Hell Yes They Knew: 2004: This Far and No Further

Back to Hell Yes, They Knew | On to 2005

January 1: The 9/11 commission is investigating some of the "conspiracy theories" surrounding the 9/11 attacks. "What breeds these theories is that two years out, we have no authoritative account of how it happened and why it happened," says 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser. Chairman Thomas Kean says of the various theories, "All you can do is try to take every question that has been raised and see it is answered in the final report to the best of your ability. ...We have heard some theories that are a little unusual and some that have a possibility of being true; some don't hold water and some require further investigation." Breitweiser believes that the commission is worried about stonewalling and cover-ups from the Bush admininstration. She cites the administration's "excessive secrecy," Bush's initial opposition to the commission, his delay in turning over White House intelligence briefings and the naming of Philip Zelikow, a friend of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, as executive director of the panel, as evidence that the administration doesn't want an open and aggressive investigation. (Newhouse News/Cleveland Plain Dealer)
January 4: New transcripts of the crosstalk between air traffic controllers in the New York area on the morning of 9/11 are released by the New York City Port Authority. They show an unforgivable amount of confusion and lack of critical information on the part of the speakers. Columnist Mike Kelly writes: "It was just after 9 If the FAA's version of he story is correct, air traffic controllers should have known at 8:20 that at least one hijacking had taken place -- and that the hijacked jetliner had then struck the Trade Center's North Tower at 8:46 But [the] transcripts reveal that air traffic controllers at La Guardia were still in the dark even after the North Tower was hit. In one exchange, with the North Tower in flames and just before a second hijacked jetliner struck the Trade Center's South Tower at 9:03 , an unidentified man at La Guardia's control tower asks: 'Do you guys know what happened at the World Trade Center?' A second unidentified man at the control tower answers: 'We are listening to it on the news right now. Do you know anything further? What happened, a plane hit it?' 'We heard a bomb hit it,' the first man says. 'We heard that a plane hit it,' the second man answers, adding that he is just turning on the TV news. 'We are trying to get an update.' 'But you don't know anything,' the first man says. 'We don't know,' the second man says. 'We're looking at it on Channel 5 right now.'
"If that conversation was between two ordinary people, it wouldn't be all that disturbing. Indeed, it probably echoes many conversations that day between ordinary citizens trying to find out what was taking place in lower Manhattan. But that conversation was between two people who should have been on top of the information -- people in an airport traffic control tower. Why were they in the dark? The transcripts reveal that even at La Guardia air traffic controllers were still allowing jetliners to take off after the first plane struck. Only after the second plane hit did the FAA order all commercial jetliners grounded across America. Such a delay raises yet another question: Did the FAA dismiss that first hijacking report at 8:20 ? How else to explain the delay in notifying the military, the delay in notifying air traffic controllers at La Guardia, and even the delay in grounding commercial jets in the New York area and beyond? Put another way: Just what was the FAA doing?" (North Jersey Record)
January 12: The federal 9/11 commission will ask President Bush and former President Bill Clinton to meet with the panel, and will attempt to extend its investigation by several months. Vice President Cheney and former Vice President Al Gore also would be called. Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton will approach the four men and request their presence. None will be subpoenaed. It is unclear whether any will agree to appear. The issue of an extension for the commission is a touchy one for the Bush administration. Getting an extension could be a political headache for Bush if the final 9/11 report is issued in the summer. Kean, a Republican, has said the report will name names and point to failures in the Bush administration. Bush officials have proposed greenlighting the extension if the commission would agree to release the report after the November election, but then officials pulled back the offer. (New York Daily News)

