
Cheney was prior to 10 am?
Hamilton: I do not recall.
Solomon: And we don't know exactly where that..
Hamilton: Well, we think that Vice President Cheney entered the bunker
shortly before 10 o'clock. And there is a gap of several minutes there,
where we do not really know what the Vice President really did. There is
the
famous phone call between the President and the Vice President. We could
find no do***entary evidence of that phone call. Both the President and
the
Vice President said that the phone call was made, and in that phone call,
the order was supposedly was given, allegedly given, to shoot down an
airliner - if necessary
Now, there are a lot of things not answered about that period of time. The
order never got to the pilots and when it did get to the pilots, it didn't
get to them in time, and when it did get to them, they claimed it was not
an
order to shoot it down, but to identify and track an airliner, not to
shoot
it down.
What you had on this day, of course, was a lot of confusion, and a lot of
confusion in communications, at the very highest levels. When the
President
went from the school in Sarasota to Air Force One, he was trying to get
communications with the White House, he used a cell phone, in part. When
he
got to Air Force One, the communications didn't work all that well. Well,
this is all very disturbing, and I'm told has now been corrected.
Solomon: Disturbing in what way?
Hamilton: Well, disturbing that, at this particular time, the Commander in
Chief lost communications with the White House, and with his chief aides
there, right in the middle of a crisis - that's very disturbing. I hope
that's
been corrected, I've been told that it has been. But the fact of the
matter
is, if you look at 9/11, all the way through, FAA communications, NORAD
communications, White House communications, there was just a lot of
confusion, and a lot of gaps.
Solomon: So, just in terms of Mineta, just because I think that's sort of
interesting, when Secretary Mineta made at your Commission hearing, I
think
he did this May 23rd, that he arrived and talked to Dick Cheney at 9:20 -
that would show that Mr. Cheney had had some earlier knowledge that planes
had been hijacked and they wanted to take action. That was not -
Hamilton: What did the Secretary say at that time to the Vice President?
Solomon: They talked about a plane being hijacked, according to the
testimony that I've seen, according to the Mineta re****t. But there's
another one, in Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies", and I know
Richard Clarke took the stand very famously - not the stand, but testified
before the Commission very famously - he says he received authorization
from
Dick Cheney to shoot down Flight 93 at about 9:50 am. In the Commission's
Re****t, it said the authorization didn't come from Dick Cheney until
10:25,
and Richard Clarke's testimony that he and his book, isn't mentioned in
the
Commission's .. Why didn't you mention that?
Hamilton: Look, you've obviously gone through the re****t with a
fine-toothed
comb, you're raising a lot of questions - I can do the same thing...
Solomon: Yeah..
Hamilton: ..all I want from you is evidence. You're just citing a lot of
things, without any evidence to back them up, as far as I can see.
Solomon: No, I'm just asking why they weren't -
Hamilton: I don't know the answer to your question.
Solomon: I guess part of the reason is..
Hamilton: I cannot answer every question with regard to 9/11. I can answer
a
good many of them, but I can't answer them all.
Solomon: I guess, Mr. Hamilton, I don't think anyone expects you to have
all
the answers...
Hamilton: Well, you apparently do, because you have asked me questions of
enormous detail from a great variety of sources. You want me to answer
them
all - I can't do it (laughs)
Solomon: I guess part of the reason is I want to know, not necessarily
what
the answer is, but if the Commission considered, you know, what made it
into
the re****t, in terms of the discussion. And of course, what we're trying
to
understand is, if the commission simply said 'you know, those kinds...
there
was huge amounts of data, and we couldn't put everything in'.
So I guess, you know, in questions about what happened on 9/11 as we
approach the fifth anniversary of that day, and this being the kind of
most
extensive do***ent that the public has, there are questions as to what
made
it in and what you heard, and what you didn't. And that, I think, those
are
the nature of the questions.
Hamilton: Yeah. A lot of things that came to the attention of staff did
not
come to the attention of the Commission. Some of the things did come to
the
attention of the Commission, and we didn't put 'em in, or at least we put
'em in at a lower level. But many of the things did not come directly to
my
attention.
Solomon: Part of what you write in the book is that one of the key goals
here was to be as transparent and as open as possible, because you say
'without light, the conspiracy theorists jump in.'
