Rice testifies before 9/11 commission: more cover-up and lies

[RBHam]

Rice testifies before 9/11 commission:
more cover-up and lies
By Barry Grey
9 April 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/rice-a09.shtml

Thursday’s hearing of the national commission to investigate 9/11, which took testimony from Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was a bipartisan exercise in cover-up and duplicity. It was all the more grotesque, occurring as it did against the backdrop of US war crimes in Fallujah and other Iraqi cities that have already taken thousands of civilian lives, and led to more deaths and injuries of American soldiers who have been fed a non-stop diet of lies by those in Washington who authored the colonial enterprise.

That Rice could claim, “Today, along with many allies, we are helping the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to build free societies...to spread the blessings of liberty and democracy as alternatives to instability and terror,” without being challenged by a single member of the commission—Democratic or Republican—points to the real purpose of the commission. Its primary political task is to conceal from the American people the connection between the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and US imperialist policy in general, and the conspiracy hatched by the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq and seize its oil resources, in particular.

With the US government engaged in murderous actions that are inflaming public opinion throughout the Muslim and Arab world, Rice’s contention that the “war on terror” is staunching the growth of Islamist terrorism and enhancing the safety and security of ordinary Americans would be laughable, were not its implications so catastrophic.

The real question before the commission is not some “intelligence failure” prior to 9/11, but to what extent the Bush administration and top-level figures in the intelligence and military establishment pursued a deliberate policy of allowing a hijacking to occur, in order to create the pretext for implementing a pre-existing agenda of using military force to establish US imperialist hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Caspian regions.

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[RBHam]

1. The Commission's JOB is to cover up the truth

excerpt:
But the connection between the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s agenda for an American takeover of Iraq was pushed into the background by the commission members in Thursday’s hearing. That this was the result of a calculated political decision on the part of the five Republicans and five Democrats on the panel was underscored by the publication of an op-ed piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal by Democratic commission member Bob Kerrey. The former US senator and current president of the New School University in New York used the piece to reiterate his full support for the Iraq war, writing, “I believe this commission must try to provide a foundation for bipartisan agreement on what should be done in Iraq and the broader war against radical Islamists who use terror as a tactic to try to destroy our will.”

The commission, consisting of trusted defenders of American imperialism, is well aware of the massive and growing popular opposition to the Iraq war, as well as wide-spread disbelief in the official line that 9/11 was simply the result of a “failure of intelligence” and could not have been prevented. It is also acutely conscious of the existence of bitter divisions and conflicts within the ruling elite, not over the strategic goal of establishing US global hegemony, but over the means and methods employed by the Bush administration.