Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show The 9/11 Files: The Cover-up Commission | Ep 2 About this episode The 9/11 Commission authorized by Congress was a total fraud from the beginning. Led by the same people who were responsible for preventing the attack, the Commission was deliberately “set up to fail.” 9/11 widow and lawyer Kristen Breitweiser forced the Bush administration’s hand, exposing how the Commission was designed to hide the truth.
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Transcript 4,116 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
0:30 Tucker Carlson? In January 2000, as the CIA was tracking two future hijackers as they journeyed to Los Angeles, George W. Bush was seven months into his presidential campaign.
0:41 Speaker 02 What we're gonna do is we're gonna do something no other presidential candidate has been able to do. The near impossible. Remember what it was? The near impossible turn like that? One of the most exhilarating moments of my political career, and yours too.
0:54 Tucker Carlson? His campaign was working to take down his opponent at the time, Arizona Senator John McCain, by spreading rumors he'd fathered a black bastard child with a prostitute.
1:03 Speaker 03 You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed.
1:05 Tucker Carlson? The following December, two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot, and Marwan Al Shaikh, were finishing their pilot training in Venice, Florida, on the West Coast. In Washington, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the 2000 election. John McCain wanted to get political revenge. When he got his chance 10 months later, it would have historic consequences. The official story of what happened on 9/11 comes from a single report, the 9/11 Final Report of the National Commission. In the two decades since it was released, it has become the basis for all media coverage of terror attacks that day. What the media never mention is that the commission itself was a farce. It was intentionally underfunded. It was poorly structured.
1:50 Tucker Carlson? It was, from top to bottom, corrupt. Two years after the report was released, the commission's own chairman admitted it was "set up to fail."
1:58 Speaker 02 Americans have many questions tonight.
2:01 Speaker 02 Americans are asking, who attacked our country?
2:05 Tucker Carlson? Beginning in the first hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration began leveraging the tragedy to launch their next project, a so-called global war on terror.
2:17 Speaker 02 The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda.
2:27 Tucker Carlson? In a normal country, its leaders would insist on an answer to the simple question, how did a terror network closely monitored by the United States intelligence agencies, including a unit dedicated to following them at CIA headquarters in Langley, how did a group like that manage to pull off the 9/11 attacks in broad daylight? That's the question. But this is not a normal country, and it was never answered. In fact, the Bush administration ferociously opposed any attempt to look carefully at what happened that day. And that presents a bigger question: Why? What did they have to hide?
3:03 Speaker 04 My name is Kristen Brightwiser. My husband Ron was killed on September 11th.
3:08 Tucker Carlson? Brightwiser is one of four 9/11 widows who became famous at the time as the "Jersey Girls." They were some of the only people in public life in the United States who wouldn't let it go. They didn't believe the official 9/11 story, and they often said so. They were all over the media for several years, determined to identify government officials who may have been complicit in the tragedy. In the end, they were ignored.
3:33 Speaker 04 We were looking at a Bush administration that really was not interested in looking backwards. There was a push to immediately go to war. There was an invasion into Afghanistan, and then there was the queue up for the war in Iraq.
3:47 Speaker 02 I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people...
3:55 Speaker 02 And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
4:03 Tucker Carlson? Rather than get to the bottom of what actually happened, the Bush administration immediately exploited the crisis to push for what it really wanted, which was an invasion of Iraq. In his book, Against All Enemies, George W. Bush's counterterrorism czar Richard Clark said that when he went back to the White House immediately after 9/11, he, quote, "expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks would be, what our vulnerabilities were." Instead, he realized with what he called "almost sharp physical pain" that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. And that's exactly what they did. On the afternoon of September 11th, Rumsfeld said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein
4:46 Tucker Carlson? at the same time, not only Bin Laden. The day after the attack, Bush asked Clark to see if Saddam did this, see if he's involved in any way. And while meeting with the president on September 15th at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.
5:07 Speaker 04 We learned quite quickly that we were not going to get the answers that we really wanted with regard to the murder, the homicide of our 3,000 loved ones. My husband Ron was 39 when he was killed. He was a really good man. He was smart and a good dad. And he had called me on the morning of September 11th. I was rushing out the door to take my daughter to speech therapy, and I had no idea what was going on. I didn't have the television on. And he was like, "Sweets, it's me, I'm okay." And I had, I had no idea. I'm like, "Okay, I'm glad you're okay." And he was like, "No, no." He's like, "Put the television on." And he's like, "It's not my building. I knew you would be worried. It's not my building." And I put the television on, and I was still on the phone with him. And I was like, "Oh, my God. Like, what, what is that?"
