NY OBSERVER: "FOUR 9/11 MOMS BATTLE BUSH", PART 1
To All,
This is a "must read" article, IMO.... -Ray
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"So afraid is the Bush administration of what could be revealed by inquiries into its failures to protect Americans from terrorist attack, it is unabashedly using Kremlin tactics to muzzle members of Congress and thwart the current federal commission investigating the failures of Sept. 11."
nyobserver.com
by Gail Sheehy
In mid-June, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III and several
senior agents in the bureau received a group of about 20 visitors in a briefing room of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The director himself narrated a PowerPoint presentation that summarized the numbers of agents and leads and evidence he and his people had collected in the 18-month course of their ongoing investigation of Penttbom, the clever neologism the bureau had invented to reduce the sites of devastation on 9/11 to one word: Pent for Pentagon, Pen for Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the four planes that the government had been forewarned could be used as weapons—even bombs—but chose to ignore.
After the formal meeting, senior agents in the room faced grilling by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow whose cohorts are three other widowed moms from New Jersey.
"I don’t understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight school training, why didn’t you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"
"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn’t have investigated them all and found these few guys."
"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"
"We got lucky," was the reply.
Kristen then asked the agent how the F.B.I. had known exactly which A.T.M. in Portland, Me., would yield a videotape of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the attacks. The agent got some facts confused, then changed his story. When Kristen wouldn’t be pacified by evasive answers, the senior agent parried, "What are you getting at?"
"I think you had open investigations before Sept. 11 on some of the people responsible for the terrorist attacks," she said.
"We did not," the agent said unequivocally.
A month later, on the morning of July 24, before the scathing Congressional report on intelligence failures was released, Kristen and the three other moms from New Jersey with whom she’d been in league sat impassively at a briefing by staff director Eleanor Hill: In fact, they learned, the F.B.I. had open investigations on 14 individuals who had contact with the hijackers while they were in the United States.
The flush of pride in their own research passed quickly. This was just another confirmation that the federal government continued to obscure the facts about its handling of suspected terrorists leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
So afraid is the Bush administration of what could be revealed by inquiries into its failures to protect Americans from terrorist attack, it is unabashedly using Kremlin tactics to muzzle members of Congress and thwart the current federal commission investigating the failures of Sept. 11. But there is at least one force that the administration cannot scare off or shut up. They call themselves "Just Four Moms from New Jersey," or simply "the girls."
Kristen and the three other housewives who also lost their husbands in the attack on the World Trade Center started out knowing virtually nothing about how their government worked. For the last 20 months they have clipped and Googled, rallied and lobbied, charmed and intimidated top officials all the way to the White House. In the process, they have made themselves arguably the most effective force in dancing around the obstacle course by which the administration continues to block a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the country’s defenses on Sept. 11 and what we should be doing about it. They have no political clout, no money, no powerful husbands—no husbands at all since Sept. 11—and they are up against a White House, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, a National Security Advisor and an F.B.I. director who have worked out an ingenious bait-and-switch game to thwart their efforts and those of any investigative body.
The Mom Cell
The four moms—Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken—use tactics more like those of a leaderless cell. They have learned how to deposit their assorted seven children with select grandmothers before dawn and rocket down the Garden State Parkway to Washington. They have become experts at changing out of pedal-pushers and into proper pantsuits while their S.U.V. is stopped in traffic, so they can hit the Capitol rotunda running. They have talked strategy with Senator John McCain and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. They once caught Congressman Porter Goss hiding behind his office door to avoid them. And they maintain an open line of communication with the White House.
But after the razzle-dazzle of their every trip to D.C., the four moms dissolve on the hot seats of Kristen’s S.U.V., balance take-out food containers on their laps and grow quiet. Each then retreats into a private chamber of longing for the men whose lifeless images they wear on tags around their necks. After their first big rally, Patty’s soft voice floated a wish that might have been in the minds of all four moms:
"O.K., we did the rally, now can our husbands come home?
Last September, Kristen was singled out by the families of 9/11 to testify in the first televised public hearing before the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) in Washington. She drew high praise from the leadership, made up of members from both the House and Senate. But the JICI, as the moms called it, was mandated to go out of business at the end of 2003, and their questions for the intelligence
agencies were consistently blocked: The Justice Department has forbidden intelligence officials to be interviewed without "minders" among their bosses being present, a tactic clearly meant to intimidate witnesses. When the White House and the intelligence agencies held up the Congressional report month after month by demanding that much of it remain classified, the moms’ rallying cry became "Free the JICI!"
They believed the only hope for getting at the truth would be with an independent federal commission with a mandate to build on the findings of the Congressional inquiry and broaden it to include testimony from all the other relevant agencies. Their fight finally overcame the directive by Vice President Dick Cheney to Congressman Goss to "keep negotiating" and, in January 2003, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—known as the 9/11 Commission—met for the first time. It is not only for their peace of mind that the four moms continue to fight to reveal the truth, but because they firmly believe that, nearly two years after the attacks, the country is no safer now than it was on Sept. 11.
"O.K., there’s the House and the Senate—which one has the most members?"
Lorie laughed at herself. It was April 2002, seven months after she had lost her husband, Kenneth. "I must have slept through that civics class." Her friend Mindy couldn’t help her; Mindy hadn’t read The New York Times since she stopped commuting to Manhattan, where she’d worked as a C.P.A. until her husband, Alan, took over the family support. Both women’s husbands had worked as securities traders for Cantor Fitzgerald until they were incinerated in the World Trade Center.
Mindy and Lorie had thought themselves exempt from politics, by virtue of the constant emergency of motherhood. Before Sept. 11, Mindy could have been described as a stand-in for Samantha on Sex and the City. But these days she felt more like one of the Golden Girls. Lorie, who was 46 and beautiful when her husband, Kenneth van Auken, was murdered, has acquired a fierceness in her demeanor. The two mothers were driving home to East Brunswick after attending a support group for widows of 9/11. They had been fired up by a veteran survivor of a previous terrorist attack against Americans, Bob Monetti, president of Families of Pan Am 103/Lockerbie. "You can’t sit back and let the government treat you like shit," he had challenged them. That very night they called up Patty Casazza, another Cantor Fitzgerald widow, in Colt’s Neck. "We have to have a rally in Washington."
Patty, a sensitive woman who was struggling to find the right balance of prescriptions to fight off anxiety attacks, groaned, "Oh God, this is huge, and it’s going to be painful." Patty said she would only go along if Kristen was up for it.
Kristen Breitweiser was only 30 years old when her husband, Ron, a vice president at Fiduciary Trust, called her one morning to say he was fine, not to worry. He had seen a huge fireball out his window, but it wasn’t his building. She tuned into the Today show just in time to see the South Tower explode right where she knew he was sitting—on the 94th floor. For months thereafter, finding it impossible to sleep, Kristen went back to the nightly ritual of her married life: She took out her husband’s toothbrush and slowly, lovingly squeezed the toothpaste onto it. Then she would sit down on the toilet and wait for him to come home.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST.... |