Commission members testify

January 15: The 9/11 commission stuns observers by having two of its senior officials interviewed as part of the investigation. Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director, worked on the Bush-Cheney transition team as the new administration took power, advising his longtime associate and former boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, on the structure of the incoming National Security Council. Zelikow, who the commission says has recused himself from those parts of its investigation directly connected with the transition, was also appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in October 2001. The board provides the White House with advice about the quality, adequacy and legality of the whole spectrum of intelligence activities. Jamie Gorelick, one the 10 members of the commission and the other official who has answered investigators' questions, was a senior official under Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton administration. The revelations have been greeted with dismay by the commission's critics, especially survivors and relatives of the dead, because they suggest the investigation will be, in the words of Kristen Breitweiser, who lost her husband Ron in the World Trade Center, "a whitewash." The families have said for many months that they are unhappy with Zelikow's role, and are furious that they were not told he would be giving evidence. "Did he interview himself about his own role in the failures that left us defenseless?" asks 9/11 widow Lori Van Auken. "This is bizarre. We entered a looking glass world on Sept. 11 and we're still in it." Gorelick and Zelikow are the two officials to whom the White House has granted the greatest access to the most secret and sensitive national security documents of all, the presidential daily briefings. (UPI/CommonDreams)

Bush, Congressional Republicans oppose extension of commission deadline

January 19: The Bush administration and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert are refusing to extend the May deadline for the federal 9/11 investigative commission to complete its work, forcing the commission to substantially reduce the scope and detail of its inquiries. Bush and leading Republicans do not want the commission's findings to be released anywhere close to the November elections. "We need at least a few more months to complete our work," said commission member Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman who has pushed for more time. "We have a breathtaking task ahead of us, and we need enough time to make sure our work is credible and thorough." Any extension would require Congressional approval, and Hastert and other leading GOP lawmakers in Congress are flatly opposed to any such extensions. "We've had it," says Kristin Breitweiser, the wife of one of the 9/11 victims who met with several commission leaders last week. "It is such a slap in the face of the families of victims. They are dishonoring the dead with their irresponsible behavior." (Washington Post)
January 23: The US was warned of impending September 11 terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him, German secret service agents testify in the trial of an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist. The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not believed, two German officers who interviewed him told the Hamburg court. Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret services responsible for "carrying out terrorist attacks globally," one of the officers testifies. Prosecutors called the spy as a surprise witness against a Moroccan man, Abdelghani Mzoudi, who is on trial for being a key aide to three of the September 11 hijackers. He is said to have handled money, covered for absences by members of the al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg and trained in an Afghan al-Qaeda camp himself. Mzoudi is charged with 3,066 counts of aiding and abetting murder, one for each of the victims of the New York and Washington suicide attacks. Mzoudi is one of a clutch of suspected al-Qaeda operatives being held around the world. Iran said for the first time that it plans to try a dozen suspects who have been detained in the country. (Guardian)
