Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report Defrauds the Nation
by Benjamin DeMott

This was the promise, after all: answers. Answers in return for serious attention. In the preface, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton claimed that the body of the text would “identify lessons learned, from the long stretch of study, interviews, debate, meditation. The implicit guarantee was that ahead lay a work of analysis addressed to an intelligent democratic citizenry—an inventory of possible causes of the tragedy followed by a reasoned-out, sober set of judgments about which of these causes were most plausible.

The promise was not kept. The plain, sad reality--I report this following four full days studying the work--is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can’t tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points.

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