The Commission on 9/11

The Commission on 9/11

P. Schultz

June 16, 2012

From the book The Commission by Philip Shenon:

“Tom Kean could not deny the thrill of this. He took a seat in the reading room in the New Executive Office Building in early December and was handed the sheaf of PDBs [Presidential Daily Briefings] from the Clinton and Bush administrations. Here in his hands were the documents that the White House had been so determined for so long to keep from him. Lee Hamilton liked to refer to the PDBs as the ‘holy of holies’ – the ultimate secret documents in the government – and Kean assumed that must be the case.

“’I thought this would be the definitive  secrets about Al-Qaeda, about terrorist networks and all the other things that the President should act on,’ he said. ‘I was going to find out the most important things that a president had learned.’ He assumed they would contain ‘incredibly secretive, precise, and accurate information about anything under the sun.’

“Each PDB was only several pages long, so Kean could read through months of them in a stretch of a few hours.

“And he found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified. Here were the digests of the most important secrets that were gathered by the CIA and the nation’s other spy agencies at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year.

“And there was almost nothing in them.

“’They were garbage,’ Kean said of the PDBs. ‘There was really nothing there – nothing, nothing.’ If students at Drew [University, where Kean was president] turned in term papers this badly researched, ‘I would have given them an F,’ he said.”  [page 220]

Kean pointed out to his “handlers” who were watching him read this material, that he knew all this stuff because he read newspapers like the New York Times  or the Washington Post. His “minder” replied: “Oh, but you’re missing the point. Now you know it’s true.” [p. 221]

I don’t believe any comment is necessary by me.