January 27: Months before the 9/11 attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration downplayed the potential threat from hijackers bent on ramming aircraft into targets, saying that the larger threat was from explosives smuggled on board. The preliminary report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States says that in a presentation to airline and airport officials in early 2001, the FAA discounted the threat of a suicide hijacking because there was "no indication that any group is currently thinking in that direction." In July 2001, the FAA issued a warning to air carriers but did not mention suicide hijackings. Instead, it focused on the possibility that some terrorist groups might conceal explosive devices inside luggage. Bush administration officials have maintained that before the attacks there was no indication terrorists were considering suicide hijackings. But the report notes that the FAA's Office of Civil Aviation Security officially considered the possibility of suicide hijackings as early as March 1998. The full report is due on March 27, unless the Bush administration reverses its earlier decision and allows the commission more time to complete its investigation. (CBS News)
January 27: Testimony from US border agent Jose Melendez-Perez elicits the fact that Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the 9/11, plot, aroused enough suspicion at the border with his polished appearance and a suspicious student visa that he should have been refused entry into the United States. Melendez-Perez, who in a separate encounter barred an alleged al-Qaeda operative from entering the country, tells the 9/11 commission that Atta was trying to use the wrong kind of student visa at Miami International Airport and should have been turned back. He says that Atta should have raised other red flags as well. Atta was trying to switch his student visa to a tourist visa at the Miami airport, an unusual move that generally must be handled before a passenger leaves his or her country. Atta's appearance, he said, was also suspicious. He was older and traveling alone, and was too well-dressed to be coming to the country as a student. "I would have recommended refusal," Melendez-Perez says. The details surrounding Atta's entry were among a series of new facts to emerge yesterday that appear contrary to top administration officials' assertions last year that the 19 hijackers were "clean" and entered the country lawfully. Commission investigators, for example, found that a number of hijackers used passports that had been partially forged and carried visas that might have been obtained fraudulently. Of the four passports that were recovered after the attacks, two were "clearly doctored," investigators say, and they suspect at least six others presented at the border contained al-Qaeda forgery. Investigators believe that at least three other hijackers had the same suspicious indicators on their passports, though those passports were destroyed in the attacks. (Baltimore Sun)
January 28: The 9/11 commission intends to push the Bush administration for an extension of its May 27 deadline until at least late July, raising the prospect of a public fight with the White House and a final report delivered in the heat of the presidential campaign. Both the White House and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert have said they have no intention of granting the extension. In return, the commission says there is no chance of it finishing its work by the May deadline, largely because of delays and lack of cooperation from Bush officials. The commission is still negotiating, so far unsuccessfully, to secure testimony from Bush, Vice President Cheney, and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice. Former president Bill Clinton and former VP Al Gore have already agreed to cooperate fully with the commission. Bush officials fear that Democrats will use the commission's report to attack Bush during the presidential campaign. "It smacks of politics to put out a report like this in the middle of a presidential campaign," says an anonymous Republican Congressional aide. "The Democrats will spin and spin." An extension of the commission's deadline would need to be approved in Congress in the next few weeks, and the Senate authors of the bill that created the panel last year, Republican John McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman, have already said that they are willing to try to shepherd an extension bill through Congress, although both have said they expect a fight with Republican Congressional leaders. "I fully support an extension to ensure that the commission's work is not compromised by the Bush administration's delaying tactics, secrecy and stonewalling," Lieberman says. "Clearly the president is not interested in a complete and thorough investigation." (New York Times)

