Commission Vice Chair Lee Hamilton
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The 9-11 Commission was chartered to "prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,"
The final public hearing of the 9-11 Commission was held on June 16th and 17th, 2004, in Washington, DC. The Vice Chair of the 9-11 Commission was Lee Hamilton. Lee H. Hamilton is president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of The Center on Congress at Indiana University. Mr. Hamilton represented Indiana’s 9th congressional district for 34 years beginning January 1965. He served as chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. As a member of the House Standards of Official Conduct Committee Hamilton was a primary draftsman of several House ethics reforms, and on that June day in 2004 he asked this question of one of his witnesses:
"I'm interested in the question of motivation of these hijackers, and my question si really directed to the agents. What have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?"
His witness at the time was Special Agent James Fitzgerald of the FBI, and to this question he made this comment:
"They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the U.S.
Why They Hate Us
On September 20, 2001, George Bush famously explained to a joint session of Congress and the American people that the Islamic extremists responsible for 9/11 "hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
According to George W. Bush, they hate us because they hate our freedoms. Is this really true?
Despite the ready availability of contrary evidence, many Americans remain blind to the truth about our nation, that is why so many others outside our borders hate us. They choose to believe the fairy tale version of “truth, justice and the American Way”. The sad reality is that America is hated by people in the muslim world because of our policies regarding mid east politics.
Lee Hamilton Wrote A Book
"Foreign policy gets very complicated. When you take certain actions to support a friend, the security of Israel, as we did, it has consequences. No question about it."
Could this be part of the problem?
Polling of the Islamic world can be instructive for American policymakers. There are some positive building blocks in the data. Most Arabs, research shows, are positive about Americans and American culture and values, and share the same primary concerns of people in the United States such as education, healthcare, employment and personal security; this provides areas of common concern. Some research shows however, that negative attitudes towards America are hardening in many instances, due in no small part to events like those at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and America’s perceived “unbalanced” involvement in the internal politics of many Middle East countries.
On one of CNN's cable TV show "Late Edition", host Wolf Blitzer came at commission vice chair Lee Hamilton with an unusually blunt question, prompting Hamilton to reveal much of the truth. Expressing puzzlement as to why the commission had ventured no recommendation regarding Iraq, Blitzer suggested one: "Don't go to war with countries that had nothing to do with 9/11."
If one reads page 147 of the 9-11 commission report carefully, they would find within it a key sentence shedding light on the motive of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), whom the report calls the "mastermind of the 9/11 attacks:"
"KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."
A footnote points out that his statements regarding the "why" of attacking the United States echo those of his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, when he was sentenced in New York to a prison term of 240 years in January 1998. Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, accused the United States of supporting Israeli terrorism against Palestinians, adding that he was proud to fight any country that supports Israel.
Michael Scheuer, the CIA analyst author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, emphasizes that Bin Laden's "genius" is his ability to exploit U.S. policies - first and foremost, our one-sided support for Israel--that are most offensive to Muslims, and notes that it is particularly difficult to have a serious debate regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.
Blackout: Never Heard On TV Network News
If our support for Israel is one of the reasons why we are hated in the Arab world, why are we not allowed to know that? You never read about it in the papers, and you never hear about it on the television news, why?
Policy Matters
Even the 9/11 Commission, in its otherwise thoughtful treatment of issues related to the 9-11 tragedy, skirted this important issue by noting:
“America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in
Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.”
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This article
was written by J. Mark Soveign who writes for |
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