5:52 Speaker 04 And he was like, "You know, there's an explosion in the building next to me, but it's not my building. I'm safe, I'm fine." And I was like, "It's really bad. You know, it looks bad." And he was like, "That's why I called. Don't worry, it's not my building." And he's like, and then his voice cracked, and he was like, "Sweets." He's like, "People are falling out the windows." I'm like, "Just, you know, what are you, what are you, what are you going to do?" And he's like, "Well, I'm going to go down to the trading floor and see if I can find a television to see what's going on. We don't know anything." He's like, "But I didn't want you to worry. I love you." He's like, "I'll call you back." And...
6:24 Speaker 04 You know, that was the last I spoke to him. And like three minutes after we got off the phone, I still had the TV on and I saw his building explode right where he was. And I just, I wish I told him to run. I wish I told him to get out. I wish I told him, you know, it's not safe. Something's wrong. Get out. But I just, I didn't. I think, you know, feeling that way, feeling like, why didn't I know? Why didn't I have a woman's instinct to be like, get out? Made me want to fight for the commission and for everything else because I felt like the American public deserves to know.
7:04 Tucker Carlson? The Bush administration, which at the time was enjoying a historic 90% approval rating, was pushing a very clear storyline. They told the country that Osama bin Laden had simply caught American authorities off guard.
7:17 Speaker 05 There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
7:21 Tucker Carlson? That was a lie. And by May of 2002, more than two-thirds of Americans understood that it was a lie. They wanted an investigation into the so-called intelligence failures that led to the attack. The initial effort to investigate 9/11 was a joint congressional commission led by Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida, and Congressman Porter Gosse, a former CIA officer who would later become the agency's director, appointed by Bush.
7:47 Speaker 03 These public hearings are part of our search for truth.
7:51 Speaker 04 Cheney did not want anyone looking into his failures that day, the administration's failures. And more than anything, I think he and the political strategist Karl Rove were very focused on the president's reputation, on ensuring that he would get re-elected.
8:06 Tucker Carlson? The lengths that the Bush administration went to kill the investigation into 9/11 are shocking. In the winter of 2002, Dick Cheney called the then-Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and made a threat. The Veep told Daschle, "The leaders of the war on terror would be too busy to get bogged down in preparing for and testifying in front of the committees." The strong implication of this, "If you insist, we'll say you're interfering with the war effort."
8:34 Tucker Carlson? The committee moved forward anyway. On June 19, 2002, they discovered that the NSA had intercepted messages from Al Qaeda operatives from the day before the attacks, saying, quote, "The match begins tomorrow," and "Tomorrow is Zero Day." It couldn't have been clearer. Someone on the committee leaked those messages to the news media. CNN broadcast them. And in retaliation for this, for telling the truth, the Bush administration sicked the FBI, then run by Robert Mueller, on the committee.
9:05 Speaker 04 The FBI, you know, really came down hard on the joint inquiry. They polygraphed, they interviewed, they made all kinds of threats. And so, you know, when the FBI comes after you, it's kind of scary because you're looking at not only, you know, potentially losing your position in Congress, but also imprisonment.
9:28 Tucker Carlson? It was pure intimidation.
9:30 Speaker 04 And so, it had a very chilling effect, in my opinion, on the progress of the inquiry and their investigation.
9:38 Tucker Carlson? In the end, Congress did make some interesting discoveries, most of which were redacted in the final report. The Jersey Girls continued to push for the truth. They were furious. They demanded an independent commission. George W. Bush's political enemies agreed. John McCain's revenge was an independent commission that would explore the truth about what happened on 9/11.
9:58 Speaker 06 This legislation that calls for a blue-ribbon commission to examine the facts surrounding September 11th.
10:05 Tucker Carlson? On November 27, 2002, President Bush, fearing major political blowback if he vetoed the commission, signed the bill into law. But he managed to neuter the commission in the process. His allies in Congress gave the commission weak subpoena power and limited them to a strict 18-month timeline. They appropriated for the entire investigation just $3 million. By Washington standards, it was nothing. By comparison, Congress gave 13 times more funding to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It appropriated 11 times more funding for Robert Mueller's investigation into Russiagate. The administration and the Congress simply didn't want the public to know what happened on 9/11. But that wasn't the only thing they did to subvert the truth.
10:49 Speaker 04 The White House, one of the ways that they controlled the commission was they were going to choose the chairman.
10:54 Tucker Carlson? Their first choice was Henry Kissinger.
10:57 Speaker 02 Today, I'm pleased to announce my choice for commission chairman.
11:01 Speaker 02 Dr. Henry Kissinger.
11:02 Speaker 04 At the time, I was like 30 years old, so I had known Kissinger, but I didn't really, you know, as a stay-at-home suburban housewife, it's not like I, you know, had dived into all of Henry Kissinger's horrible acts and his status as a war criminal.