Commission reveals numerous failed opportunities to discover or prevent attacks

January 30: The 9/11 investigative commission reveals that the United States missed numerous opportunities to either discover or to prevent the terrorist attacks. The "missteps" include miscommunications about al-Qaeda operatives dating back to the mid-1990s, hijackers who were allowed to repeatedly enter the United States even with false or the wrong visa papers, and missed chances to stop suspects at airport security checkpoints despite warning signs. "We were asleep. Opportunities were lost," says chairman Thomas Kean. "The hijackers analyzed our system and developed a plan they felt sure would beat it in every case, and 19 out of 19 succeeded." The errors documented by the commission date back to just after the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and continued until the fateful day in 2001. The panel found airline security stopped nine of the 19 hijackers on the day of the attacks but let them go. All five of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles International Airport outside Washington were flagged as security risks. All that was required then was that their checked bags be searched for explosives. None was found, so they were allowed to board. Three of them also had carry-ons that set off alarms on X-ray belts. However, despite one or two additional checks, they successfully got on the plane with pocket knives and box cutters. That plane crashed into the Pentagon. Three of the five hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11 from Logan International Airport in Boston, as well as one hijacker on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, also were stopped as potential security risks. But they were allowed to board after their baggage tested negative for explosives.
Commission member Jamie Gorelick asks Claudio Manno, the security chief of the FAA, who was charged with regulating America's air carriers, "Our briefings have told us that in the spring-summer of 2001, the hair of the intelligence community was on fire. A high-high state of alert existed. Did you take any enhanced security measures?" No, came the answer from Manno. Gorelick persisted in her line of questioning: when a passenger going through security during this high state of alert set off the magnetometer, were inspectors directed to open the carry-on bag for inspection? No, came the answer. That explains why the passenger-screening program was a failure, despite having flagged five of the hijackers when they or their hand luggage set off the magnetometers. The FAA's only requirement for security screeners at that time was to look at any knife or other object and, if it looked "menacing," designate it as a weapon. It was the "common-sense" test. So the security screeners ran the five men through a second, less sensitive computerized magnetometer and hand-wanded them, but never opened their carry-ons. Thus the hijackers on three of the four planes all managed to smuggle on bombs (whether real or fake) and compressed chemical sprays. Both items, obviously, were illegal. As the questioning wore on, commissioners became exasperated as one official after another pleaded ignorance of any "specific or credible" threats of terrorism in this country. "We know from classified brief-ings that our government was tracking Middle Eastern terrorist suspects since the year 2000 and the millennium plot to blow up LAX was foiled," says Gorelick. That catastrophe had been averted by a female customs agent, Deanna Dean.
Gorelick then interrogated former FAA administrator Jane Garvey, who headed the agency during both the highly tense run-up to the millennium and in September 2001 and who had already stalled the commission, forcing it to subpoena FAA documents that had already been released on CD-ROM to airline executives and airports in July 2001, and even placed in the Federal Registry. Gorelick asks, "Again, did you take any increased measures to respond to the high-high state of alert in the spring-summer of 2001?" Garvey's response: "I don't recall any. I'd have to go back and look." The FAA information sent to airlines read, in part: "Members of foreign terrorist groups...and radical fundamentalist elements from many nations are present in the US, recruiting others for terrorist activities and training them to use explosives and airplanes. This increased threat to civil aviation abroad and within the United States exists and needs to be countered and prevented." Garvey claims to have been unaware of the information until after the 9/11 attacks. Kerrey was frankly disbelieving: "One of the presumptions that keeps surfacing is that an attack on our homeland was incredible," Kerrey says. "Yet there was a pattern beginning with the World Trade Center bombing in '93, followed by a much more sophisticated attack on Americans in our embassies in Africa in August '98 and the terrorist attack on the Cole in October 2000, which we knew was al-Qaeda. The possibility of a terrorist strike on our soil was obvious. Do they have to send you a memo?! You people ought to be coming to the microphone and saying, 'We failed miserably, and it cost us like hell.' What is this: 'We couldn't have imagined...'? These people defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, for God's sake!"
The panel also found FBI and CIA officials did not share knowledge about al-Qaeda or played down that information with customs, immigration and FAA officials. Consequently, some of the hijackers escaped capture despite questioning by customs officials after they submitted improper visa forms or acted suspiciously. The commission said if military intelligence were shared about al-Qaeda and their tendency to travel on Saudi passports, authorities would have known to stop them. But at least two and as many as eight of the hijackers were allowed to enter on fraudulent visas. Six of the hijackers eluded detection even though they overstayed their visas or failed to attend the English language school for which their visas were issued.
"The evidence is pretty damning," says Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "There were many signals to the White House that we were in a state of high danger in the summer of 2001, yet no leadership was exercised to shake the agencies down." Two known al-Qaeda operatives were on a special terrorist watch list known as Tipoff, but airline officials were unaware because it was separate from the FAA's list of people barred from flying. A former FAA official acknowledged at Monday's hearing he had not known until this week that Tipoff existed. "The question is, can you take an institution like the FBI and change its culture so it is focused on prevention of acts of terrorism rather than prosecution of criminal acts," says vice chairman Lee Hamilton. "That's a major question in homeland security." Kean has said many midlevel officials clearly could have prevented the attacks, but has reserved judgment on top officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations. The panel is seeking interviews with Bush and Clinton and plans to meet soon with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. "We'll pursue every lead and follow the trail wherever it goes," he says. "When our report comes out, we're not going to mince words." (AP/Miami Herald, New York Observer)