Hamilton: That's right.
Solomon: Now, one place that you shed a lot of light on - and you write
about it in this book ["Without Precedent"] as well - is a place where
conspiracy theorists, as you call them, have jumped in, which is the plane
that hit the Pentagon. As you and I both know, there's a number of
publications that [say] the hole in the Pentagon was too small to
accomodate
a plane of that, you know, 125 foot wingspan, 40 feet high, and that it
was
a missile. What did you make - what did the Commission, when it heard all
those kind of ideas, how did you consider those, and what investigation
went
on around those?
Hamilton: Well, we said an airplane went into the Pentagon. And we said
that
jet fuel there too caused an awful lot of the damage and the injury. We
had
one member of the staff who had been badly, badly burned by jet fuel, and
as
you know, jet fuel causes specific kinds of burns, and these burns were
from
jet fuel. So all of our evidence indicated a plane went in, and that's
what
the eyewitnesses said that we saw.
Solomon: And you know, this notion - and this is maybe one of the most
popular theories, and you see it all over - is that re****ts initially came
back from the Pentagon that there was no debris at all, that the plane
simply disintegrated inside the Pentagon. To those people, those of us who
have seen aviation accidents, that sounded in some ways difficult to
believe, because there was such a huge plane, and the maneuvre that it
would
require the pilot to make would have been, you know, to fly into it seemed
so astoni****ng. What did the commission make of the debate, such as it is,
that surrounds that?
Hamilton: We thought it was an airplane
Solomon: Straight up?
Hamilton: Straight up.
Solomon: Was there any debris?
Hamilton: My recollection is, the answer's yes. Was there a lot of debris?
I
don't think so. To say that there was no debris strains my recollection, I
didn't remember it that way, I thought there was some debris. But you
know,
you have relatively little experience with planes highly loaded with jet
fuel cra****ng, (chuckles) and reconstructing exactly what happened on the
basis of the crash. We did the best we could on it. We thought it was an
airplane.
There were a number of eyewitnesses, of course, who saw the plane go into
the Pentagon, a number of people, for example, who were driving on the
roadway - I forget the number of it right now - who had the airplane fly
over their cars into the building, and they stopped their car, and saw the
plane going into the Pentagon - that was not one, that was a number of
eyewitnesses. We relied upon that, of course.
Solomon: And you know, when you.. You've spoken with many of the
witnesses,
your Commission heard testimony from all sorts of different people. So
when
you hear these kind of ongoing allegations that there was conflicting
re****ts of the witnesses; that the FBI confiscated tapes from the gas
station across the road, that supposedly saw it within a day of it; that
some of those witnesses disappeared.. what do you make of those kind of...
Hamilton: I don't believe for a minute that we got everything right. We
wrote a first draft of history.
We wrote it under a lot of time pressure, and we sorted through the
evidence
as best we could.
Now, it would be really rather remarkable if we got everything right. So
far, of the things that have been brought up challenging the re****t, to my
knowledge, we have more credibility than the challenger. But I would not
for
a moment want to suggest that that's always true, either in the past or in
the future. People will be investigating 9/11 for the next hundred years
in
this country, and they're going to find out some things that we missed
here.
So I don't automatically reject all the evidence you cite. It may be we
missed it, it may be we ignored it when we shouldn't have - I don't think
we
did, but it's possible.
Solomon: You write.. the first chapter of the book is 'the Commission was
set up to fail.' - my goodness, for the critics - who suggest that it was
indeed set up to fail as some kind of obfuscation - you certainly dangled
a
juicy piece of bait out there in the river. Why do you think you were set
up
to fail?
Hamilton: Well, for a number of reasons: Tom Kean and I were substitutes -
Henry Kissinger and George Mitchell were the first choices; we got started
late; we had a very short time frame - indeed, we had to get it extended;
we
did not have enough money - 3 million dollars to conduct an extensive
investigation. We needed more, we got more, but it took us a while to get
it.
We had a lot of skeptics out there, who really did not want the Commission
formed. Politicians don't like somebody looking back to see if they made a
mistake.
The Commission had to re****t right, just a few days before the Democratic
National Convention met, in other words, right in the middle of a
political
campaign. We had a lot of people strongly opposed to what we did. We had a
lot of trouble getting access to do***ents and to people. We knew the
history of commissions; the history of commissions were they.. nobody paid
much attention to 'em.
