Philip Zelikow

Who is he: Philip Zelikow was director of the 9/11 Commission assembled to determine an official report on the events leading to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York City. The 9/11 Commission Report has been the subject of abundant criticism with thousands of scientific experts in various disciplines claiming that the official conclusion of the Commission is highly flawed and scientifically impossible.

Zelikow was the most actively involved commissioner involving procurement of and control over information, and micro-managed much of the operation through his personal research team according to Commission staff members.

Central to the critical analysis of the final report is not only the physical impossibilities, but the selective omission of evidence that pointed to a different conclusion and the evidence of particular individuals involved. For example, Zelikow refused to allow consideration of any evidence provided by the US Army's project, "Able Danger," which warned of the supposed attackers a year before the event.

Countless questions surrounding the series of events have never been answered and have been largely uninvestigated by mainstream corporate media outlets, as well as the Commission. Zelikow almost single-handedly built the academic underpinning to justify the Iraq War, claiming that Saddam Hussein was an integral part of the World Trade Towers attack regardless of the intelligence. The result was an essential whitewash and structured perception of the actors and culprits.

Background: Zelikow began his career as a lawyer. He is a graduate of Houston Law Center and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Redlands. He also holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in international politics and diplomacy from Tufts University. Much of his professional career as an administration official has been as a personal assistant to former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The have also authored a book together, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft.

Zelikow's position in the Bush administration and his involvement in drafting the administration's foreign policy creates conflict of interest problems for serving on the 9/11 Commission, let alone as the leader of the informational conduit. Every other member of the commission also had potential conflicts of interest involving possible actors who benefited from ignored evidence.

Zelikow began his career at the State Department as a Foreign Services Officer under US Secretary of State George Schultz. He has always been a national security specialist. In the George H.W. Bush administration Zelikow was appointed to the National Security Council. Upon leaving the National Security Council in 1991 after Desert Storm, Zelikow returned to teaching at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He taught until 1998 when he moved to the University of Virginia as director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs as the White Burkett Miller Professor of History, which was responsible for releasing the previously secret tapes of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations.

In 2000 Zelikow joined the George W. Bush campaign and began formulating a national foreign policy for the administration during the election. He was placed on the President's Intelligence Foreign Advisory Board after the election. In addition, he served on several task forces and commissions, one as director of the National Commission on Election Reform, which updated the US election laws.

Zelikow was an integral part of the Bush administration policy of preemptive justified war, as he was given the task of rewriting the national security policy by former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice shortly after the 9/11 attack. Secretary of State Colin Powell had issued his own policy but it was rejected by Rice as being too weak.