White House blocks commission access to key documents

January 31: The White House is refusing to allow the 9/11 commission to have notes on presidential briefing papers taken by some of its own members. Some commission members are threatening to subpoena the notes to force their release. Lack of access to the materials would mean that the information they contain could not be included in a final report about the attacks, several officials say. "We're having discussions on this almost hourly or at least daily," says the commission's vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman. "We retain all of our rights to gain the access we need. ...This is a priority item for us to resolve, and we are working to resolve it." The dispute stems from an agreement reached in November that allowed a four-member team from the commission to examine highly classified documents known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB), including a controversial August 2001 memo that discusses the possibility of airline hijackings by al-Qaeda terrorists. The deal allowed the team, made up of three commission members and Executive Director Philip Zelikow, to take notes on the materials that would be passed along to the rest of the commission, but only after the White House gave its approval. The team completed its work several weeks ago but has been unable to reach an agreement with the White House on how to share its summaries with the seven commission members who were not privy to the material.
Democratic commission member Timothy Roemer says that "the convoluted and tortuous process set up by the White House has bottlenecked. If it's not resolved within the next few days, I believe we have to pursue other options." The commission has been trying without success to get the May 27 deadline for its report pushed back at least two months; Bush officials have repeatedly refused the request, not wanting the commission's report to come out too close to the Presidential election. Legislation to be introduced next week in the Senate would extend the commission's deadline until next January, avoiding the election altogether. "The momentous nature of the event requires that this commission not be rushed to complete its work," says Kyle Hence, co-founder of 9/11 Citizens Watch, a group created to ensure that answers and accountability arise from the Sept. 11 investigation. "The commission is coming up with new information," said Kristen Breitweizer, who lost her husband, Ron, in the collapse of the World Trade Center. "As time goes by and more comes to light, we get a clearer picture of how this terrible thing happened. The commission's report will be the definitive official account. There is only one chance to get this right, so we plan to make sure they get all the time they need." (Washington Post, Working for Change)

Rice agrees to appear before commission, but will not be sworn in or testify in public

February 3: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has agreed to be interviewed by the bipartisan 9/11 commission on February 7, after weeks of resistance from the White House to the panel's requests. Rice will not testify under oath, and her testimony will not be made public, says commission member Bob Kerrey. Kerrey says he will lobby the comission to request sworn, public testimony from Bush's embittered national security advisor. "I'm very much interested in following up on the statement Condoleezza Rice made at her famous press conference in '02, that 'I don't think anybody could have predicted ... that they would try to use an airplane as a missile," says Kerrey. "I don't believe that." Kerrey also reveals that the scope of the 9/11 commission will take in "about half of what the President was doing in the pre-9/11 situation in Iraq. He alleged that there were al-Qaeda and terrorist connections, and that's very much part of what we're examining." Kerrey opposes Bush's decision to create another commission to examine the intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war, saying that it's a mission that overlaps with investigations the 9/11 panel is already doing. "When the Bush administration began in January of '01, their transition team rearranged the Clinton national-security agenda. The question is: Did they continue the anti-terrorism effort? Where did they put al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden on their list of national-security threats?" (New York Observer)
February 4: President Bush reverses himself and agrees to give the 9/11 commission two more months to complete their report. The commission now has until July 26 instead of May 27 to complete its work. It is now expected to release its report sometime in late August. Congress has yet to agree to the extension. (Washington Post)
February 8: Bush refuses to commit to to being questioned by the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks. "Perhaps, perhaps," Bush tells NBC's Meet the Press in an interview when asked if he would submit for questioning. The commission interviewed Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on February 7. It met last weekend with her deputy, Stephen Hadley. (Reuters/New York Times)
February 12: 9/11 commission member Bob Kerrey says that restricted access to White House intelligence documents will make it difficult for the panel to give a full accounting of the tragedy. In comments that contradict Republican chairman Thomas Kean, Kerrey, a Democrat, says that the summary of the classified presidential daily briefing papers made available this week to the bipartisan panel is inadequate. "What we got was a summary that had been modified substantially with many things taken out," says Kerrey. "I have not seen everything I need. The summary was confusing and limited, and does not inform anyone reading it what was going on in the White House from February 1998 to September 11 [2001]." The summary was put together by three of the panel's members and its executive director, who were allowed to review the classified documents and report back to the other members. The commission recently voted to accept their summary, which had been edited by the White House. With Kerrey and two other Democratic members dissenting, the commission also voted against issuing a subpoena to obtain access to the original White House documents for all 10 commissioners.
Kerrey says it is central to the inquiry to know exactly what Presidents Clinton and Bush and their top policy-makers were told about a possible terrorist attack on US soil, and "what the primary national security people were doing to prepare themselves." He says the White House promised to provide this information and "broke its word to give our reviewers wide latitude" in taking notes and making complete information available to all 10 commissioners. "Those who read the full reports are better prepared to give a full accounting than those of us who did not have complete access," says Kerrey, a former Senate Intelligence Committee member. "I wasn't able to bring my knowledge and experience to evaluate the presidential briefing papers." "It seems inconsistent to me for the White House to say we were not warned prior to 9/11, but you can't see all the documents that might help you understand this," says fellow commission member Tim Roemer. "If they want to make the claim, let us see the documents so that we may or may not validate that." (New Jersey Star-Ledger)

