9/11 Commission Intimidated Witnesses with Government Minders

Somewhat lost within the flu pandemic media hype this week is an important new revelation concerning the cover up of the events of 9/11.

A recently uncovered 9/11 Commission memo dating from October 2003, half way through the panel’s investigation, addresses concerns that government “minders” were intimidating witnesses and shaping their testimonies.

The document was drafted by Kevin Scheid, a senior staffer who led the commission’s Team 2, which was responsible for reviewing the overarching structure of the US intelligence community.

Names also appearing on the memo are those of staffers Lorry Fenner, an air force intelligence officer, and lawyer Gordon Lederman.

The memo, entitled “Executive Branch Minders’ Intimidation of Witnesses,” states the following:

Minders “answer[ed] questions directed at witnesses;”

Minders acted as “monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staffs lines of inquiry and witnesses’ verbatim responses.” The staff thought this “conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution;”

Minders’ notetaking “facilitates agencies in alerting future witnesses to the Commission’s lines of inquiry and permits agencies to prepare future witnesses either explicitly or implicitly.”
Minders “positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions.”

The staffers make it clear that intimidation by minders was widespread and had not only occurred with their team’s witnesses.

The memo was discovered by an independent researcher in the National Archives, to which it was added earlier this year.
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The revelations come in the wake of an admission by the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission - John Farmer - who said that the government agreed not to tell the truth about the events of 9/11.

Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission, set to be released in September, unveils how “the public had been seriously misled about what occurred during the morning of the attacks,” and Farmer himself states that “at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”

Farmer’s statements dovetail with those highlighted in an August 2006 Washington Post report, which stated that “Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.”

The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

These statements and testimonies, combined with the swathes of still unanswered questions surrounding the attacks, confirm that the 9/11 Commission was a complete whitewash and intensify the need to establish a new independent investigation.