So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail. We
decided that if we were going to have any success, we had to have a
unanimous re****t, otherwise the Commission re****t would simply be filed.
Solomon: I guess the question is, you know, if forty odd million dollars
were spent investigating President Bill Clinton's ***ual infidelities, why
did the American people and the world have to wait 441 days for a
commission
that was originally budgeted for 3 million dollars and given barely a
year,
and as you write in the book and do***ent so well, was... had to fight to
get access to even use its subpoena power very judiciously, for fear that
there'd be a backlash against the Commission. I mean, an event as
cataclysmic as 9/11, it begs the question: why was the administration so
unwilling to budget this thing, and then Congress so unwilling to give
money
and let you guys go whole hog to do more?
Hamilton: (Laughs) I think basically it's because they were afraid we were
going to hang somebody, that we would point the finger, right in the
middle
of a presidential campaign - 'Mr. Bush, this was your fault' - or even Mr.
Clinton. President Clinton was wary about this re****t too.
Now I want to say, eventurally both presidents cooperated, but it took a
while. And it's not too unusual for me to understand that they were
skeptical. A commission that is created does not have automatic
credibility - we had to work at that, we had to produce a lot of re****ts
which were recognized, fortunately, to be professionally done, seriously
done - and not out to hang anybody.
Solomon: Sorry, but why not out to hang anybody? This idea, 'they didn't
want to point fingers', that you weren't out to 'hang anybody'.. Good God,
I
thought the families were saying, 'let's find out not just what happened,
but who is accountable' - you know, that famous testimony of Richard
Clarke,
in front of your commission, when he said, "I failed you." Weren't people
wanting you to point fingers and make someone accountable?
Hamilton: Yes I think they were. And we say, in the book, that there was a
thirst for accountability. Now, part of that thirst was just to tell the
story. This traumatic event occurs and they wanted to understand why it
occurred, and we tried to tell that as best we could.
Government's not very good at looking back and criticizing itself, and one
of the things that impressed us over and over again, as we talked to one
agency after the other, is: they had not really met and turned this over
in
their mind; government is always operating on the Inbox, and we were
critical of almost every agency, in not looking back and asking what went
wrong. So I think that's a powerful factor in government, and...
Solomon: It does also suggest - I mean, there is that factor - but you
know,
what the public often.. now, and again, I talk about the 9/11 families,
who
were so instrumental in getting the Commission going..
Hamilton: That's correct.
Solomon: They said, 'listen, is one of the reasons they're not getting
funded, and it's so late, is that someone's got something to hide.
Hamilton: There is... well, a lot of people have things to hide.
Solomon: Well who in this case?
Hamilton: Look, you can go down the list and probably identify a hundred
people who made mistakes that day:
t he ticket-taker at the Boston Logan air****t; the customs official who
let
these fellows in, not one but many times, right up to Bill Clinton or
George
Bush.
Solomon: What were their errors?
Hamilton: They didn't pay enough attention to terrorism. They didn't treat
it with enough urgency. They didn't really anticipate this, even though
there were many voices, you mentioned Richard Clarke a few times, who were
clearly urging them 'do it' - he served both presidents.
What we decided was two things: the mandate did not ask us to identify
people or even did not use the word 'accountability'. We did not want to
go
beyond our mandate.
Secondly, what we thought was really im****tant in all of this was not so
much that a particular person failed in their responsibility, whatever
that
responsibility might be, but that there were systemic problems in the
government that we really thought need to be identified and corrected.
We believe that, had we gone into the question of identifying a hundred
people here who goofed up on
9/11, or prior to 9/11, and did not do their job responsibly, we would
have
gone outside the mandate of the Commission, we would absolutely have
destroyed any op****tunity for unanimity of view, because the Commission
would have bogged down with whether Jim Smith or Sally Jones had done
their
job right, and that's an unending task.
Solomon: In retrospect, one of the criticisms that you level in this book
"Without Precedent" is aimed at both the FAA and NORAD, both of whom
representatives testified before the Commission, and both of whom gave
what
to me - and I'm allowed to be much more impolite than you - sounded to me
like lies. They told you testimony that simply... the tapes that were
subsequently.. that have subsequently been revealed, were simply not true.
