NY OBSERVER: "FOUR 9/11 MOMS BATTLE BUSH", PART 3
nyobserver.com
"This is a stonewalling job of far greater importance than Watergate. This concerns the refusal of the country’s leadership to be held accountable for the failure to execute its most fundamental responsibility: to protect its citizens against foreign attack."
The Commission
The 9/11 Commission wouldn’t have happened without the four moms. At the end of its first open hearing, held last spring at the U.S. Customs House close to the construction pit of Ground Zero, former Democratic Congressman Tim Roemer said as much and praised them and other activist 9/11 families.
"At a time when many Americans don’t even take the opportunity to cast a ballot, you folks went out and made the legislative system work," he said.
Jamie Gorelick, former Deputy Attorney General of the United States, said at the same hearing, "I’m enormously impressed that laypeople with no powers of subpoena, with no access to insider information of any sort, could put together a very powerful set of questions and set of facts that are a road map for this commission. It is really quite striking. Now, what’s your secret?"
Mindy, who had given a blistering testimony at that day’s hearing, tossed her long corkscrew curls and replied in a voice more Tallulah than termagant, "Eighteen months of doing nothing but grieving and connecting the dots."
Eleanor Hill, the universally respected staff director of the JICI investigation, shares the moms’ point of view.
"One of our biggest concerns is our finding that there were people in this country assisting these hijackers," she said later in an interview with this writer. "Since the F.B.I. was in fact investigating all these people as part of their counterterroism effort, and they knew some of them had ties to Al Qaeda, then how good was their investigation if they didn’t come across the hijackers?"
President Bush, who was notified in the President’s daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, that "a group of [Osama] bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives," insisted after the Congressional report was made public: "My administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks."
Kristen, Mindy, Patty and Lorie are not impressed.
"We were told that, prior to 9/11, the F.B.I. was only responsible for going in after the fact to solve a crime and prepare a criminal case," Kristen said. "Here we are, 22 months after the fact, the F.B.I. has received some 500,000 leads, they have thousands of people in custody, they’re seeking the death penalty for one terrorist, [Zacarias] Moussaoui, but they still haven’t solved the crime and they don’t have any of the other people who supported the hijackers." Ms. Hill echoes their frustration. "Is this support network for Al Qaeda still in the United States? Are they still operating, planning the next attack?"
Civil Defense
The hopes of the four moms that the current 9/11 Commission could broaden the inquiry beyond the intelligence agencies are beginning to fade. As they see it, the administration is using a streamlined version of the tactics they successfully employed to stall and suppress much of the startling information in the JICI report. The gaping hole of 28 pages concerning the Saudi royal family’s financial support for the terrorists of 9/11 was only the tip of the 900-page iceberg.
"We can’t get any information about the Port Authority’s evacuation procedures or the response of the City of New York," complains Kristen. "We’re always told we can’t get answers or documents because the F.B.I. is holding them back as part of an ongoing investigation. But when Director Mueller invited us back for a follow-up meeting—on the very morning before that damning report was released—we were told the F.B.I. isn’t pursuing any investigations based on the information we are blocked from getting. The only thing they are looking at is the hijackers. And they’re all dead."
It’s more than a clever Catch-22. Members of the 9/11 Commission are being denied access even to some of the testimony given to the JICI—on which at least two of its members sat!
This is a stonewalling job of far greater importance than Watergate. This concerns the refusal of the country’s leadership to be held accountable for the failure to execute its most fundamental responsibility: to protect its citizens against foreign attack.
Critical information about two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lay dormant within the intelligence community for as long as 18 months, at the very time when plans for the Sept. 11 attacks were being hatched. The JICI confirmed that these same two hijackers had numerous contacts with a longtime F.B.I. counterterrorism informant in California. As the four moms pointed out a year ago, their names were in the San Diego phone book.
What’s more, the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office had in custody in August 2001 one Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national who had enrolled in flight training in Minnesota and who F.B.I. agents suspected was involved in a hijacking plot. But nobody at the F.B.I. apparently connected the Moussaoui investigation with intelligence information on the immediacy of the threat level in the spring and summer of 2001, or the illegal entry of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi into the United States.
How have these lapses been corrected 24 months later? The F.B.I. is seeking the death penalty for Mr. Moussaoui, and uses the need to protect their case against him as the rationale for refusing to share any of the information they have obtained from him. In fact, when Director Mueller tried to use the same excuse to duck out of testifying before the Joint Committee, the federal judge in the Moussaoui trial dismissed his argument, and he and his agents were compelled to testify.
"At some point, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis," says Kristen. "Which is more important—one fried terrorist, or the safety of the nation?" Patty was even more blunt in their second meeting with the F.B.I. brass. "I don’t give a rat’s ass about Moussaoui," she said. "Why don’t you throw him into Guantánamo and squeeze him for all he’s worth, and get on with finding his cohorts?"
The four moms are demanding that the independent commission hold a completely transparent investigation, with open hearings and cross-examination. What it looks like they’ll get is an incomplete and sanitized report, if it’s released in time for the commission’s deadline next May. Or perhaps another fight over declassification of the most potent revelations, which will serve to hold up the report until after the 2004 Presidential election. Some believe that this is the administration’s end game.
Kristen sees the handwriting on the wall: "If we have an executive branch that holds sole discretion over what information is released to the public and what is hidden, the public will never get the full story of why there was an utter failure to protect them that day, and who should be held accountable."
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