…in fact, I’ve written innumerable columns and scores of thousands of words against it, some of them in this space. The commission was intellectually corrupt and corrupted. But Andy, consider this: The commission hears, in July 2004, from a guy who says that four years earlier he saw, on a chart with 60 other people on it, the face and name of Mohammed Atta. He has no proof of this, and the commission itself examined documents at the Pentagon months earlier from the same operation and found nothing there. With nothing else to go on, this isn’t even worthy of a footnote. It’s just blather and palaver, and let’s be honest here — would you have remembered a specific name like “Mohammed Atta” from a list of 60 names in 2000? We didn’t know it was 60 names when this first came out. Weldon and the Naval officer guy made it sound like there were only five names.
Now, as my earlier item on Time magazine noted, Weldon is backing off his contention in his book that he had given the Bush NSC a chart with Atta’s name on it just after the attacks in 2001.
None of this passes the smell test. And an apology is due the 9/11 Commission staff at the very least, I think, because some of us were in effect contending that they were sloppy or dishonest or covering something up. Sounds like they were being professional to me.