Bob Kerrey named for 9/11 Commission

posted by ewing2001 on Tuesday December 09, @05:01AM

Update: Kerrey was part of neocon group that pushed for war with Iraq

Tom Daschle ignored unofficial nomination of Kristen Breitwieser

Update: Breitwieser about Kerrey Nomination (12/09)
Update: Family Steering Committee Statement

Ex-Sen. Kerrey Joins Sept. 11 Commission (12/09)

Newsday -December 9

WASHINGTON -- Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who served as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was named Tuesday to fill a vacancy on the independent commission studying the Sept. 11 attacks.

Kerrey replaces former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who left to become a director of the Export-Import Bank. The appointment was made by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

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Breitwieser about Kerrey Nomination

AP -December 9

"He has a lot of work to catch up on, and we hope he's committed to finding the truth," said Kristen Breitweiser of New Jersey, a leader of the grass-roots movement that successfully lobbied for an independent commission. Her husband Ronald was among 2,750 people killed at the World Trade Center.

Family Steering Committee Statement on the Appointment of Senator Bob Kerrey

December 9, 2003      

Based on a favorable outcome after the standard vetting for any potential conflicts of interest, the FSC welcomes Senator Bob Kerrey to the 9/11 Independent Commission. A conflict of interest would be defined as any pecuniary self-interest, monetary interest, or bias that would cloud a Commissioner's ability to thoroughly investigate any and/or all aspects of 9/11.  

We continue to expect the Commission, staff and now Senator Kerrey to aggressively seek the truth about 9/11. We maintain that the Commission and staff must follow the facts wherever they may lead with complete transparency in order to answer the many unresolved questions about 9/11.

We are hopeful that this appointment to the Commission will serve to re-invigorate and re-focus the Commission to their task of investigating how intelligence and defense failures led to the murder of 3000 victims on the morning of 9/11.

Since the Commission's deadline is rapidly approaching, we hope that Senator Kerrey will be expeditiously brought up to speed with the work of the Commission thus far. Time is of the essence as the nation waits to find out how and why the inconceivable was allowed to happen on the morning of 9/11.

Kerrey's Neocon Ties: Pro Iraq War

FPIF Policy Report (*thx for the Submission to Allan Duncan)
November 2002 "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" Sets Up Shop (Source)

By Jim Lobe

Jim Lobe is a contributor and member of the Advisory Committee of Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.

A small group of well-placed right-wing activists with close ties to hawks in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as next Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, is busy readying a new campaign to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq.

The "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" is setting up offices on Capitol Hill this week, according to its president, Randy Scheunemann, Lott's former chief national-security adviser who last year worked in Rumsfeld's office as a consultant on Iraq policy. The chairman of the new Committee, Bruce P. Jackson, is a former vice president of Lockheed Martin who chaired the Republican Party Platform's subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy when Bush ran for president in 2000.

Jackson, who also served as chairman of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, which spearheaded a "citizen's" campaign to persuade Congress to ratify NATO's eastward expansion in 1998, resigned from Lockheed earlier this year to, in his words, "pursue democracy building projects full-time."

He, Scheunemann, and a prominent Republican fund-raiser who worked with Jackson on the NATO Committee, Julie Finley, founded the Project on Transitional Democracies, for which he is now president. He also leads the U.S. Committee on NATO, a successor to the expansion effort, in which both Scheunemann and Finley are officers.

The new Committee on Iraq appears to be a spin-off from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a front group consisting mainly of neoconservative Jews and heavy-hitters from the Christian Right whose public recommendations on fighting President George W. Bush's "war against terrorism" and alignment with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the second intifada have anticipated to a remarkable degree the administration's policy course.

Both Scheunemann and Jackson have signed a number of PNAC's open letters to Bush, including one sent just eight days after the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, calling for Washington to carry the anti-terrorist campaign beyond al Qaeda to Syria, Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Palestine Authority and, of course, Iraq.

Other signers included Richard Perle, chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB), Frank Gaffney, a Perle protege who now heads the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and several of Perle's colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), including former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Marc Reuel Gerecht.

Gary Schmitt, PNAC's executive director, has agreed to join Jackson, Finley, and Scheunemann, as an officer in the new Iraq group. Scheunemann told FPIF that they are still recruiting members for the Committee's board of directors. So far, however, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, and ret. General Wayne Downing, a former lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress (INC) who worked as Bush's top counter-terrorism official on his National Security Council staff until he unexpectedly resigned last summer, have all signed on. Like Downing, Scheunemann has long-standing links to the INC, a very loose coalition of Iraqi dissidents and opposition groups headed by the controversial Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi and the INC have long been championed by the neoconservatives around Rumsfeld and Cheney but disdained as ineffectual and possibly corrupt by regional specialists at the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the uniformed brass, including ret. General Anthony Zinni, who served as commander of the Pentagon's Central Command in the late 1990s.

In 1998, Scheunemann, who was then working for Lott, drafted the "Iraq Liberation Act" that authorized 98 million dollars for the INC, only a fraction of which was spent by the Clinton administration, largely due to opposition from State, the CIA, and Zinni. The Pentagon recently took control of the bulk of the unspent funds to begin training various INC factions.

The mission statement of the new Committee, whose website is at www.liberationiraq.org, describes its purpose as "promot[ing] regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."

It says the current government in Baghdad "poses a clear and present danger to its neighbors, to the United States, and to free peoples throughout the world."

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