Once Lorie began surfing the Web, she couldn’t stop. She found a video of
President Bush’s reaction on the morning of Sept. 11. According to the official
timeline provided by his press secretary, the President arrived at an elementary
school in Sarasota, Fla., at 9 a.m. and was told in the hallway of the school that a
plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. This was 14 minutes after the first
attack. The President went into a private room and spoke by phone with his
National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room.
"That’s some bad pilot," the President said. Bush then proceeded to a classroom,
where he drew up a little stool to listen to second graders read. At 9:04 a.m., his
chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered in his ear that a second plane had struck
the towers. "We are under attack," Mr. Card informed the President.
"Bush’s sunny countenance went grim," said the White House account. "After
Card’s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the
second graders read and soon was smiling again. He joked that they read so well,
they must be sixth graders."
Lorie checked the Web site of the Federal Aviation Authority. The F.A.A. and the
Secret Service, which had an open phone connection, both knew at 8:20 a.m. that
two planes had been hijacked in the New York area and had their transponders
turned off. How could they have thought it was an accident when the first plane
slammed into the first tower 26 minutes later? How could the President have
dismissed this as merely an accident by a "bad pilot"? And how, after he had been
specifically told by his chief of staff that "We are under attack," could the
Commander in Chief continue sitting with second graders and make a joke? Lorie
ran the video over and over.
"I couldn’t stop watching the President sitting there, listening to second graders,
while my husband was burning in a building," she said.
Mindy pieced together the actions of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He
had been in his Washington office engaged in his "usual intelligence briefing." After
being informed of the two attacks on the World Trade Center, he proceeded with
his briefing until the third hijacked plane struck the Pentagon. Mindy relayed the
information to Kristen:
"Can you believe this? Two planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York City did
not rise to the level of Rumsfeld’s leaving his office and going to the war room to
check out just what the hell went wrong." Mindy sounded scared. "This is my
President. This is my Secretary of Defense. You mean to tell me Rumsfeld had to
get up from his desk and look out his window at the burning Pentagon before he
knew anything was wrong? How can that be?"
"It can’t be," said Kristen ominously. Their network being a continuous loop,
Kristen immediately passed on the news to Lorie, who became even more agitated.
Lorie checked out the North American Aerospace Defense Command, whose
specific mission includes a response to any form of an air attack on America. It
was created to provide a defense of critical command-and-control targets. At 8:40
a.m. on 9/11, the F.A.A. notified NORAD that Flight No. 11 had been hijacked.
Three minutes later, the F.A.A. notified NORAD that Flight No. 175 was also
hijacked. By 9:02 a.m., both planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, but
there had been no action by NORAD. Both agencies also knew there were two
other hijacked planes in the air that had been violently diverted from their flight
pattern. All other air traffic had been ordered grounded. NORAD operates out of
Andrews Air Force Base, which is within sight of the Pentagon. Why didn’t
NORAD scramble planes in time to intercept the two other hijacked jetliners
headed for command-and-control centers in Washington? Lorie wanted to know.
Where was the leadership?
"I can’t look at these timelines anymore," Lorie confessed to Kristen. "When you
pull it apart, it just doesn’t reconcile with the official storyline." She hunched down
in her husband’s swivel chair and began to tremble, thinking, There’s no way this
could be. Somebody is not telling us the whole story.
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."
From Gail Sheey....more to come
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