Hamilton: That's correct.
Solomon: And it wasn't just lies by ommission, in some senses lies of
commission, they told you things that basically didn't happen. What do you
make of that?
Hamilton: Well, I think you're right. They gave us inaccurate information.
We asked for a lot of material and a lot of do***entation. They did not
supply it all. They gave us a few things. We sent some staff into their
headquarters. We identified a lot more do***ents and tapes, they
eventually
gave them to us, we had to issue a subpoena to get them.
Eventually they told us we had the story right, they had it wrong, it took
a
while to get to that point, but we eventually got here. Did they lie to us
or was it inadvertent? We are not a law enforcement agency, we did not
have
that kind of authority, going back to the mandate again. All of us had our
suspicions here, but we simply did not have the staff and we were right up
against the deadline when this came out, that we didn't have the time to
say
that these officials had willfully and intentionally lied.
So we punted - and we said, 'we can't do this, we don't have the statutory
authority, we don't have the staff', we don't have the time'. We will tell
the story as we understood it - they did mislead us. Was it wilful? We
don't
know. We'll turn it over to the authorities, and that's what we did.
Solomon: And they're investigating?
Hamilton: They are now still investigating.
Solomon: The recently released transcripts of what happened at NEADS,
which
is the Northeast Air Defence, paints a startling picture of confusion.
Hamilton: I think that's the right word: enormous confusion, two of these
airplanes that crashed were never identified. At one point, they had the
American military jets chasing a phantom jet out in the Atlantic Ocean -
in
other words, going in the wrong direction.
The military had very little warning, I think, 2 minutes on one plane and
11
minutes on the other, if my recollection serves me right, and the
disappointing thing here is that our, in a sense, first line of defense
didn't
work.
Solomon: So is the story - and again, and I talk about those polls, 42% of
Americans - your re****t very much... and subsequent things that have been
released, subsequent tapes from places like NORAD, the air defence
systems,
suggest a mass failure of the first line of defense, which is incompetence
and confusion which led to the lack of prevention of this.
Hamilton: Yeah.
....
Solomon: Now what happens when you get on to these [talk radio] shows, and
you talk about that, and you get every - because you understand that the
landscape is now littered with that stuff. What do you say to all these
re****ts that are coming in - constantly?
Hamilton: I think people do not sufficiently understand how complicated
conducting a major investigation is, and how difficult it is, in an event
of
this kind, to chase down every answer to every question, and... Look, I
can
go before any audience in America today and I can raise so many questions
about 9/11 - raise questions, not answer questions, raise questions -
about
the investigation. And everbody in the audience will walk out saying 'the
government misled us or lied to us.' It's a very easy thing to do! I can
raise questions about our own re****t!
Solomon: Like what? What would you raise?
Hamilton: Well, like I just said, about the 19 hijackers, we didn't answer
that question.
We had to tell that story as best we could, and we did, and we made a lot
of
judgments about the credibility of evidence. Were we right in every case?
I
suspect not. Were we right in most cases? I think so.
I do not know at this point of any factual error in our re****t, that I
would
absolutely say 'we just plain missed it.' Now, maybe I need to review it
more carefully, but I cannot recall right now at this instance any fact
that
we just plain missed.
Solomon: Not that you got wrong, but the fact that was omitted?
Hamilton: Well, I know there were a lot of questions that we could not
answer, with regard to FAA and NORAD and White House activity, and a lot
of
other things, we just can't answer 'em.
Solomon: Is there anything in retrospect.. I mean, your deadline was so
tight, and you say that forced you to make some very tough decisions as to
how far ranging the investigation could be. In retrospect, if you'd had
more
time, what would you have investigated more thoroughly?
Hamilton: I would have, I think we spent - if I were critiquing the work
of
the Commission - I think we spent too much time on the question of access.
And I would have liked to have gotten that over with, say, in the first
half
of the Commission's work, so that we could have spent more time in putting
the story together, maybe trying to answer some of the questions you raise
that I can't answer - and poli****ng the recommendations.
But you don't... everything doesn't go like you want it to go, and we were
fighting the question of access right up to the end of the Commission's
work.
