The Spanish Connection to 9/11 (or, What the Commission Didn’t Care to Find)

I contended back when it was holding hearings that the 9/11 Commission was pretty much a bureaucratic farce whose job seemed not to be to get at the truth but to do a healthy bit of wallpapering and to lull us all back into a sound September 10th sleep.

The more time goes on, the more I’m convinced I was correct. Of interest today is an OpinionJournal column on a Spanish judge who has not given up a relentless pursuit of the whole story of 9/11. Here is the column’s summation:

Baltazar Garzon, known for his prosecutorial zeal, is a controversial figure in Spain, having investigated everything from Basque terrorism to the Madrid bombing investigation whose alleged perpetrators are currently on trial in Madrid. But even many who don’t agree with his methods–or his politics–agree he is on solid ground in his relentless pursuit of the connections between the Spanish cell and al Qaeda.

Yet if Mr. Garzon is correct about the Spanish connection to 9/11, it is not only the effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation of its al Qaeda prisoners that is called into question. The information from Binalshibh, KSM and other detainees was used to fill in the missing pieces of the jigsaw, and those gaps concerned the contacts the 9/11 conspirators might have had with others wishing to harm America. By saying that no one else was involved–not in Spain, Iran, Hezbollah, Malaysia, Iraq, the Czech Republic or Pakistan–these detainees allowed the 9/11 Commission to complete its picture of al Qaeda as a solitary entity.

Yet to come to its conclusion on this most fundamental issue, the commission was prohibited from seeing any of the detainees whose accounts it relied on. Nor was it allowed even to question the CIA interrogators to determine the way that information was obtained. The commission’s joint chairmen themselves later acknowledged that they “had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information.” So when Judge Garzon comes up with evidence that runs counter to detainees’ claims, cracks begin to emerge in the entire picture.

What Garzon has are videos, intercepted communications, actual sightings, good strong deductions, and an unwillingness to prejudge the evidence. That’s a lot more than the 9/11 Commission ever brought to the table.