11:18 Speaker 02 Dr. Kissinger is one of our nation's most accomplished and respected public servants.
11:24 Tucker Carlson? Kissinger had served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon. He pushed a massive expansion of the Vietnam War, including secret bombings in Cambodia and Laos.
11:35 Speaker 07 There are questions about his role in Vietnam, his role in the coup in Chile.
11:40 Speaker 04 When we first met him, he gave us this long talk about how honored it was, and it was like the, you know, opportunity, not the opportunity, but like a responsibility of a lifetime.
11:48 Speaker 08 It is a great honor to be appointed by the President to be Chairman of the Non-Partisan Independent Commission.
12:00 Tucker Carlson? In 2002, he was running a lucrative consulting business called Kissinger Associates.
12:05 Speaker 04 I really spent a bit of time researching him, predominantly his clients, and we had grave concerns that he was chosen by the Vice President and the President and Karl Rove because he was really good at what he does. And so, we were also concerned about his clients and that he had a huge conflict of interest. And so, we were invited to meet with him at his offices on Park Avenue. We were put into his office, it was kind of close quarters, it was really, really hot. He had the heat turned up to like 100 degrees. And, you know, it was the winter, so we had like turtlenecks on and sweaters and stuff, so we're like sitting there like sweating, and he's just sitting there calmly.
12:47 Tucker Carlson? Cranking up the thermostat is a well-known manipulation strategy. If you make a room uncomfortably hot, the discomfort puts pressure on the other negotiating party to make concessions more quickly.
12:57 Speaker 04 So at one point after we got through the niceties, one of the widows had asked him whose clients were. Do you represent any Saudi royals? Do you represent anyone in the Bin Laden family? And, you know, at the time, it wasn't that much of an outrageous question because there were members of the Bin Laden family who had relationships with, you know, the Bush family and others. And so it wasn't like it was an outrageous question. And he immediately got flustered and, you know, went to pick up a cup of tea or coffee and spilled it on the table. He feigned that it was his fake eye, which didn't know that
13:40 Speaker 04 he had a fake eye. And we immediately went to like clean it up like moms, you know, like, oh, it's okay. And then he just never answered the question. And then the very next day, he resigned.
13:50 Speaker 00 Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down from the position Friday.
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15:22 Tucker Carlson? political bagman making this phone call? No one's ever explained.
15:27 Speaker 04 Tom is the nicest guy on the planet. He's very much a gentleman. He does not go for the jugular.
15:31 Tucker Carlson? After he accepted the job, Kane was dragged to the White House, where the president's top advisers told him, "We want you to stand up. You've got to stand up. You've got to have courage. We don't want a runaway commission." In other words, do what we say.
15:48 Speaker 04 The White House's fingerprints were certainly all over the commission.
15:51 Tucker Carlson? Chairman Kane ultimately admitted the commission was, quote, "set up to fail." And that's absolutely true. But in addition to a meaningless budget, the tight timeline, and weak subpoena power, there was another problem: the man Kane selected to run it. On January 27, 2003, the commission issued a press release announcing they'd selected an academic called Philip Zelico to be the commission's executive director.
16:16 Speaker 04 He was sold to us as a historian. I was responsible for the research for Zelico to make sure that he didn't have any conflicts of interest. He had a lot of conflicts of interest.
16:28 Tucker Carlson? The release described Zelico as, quote, "a man of high stature who had distinguished himself as an academician, a lawyer, author, and public servant." The release did not note that Zelico was an active Bush administration official. He served on a White House Intelligence Advisory Panel. It also failed to note his extensive ties to Condoleezza Rice. He'd served on her transition team. He'd co-authored a book with Rice in 1995. In 2002, at Rice's behest, Zelico authored a policy paper championing preemptive invasions. And this cemented his role as a key architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Zelico was the perfect person to keep the commission from finding the truth.
17:11 Speaker 04 I believe he was placed there to, again, play the gatekeeper, to ensure that the commission would not unearth the truth, and, more than anything, to protect the Bush administration and also lay the groundwork for the war in Iraq, in addition to other things.
17:28 Tucker Carlson? Zelico's first move was to pre-write the entire report before the facts were in. In March of 2003, before the investigation had even begun, Zelico had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings. He kept all of this a secret from the rest of the staff.
17:47 Speaker 04 As it turned out, his outline is nearly verbatim to what the final book looks like. And so what I believe is that he just basically had the outline, knew that it was a "safe outline", it was probably approved by the Bush administration.
18:01 Tucker Carlson? His second move was to consolidate his power. Zelico gave himself total control over the hiring process.
18:08 Speaker 04 He at first tried to block the staffers from communicating with the commissioners.