Solomon: One last thing before we go: you had, of course, Vice President
Dick Cheney and President George Bush testify together - not under oath,
with no transcript that would be made to the public. For a lot of the
family
members, and a lot of the public, they thought 'so many other people
testified under oath, so many other people had public testimony - why not
the President and the Vice President?' That again looked as though they
were
trying to obfuscate or hide something - what's your view on that?
Hamilton: I don't remember any time that a President of the United States,
on a non-criminal matter, testified under oath. I do recall when President
Johnson was asked to testify to the Warren Commission, he just flat out
told
him, 'I am not going to do it. Presidents of the United States don't do
that
sort of thing.'
Solomon: He wrote a 3 page letter.
Hamilton: He wrote a letter. Now, we asked President Bush and Vice
President
Cheney to testify, they said no. We went back to it, we said, 'look, we
will
have no credibility as a commission if we do not hear from you.'
They considered that. They came back to us and said, 'we will talk to you
-
Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton - but not the other commissioners.' We said that
was not satisfactory, 'you had to talk to all ten of the Commission.' I go
into this detail just to tell you there was a long course of negotiation
here.
Eventually they said they would both testify - not testify but meet with
us - all ten commissioners - in the White House. There would be note
takers,
but no transcript taken. Tom and I asked the question, 'can we get the
information we need under this arrangement? We answered that 'yes'.
In the actual appearance with the President and the Vice President, they
were exceedingly co-operative. The president sat there for four hours and
responded to questions.
At one point, Tom Kean interrupted one of the Commissioners, Richard
Ben-Veniste, as I think we tell in the book, and said, 'Richard, we have
got
to respect the President's time.' And the President said, 'look, I'm in
charge here, I'll take the time, and let Richard ask his questions.'
We felt like we got a very extended long period of time with the
president.
He was completely candid. He did almost all the talking. Vice President
Cheney talked only with reference to what happened at the White House on
9/11, because the President was not in the White House then, and took any
question we had, and we had a lot of questions.
Solomon: Do you wish there was a public transcript of that?
Hamilton: If we had our preference, would there be a public transcript?
It's
fine with me. But it was a White House call.
Solomon: I just want to clarify something that you said earlier. You said
that the Commission Re****t did mention World Trade Center Building 7 in
it,
what happened. It did mention it or it didn't?
Hamilton: The Commission reviewed the question of the Building 7 collapse.
I
don't know specifically if it's in the Re****t, I can't recall that it is,
but it, uh..
Solomon: I don't think it was in the re****t.
Hamilton: OK, then I'll accept your word for that.
Solomon: There was a decision not to put it in the re****t?
Hamilton: I do not recall that was a specific discussion in the Commission
and we rejected the idea of putting Building 7 in, I don't recall that. So
I
presume that the re****t was written without reference to Building 7 at
all,
because all of the attention, of course, was on the Trade tower buildings.
Solomon: And the black boxes on the planes: one bit of evidence I just got
asked about, if it came up, was: the last 3 minutes of the black box on
Flight 93 has not been made public or is missing, or I don't know what's
happening. Was there any discussion as to what happened to those last
three
minutes?
Hamilton: I do not recall any reference to the black box.
Solomon: Were they all found?
Hamilton: I do not know, off hand, I do not know.
Solomon: Mr. Hamilton, I want to thank you so much for taking the time..
Hamilton: Yes, sir.
Solomon: ..and for discussing the book. What's the reaction, by the way,
from the families to this book?
Hamilton: Well, the families are a lot of different people. And many of
them
have been very enthusiastic. I understand there is a book coming out which
will be quite critical of the work of the 9/11 Commission.
You had all kinds of reactions among the families: some people would just
want to forget the whole thing and move on with their lives - people react
differently to tragedy. Others, as you know, were enormously sup****tive of
the Commission. Some began very sup****tive of the Commission, and became
critical of what we did, and and they ended up not liking our
recommendations - I don't know that they criticized the re****t itself so
much. But everybody has a... When you say 'the families', it includes a
lot
of different attitudes and viewpoints.
Solomon: What keeps you up at night about 9/11 still?
Hamilton: Not very much, I've turned my attention now to homeland
security,
and a lot of things bother me there.
Solomon: Thanks a lot.
Hamilton: Yup.
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