(Updated: Originally posted December 6, 2006)
Just some things you should know about the former Democratic Representative from Indiana, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, and co-chair of the just released Baker-Hamilton report.
"Lee H. Hamilton, a Compromiser Who Operates Above the Partisan Fray" by PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — The choice before the Sept. 11 commission in late 2003 was whether to subpoena the Pentagon to turn over classified documents, and four of the panel’s five Democrats were eager to do so.
The dissenter was the commission’s vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a retired Democratic House member from Indiana, who had come to be trusted by the Bush administration as an honest broker. He told the other Democrats that he wanted to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, an old friend from Congress, time to cooperate.
Trusted by the Bush administration? Rumsfeld an old friend?
Wanted to give them "time to cooperate?" WTF?
Mr. Hamilton has said little in public about the deliberations of the [Baker-Hamilton Commission] but said recently that the successes of the Sept. 11 commission resulted from an effort to “respect one another as individuals — I didn’t see my Republican friends with a big R on their head.” He added: “We talked, and we talked, and we talked. And if you know a way to build a consensus without talking to one another, let me know.”
Success of consensus, or SUCCESSFUL COVER-UP?!
Mr. Hamilton is demonstrating... that he is not in lock-step with Democratic leaders... Similar complaints from Democrats about Mr. Hamilton’s dealings with the White House were heard in the mid-1980s, when he led the House intelligence committee and appeared reluctant to follow up on news reports that the Reagan administration had sold weapons to Iran and diverted the proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels, called the contras.
The reports proved to be true, and Mr. Hamilton acknowledged later that he had been duped by senior Reagan administration officials. “I basically believed them,” he said after the Iran-contra affair was exposed. “My attitude was, ‘I don’t have any hard evidence not to believe.’ ” He later led the House investigation of the scandal.
So they've fooled him once, twice, and now a third time?!
Mr. Hamilton said in a speech last spring that in his decades in Congress, he was often asked, “Why don’t you focus on problems here at home?”
The answer, he said, was simple. Americans lived in a world, he said, in which a foreign-born terrorist “can endanger more Americans than a drug dealer in Brooklyn, where a terrorist strike can take the lives of 3,000 Americans in a few horrifying minutes.” More and more, he said, the United States needed to “see our problems in the context of the world we live in."
Yeah, or helping to CREATE that context with guys like Philip Zelikow, right?
There's your DemocraPic watchdog, folks!!
What a pit-bull, huh?