18:13 Tucker Carlson? In a now-public memo, Zelico cut off his staff's access to the commissioners. Quote, "If you are contacted by a commissioner with questions, please contact Deputy Director Chris Kojim or me." Zelico restricted access to documents. He divided the staff into separate teams. He siloed them from each other. And he closely supervised Team 3. That was the group that dealt with classified information from the White House and the CIA. One of Zelico's first moves was a secret agreement with the Justice Department to block access to the files of the congressional inquiry until the White House had had a chance to review them first.
18:47 Speaker 04 Zelico was sort of limiting access to documents. When people were requesting specific things, Zelico would block it.
18:55 Tucker Carlson? Notably, the final report contains a full 61 references to finding no evidence of certain claims about 9/11.
19:03 Speaker 04 The cute way of explaining why Zelico uses that phrase is that if you don't look for the evidence, you don't find the evidence. And so you're not lying when you say, "We found no evidence."
19:15 Tucker Carlson? At one point, a staffer overheard Zelico pressuring a CIA employee to accept Condoleezza Rice's recollection of intel briefings before the 9/11 attacks. Most damning of all? Phone logs, kept by Zelico's assistant, show that he was regularly taking calls from both Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove, George W. Bush's top political adviser in the White House. "We reached out to Karl Rove for an explanation of this, and he denied having been in regular contact with Zelico. But that is untrue." Even Zelico himself acknowledges he received multiple calls from Karl Rove, but he claims they did not discuss the commission. He doesn't say what they did discuss. None of it is plausible.
19:58 Speaker 04 It wasn't even like he was on the National Security Council. He didn't really have any information that would be helpful to the Commission. Why is the Commission's staff director having communications with the White House's political strategist?
20:11 Tucker Carlson? From the outset, the Commission started to advance the interests of Bush's neocon foreign policy agenda. When Team Three, the counterterrorism group, submitted their draft to Zelico, he inserted sentences that tried to link Al Qaeda to Iraq to suggest the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9/11, and that Bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq. In the end, those sentences were removed after staffers alerted the commissioners. But the commissioners did not prevent Zelico from stacking public hearings with discredited neocons who toed the White House line about Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda, none of which were real. The first outside expert to testify to the Commission was the Hoover Institute's Abraham Sofar.
20:54 Tucker Carlson? His written remarks to the Commission include eight references to Iraq and five references to Saddam Hussein. Keep in mind, this was a hearing on 9/11, which had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or Iraq. Sofar spent most of his time at the public hearing talking about the need for preemptive invasions.
21:12 Speaker 09 The need for preemptive actions stems ultimately from the conditions of modern life.
21:18 Tucker Carlson? At the third hearing, Zelico produced a florid and widely discredited neocon called Lori Milroy from the American Enterprise Institute. She appeared as a witness.
21:28 Speaker 10 There is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds are Iraqi intelligence agents.
21:34 Tucker Carlson? By April of 2004, former Senator Bob Carey of Nebraska, a Democrat, confronted Rice about Zelico's ties to the administration.
21:42 Speaker 11 Let me just ask you directly, and you can just give me, keep it relatively short, but I wanted to get it on the record. Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelico any questions about terrorism during transition, since he was the second person carded in the National Security Office and had considerable expertise?
21:59 Speaker 05 Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing. Philip was, in fact, as you know, had worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plan, so yes.
22:13 Speaker 11 Yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?
22:14 Speaker 05 We talked, Philip and I, over a period of, you know, we had worked closely together as academics.
22:19 Speaker 11 During the transition, did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?
22:23 Speaker 05 Oh, to do anything on terrorism? To help us think about the structure of the terrorism, Dick Clark's operations, yes.
22:33 Tucker Carlson? Incredibly, the man in charge of the official story of 9/11, Philip Zelikow, was the Bush administration adviser who decided to demote the White House's counterterrorism czar Dick Clark in the months before 9/11. Yet somehow, these details, central though they are, were left out of the commission's final report. The 9/11 commission report was a cover-up from beginning to end. That is true. And that's the most important starting point for those seeking to understand what actually happened on September 11th. The official story is a lie. What isn't clear is why our government, and subsequent governments, under subsequent presidents, would want to continue that lie and cover up what actually happened
23:18 Tucker Carlson? on 9/11. What exactly were they hiding? And more important, who were they protecting? We found out. That's in the next installment of our 9/11 series.
23:34 Tucker Carlson? Thank you for watching The 9/11 Files. The next episode drops next week, or you can unlock the entire five-part series right now, ad-free, by becoming a TCN member. Members also get access to the Watch Companion, a guide to the timeline, the key figures, the primary sources that we went to to bring you this documentary. You can read along as you watch. Join us today at TuckerCarlson.com for the whole series all at once as support our investigative work. We couldn't do any of this without our members. We're grateful for you. So, thanks.
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