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Sept. 11 Spin ControlThe creation of the 9/11Commission Report.

By Juliet Lapidos
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2008, at 4:46 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Page 124: Alberto Gonzales did his best to stonewall the investigation. Shenon says "the script" for meetings between Gonzo, Kean, and Hamilton was always the same: He would greet the chairmen "cordially and invite them into his West Wing office. Coffee, tea, a glass of spring water? He was usually in shirtsleeves and invited his visitors to take a seat around his coffee table. Then he would spend thirty minutes saying no to all of Kean and Hamilton's requests."

Page 215: Gonzo tried to deny the commission access to the President's Daily Brief. At one point, he provided the commissioners with a "comically inadequate" overview to get them off his back. White House lawyers offered "a general description of what the documents were, how they were prepared, the choreography of the CIA's morning briefings in the Oval Office. The lawyers disclosed that about three hundred PDBs from the Clinton and Bush administrations contained the sort of information about al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that the commission was looking for. And that was where the briefing stopped. The White House lawyers were silent. They said they were barred from saying anything more. They refused to answer any other questions about what might actually be in the hundreds of PDBs."

What's Not in the Report?

Page 399: Mike Jacobson and Raj De, two commission staffers, uncovered "explosive material on the Saudis: the actions by Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi 'ghost employee' who played host to the two hijackers in San Diego, and Fahad al-Thumairy, the shadowy Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles. … [T]he unusual cash transfers from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington to the family of another mysterious Saudi who was tied to al-Bayoumi." The two staffers drafted a chapter with their findings, but their team leader, Dieter Snell, felt they hadn't backed up their allegations conclusively. He excised some of the most damning material and relegated the rest to the report's footnotes.

Page 373: The commission didn't have sufficient manpower to adequately review the NSA's voluminous archives. As a result, the 9/11 Commission Report may have some serious holes. Zelikow (who for all his shortcomings did feel some commitment to the historical record) said he "was worried that important classified information had never been reviewed at the NSA and elsewhere in the government before the 9/11 commission shut its doors, that critical evidence about bin Laden's terrorist network sat buried in government files, unread to this day."

Table Scraps

Shenon interviewed tons of insiders for his book, so he came away with a few great anecdotes.

Page 96: Mayor Michael Bloomberg was reluctant to comply with the commission. When Zelikow first arrived at City Hall, a Bloomberg senior aide barked, "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Page 243: Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno was very popular with her security detail. According to Thomas Pickard, the FBI agent who ran the bureau as acting director before 9/11, "the agents loved working with her. She was very good about making sure that they got something to eat." On one occasion, Pickard arrived at her apartment to find no agent on duty: "I draw my weapon, thinking that there's something wrong. … I knock on the door. I go inside. Reno is there. She's making chicken soup because the agent is not feeling well."

Page 245: Pickard wasn't too impressed with Reno's successor, John Ashcroft. He says the following story made the rounds at the FBI: "[A]n obviously pregnant Justice Department lawyer was forced to fly to Missouri, where Ashcroft had kept a home, during a storm to obtain his signature. … The lawyer knocked on his door and was amazed when Ashcroft did not invite her in. For the next thirty minutes, the big-bellied Justice Department lawyer remained on the porch, in the bitter cold and rain, while he read the wiretap application. He would not invite her in."

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Juliet Lapidos is a Slate assistant editor.
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