quote: ‘…While the photographs convey an atmosphere of crisis, their substance adds little to what is already known, from the 9/11 Commission report, Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side,” and Bob Woodward’s “Bush at War.” Like all three of these accounts, the photos put Cheney at the center of events. Perhaps this is the reason that the National Archives took more than thirteen years to post them to Flickr, whereas photos of Bush making calls from Air Force One were released almost immediately. The Cheney photos might never have come out at all, were it not for a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Colette Neirouz Hanna, a producer who has worked on more than ten documentaries about the Bush Administration for “Frontline.”
It is striking how much information about September 11th still remains secret. Most significant, perhaps, are the twenty-eight sealed pages of the 9/11 Commission report. One congressman told Lawrence Wright that they contain information “about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” More than thirteen years after the attacks, they remain classified. So are large chunks of the F.B.I.’s meticulous reconstruction of the hijackers’ pasts, a table with more than three thousand items running from the September 1, 1968, birth of Mohammed Atta, in Egypt, to the September 12, 2001, discovery of Nawaf al-Hamzi’s car, at Dulles Airport. It is impossible to know what events were redacted from the chronology, but surely they would yield insights into how and why the attacks occurred, and how our systems of defense failed to intervene beforehand.
At the beginning of his Presidency, George W. Bush signed an executive order claiming that the White House has the authority to hold back the records of former Presidents indefinitely. This move was challenged in federal court and later reversed by President Obama. But the decision to withhold the Cheney photographs for thirteen years is evidence that little has changed.
via How Dick Cheney Looked on 9/11 – The New Yorker….’
