The Chilcot Inquiry: Britain’s 9/11 Commission
Maidhc Ó Cathail – Dissident Voice January 5, 2010All too often, official inquiries are conducted by the very people who should
themselves be under investigation.
In this respect, Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war bears a distressing
similarity to the 9/11 Commission.
In a remarkable symmetry, both inquiries involve a Jewish Zionist historian, who
not only advised his country’s leader to go to war against Iraq, but actually
provided the ideological justification for that unnecessary war.
Perhaps Philip Zelikow was one of
the few people who was not surprised by his appointment as executive director of
the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better
known as the 9/11 Commission. After all, the Professor of History at the
University of Virginia had shown uncanny prescience in foreseeing an event such
as 9/11 itself. In 1998, as project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism
Group, Zelikow had written:
“An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of
people … would be a watershed event in America’s history.… Like Pearl Harbor,
such an event would divide our past and future into a ‘before’ and ‘after.’”
Yet despite his awareness of an imminent threat of “catastrophic terrorism”
against the United States, in the Bush administration Zelikow was instrumental
in downgrading the status of the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism,
Richard Clarke.1 Effectively cutting off his direct access to the President,
this prevented Clarke from discussing al-Qaeda with George W. Bush before
September 11.
In an even clearer conflict of interest, as a member of Bush’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board, Zelikow had authored the 2002 National Security
Strategy of the United States. Dubbed the “Bush Doctrine” by the Washington
Post’s hawkishly pro-Israeli columnist Charles Krauthammer,2 it advocated the
necessity of “preemptive war.” Based on a policy first mooted in 1992 by two
other Jewish neoconservatives, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby,3 the Zelikow
Doctrine provided the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
While Bush probably believed he was “ridding the world of evil,” Zelikow knew
exactly why Iraq was being targeted. In a rare moment of candour, he told an
audience at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002:
“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you
what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990—it’s the
threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name,
because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you
frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it
rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”
Nevertheless, as executive director of the 9/11 Commission Zelikow did his very
best to “sell” the Iraq war to the American people. The first expert witness he
called had “no special expertise on the events of September 11,” but that didn’t
seem to matter too much. Instead of discussing 9/11, Abraham Sofaer, a board
member of the pro-Israeli Koret Foundation, made an impassioned speech in
support of the “preemptive war” against Iraq.4
An even more controversial “expert” witness called was Laurie Mylroie. Known as
the “neocons’ favourite conspiracy theorist,” the American Enterprise Institute
scholar had made a career out of seeing the hand of Saddam Hussein behind every
anti-American terrorist attack during the previous decade. Her 2000 book, Study
of Revenge, in which she laid out her flimsy case against Saddam, acknowledged
the assistance of Wolfowitz and Libby, and was blurbed by Richard Perle as
“splendid and wholly convincing.”
Exercising a scepticism toward Mylroie’s “batty” theories lacking in much of the
media coverage, one of the 9/11 widows lambasted Zelikow for this transparent
“sales pitch for the Iraq war.”
Zelikow’s persistent efforts to rewrite the Commission staff’s reports to give
the impression of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq “horrified” some of his
staff, many of whom considered him a “White House mole.”5 Little did they
suspect, however, that Zelikow’s loyalties might lie much further afield.
If British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown were genuinely interested in finding out why his predecessor
followed George Bush into the Iraq quagmire, his appointment of Sir Lawrence
Freedman to the five-member Chilcot Inquiry was an odd choice. As the political
editor of the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Michael Crick, pointed out, “Critics of
the war might argue Sir Lawrence was himself one of the causes of the war!”
Crick was referring to a Freedman memo which formed the basis of Tony Blair’s
1999 Chicago speech, “The Doctrine of the International Community.” In what
became known as the “Blair Doctrine,” Freedman had offered an answer to the
specious question: “When was military action justified for liberal, humanitarian
reasons?”
In addition to the Freedman Doctrine’s justification of military intervention in
“rogue states” such as Iraq, Freedman has admitted that he “instigated” a
pre-war seminar for the British Prime Minister, because he was “aware of
misgivings among some specialists in Iraq about the direction of policy.”
Clearly, Freedman has no such “misgivings” himself about the illegal invasion of
Iraq. It was, he claims, motivated by “rather noble criteria.”6
In his recent book, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East,
Freedman is dismissive of those who suspect less “noble” motives for the war.
“Another popular theory,” he writes, “is that U.S. foreign policy was
effectively hijacked by a group of neoconservatives with a grand design to
reshape the Middle East. A conspiratorial version of this theory argues that the
aim was to help Israel, by removing a leading rejectionist state from the
scene.”
Presumably, the consistency of the prescriptions that runs from Oded Yinon’s “A
Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” through Perle, Feith and Wurmser’s “A Clean
Break,” to the so-called “Bush Doctrine” is merely coincidental. Evidently, the
learned Professor of War Studies needs to read “The Israeli Origins of the
Middle East War Agenda” in Stephen Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal.
Perhaps it is also “conspiratorial,” or worse, to wonder about the media’s
hyping a book which obscures why America “confronts” Israel’s enemies in the
Middle East, while one which exposes the Zionist agenda gets the silent
treatment.7 But it certainly is cause for concern when Freedman’s book, which
also opts for the euphemism of a “security fence” to describe Israel’s Apartheid
Wall, and repeatedly refers to the illegally occupied West Bank as Judea and
Samaria,8 is given such credence.
Just as the Zelikow-directed 9/11 Commission suppressed evidence that the main
motive for the September 11 attacks was American support for Israel,9 Freedman’s
presence on the Chilcot Inquiry is a clear indication that there will be no
inquiry into the role of Zionist insiders in taking Britain to war against
Iraq—a country that posed a threat not to British interests but to Israel’s
regional hegemony.
1. Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11
Investigation, p. 63.
2. Charles Krauthammer, “Charlie
Gibson’s Gaffe,” Washington Post, September 13, 2008.
3. “1992
Draft Defense Planning Guidance,” RightWeb, March 12, 2008.
4. Shenon, p. 104.
5. Shenon, p. 322, 107.
6. Richard Ingrams, “The
insistent doubts about Chilcot’s tame professor,” The Independent, December
5, 2009.
7. Paul Gottfried, “The
Transparent Cabal,” Taki’s Magazine, September 17, 2008.
8. Jason Burke, “From
Washington to Kabul the hard way,” Guardian, September 21, 2008.
9. “What
motivated the 9/11 Hijackers? See testimony most didn’t<>,” Representative
Press, You Tube video.
Source: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/the-chilcot-inquiry-britain%E2%80%99s-911-commission/