Fwd: 9/11 Commissioner: 'We had to go through Karl Rove'

9/11 Commissioner: 'We had to go through Karl Rove'
02/03/2008 @ 3:09 pm
Filed by Nick Langewis and David Edwards

Video on this Link:

http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=9122

Two recent segments delve into a new book that accuses the head of
the ostensibly independent 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, of being
beholden to the Bush Administration during his tenure.

The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, by
New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, indicts Zelikow on his ties
with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his frequent contact
with senior political adviser Karl Rove, during what was touted as an
independent investigation into the events surrounding the 2001 World
Trade Center attack. This seeming conflict of interest, the book
says, led Commission staffers not to trust Zelikow.

"We found him to be very fair-minded," counters co-chair Lee
Hamilton, "quite impartial, very rigorous in his searching out of the
facts; and he certainly did not try to protect the Bush
Administration, or to protect anybody else."

9/11 Commission member John Lehman goes on to tell MSNBC that it was
impossible not to go through Karl Rove when documents such as
presidential daily briefings were needed. Many Commission members, he
says, pressed the White House to provide more information and lift
restrictions on a regular basis.

"We had to go through Karl Rove, and through [Attorney General
Alberto] Gonzales and the other most senior members," says Lehman. He
indeed hoped that Zelikow was talking to Karl Rove, although he
expressed disappointment that contact with the White House wasn't
more frequent towards the beginning of the investigations.

On charges that a mass of NSA records on al-Qaeda went unreviewed by
the Commission, Lehman says that nothing new would have come about as
a result of obtaining that data besides more text to put into the
final Commission report.

The Commission is due to be published on February 5.

The following video is from NBC's Nightly News and MSNBC's News Live,
broadcast February 2 and 3, 2008.