Bush agrees to meet with commission, with Cheney, in private, and not under oath

February 13: Bush performs an about-face and announces his willingness to meet with the 9/11 commission to give testimony. The meeting will be in private, with selected members of the commission, and the results will not be released to the public. Bush insists on appearing jointly with Dick Cheney. Details of the testimony have yet to be worked out. (New York Times)

Damning evidence from Flight 11 stewardess

February 16: Amy Sweeney, who like her more famous colleague Betty Ong, was a flight attendant on American Airlines' Flight 11 that was rammed into the World Trade Center on September 11. Like Ong, Sweeney made a phone call from the flight shortly after it was hijacked; unlike Ong, the 9/11 commission's chairman, Philip Zelikow, a former member of the Bush administration, refuses to allow any of Sweeney's phone call to be publicly aired. Her husband Mike Sweeney is not so coy with information: "My wife's call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day," says her husband. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men, by name, even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board. "How do you know it's a bomb?" asked her phone contact. "Because the hijackers showed me a bomb," Sweeney said, describing its yellow and red wires. Her first call was made at 7:11 that morning, a personal call. The plane took off at 7:59; by 8:14, the FAA flight controller in Nashua, New Hampshire, knew the plane was missing. Minutes later, Sweeney used an Airfone to call American Airlines Flight Service in Boston's Logan airport: "This is Amy Sweeney," she reported. "I'm on Flight 11 -- this plane has been hijacked." She was disconnected.
On her second call, she was connected with a friend, flight service manager Michael Woodward. "Michael, this plane has been hijacked," Sweeney repeated. Calmly, she gave him the seat locations of three of the hijackers: 9D, 9G and 10B. She said they were all of Middle Eastern descent, and one spoke English very well. Because of Sweeney's information, at least 20 minutes before the plane crashed, the airline had the names, addresses, phone numbers and credit cards of three of the five hijackers. They knew that 9G was Abdulaziz al-Omari, 10B was Satam al-Suqami, and 9D was Mohamed Atta, later proven to have been the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists. "The nightmare began before the first plane crashed," says Mike Sweeney, "because once my wife gave the seat numbers of the hijackers and Michael Woodward pulled up the passenger information, Mohamed Atta's name was out there. They had to know what they were up against." Woodward was simultaneously passing on Sweeney's information to American's headquarters in Dallas–Fort Worth. There was no taping facility in his office, so Woodward took notes. Amy Sweeney's account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was occurring. She told Woodward she didn't believe the pilots were flying the plane any longer. She couldn't contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat. She told both Ong and Woodward that the plane's purser, another flight attendant, and a passenger had been attacked; the passenger appeared dead.
Ong relayed this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company's Dallas headquarters. The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that this was anything but a standard hijacking. "I don't recall any flight crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my career," says Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with American for 28 years. Both Ong and Sweeney also reported that the hijackers had used mace or pepper spray and that passengers in business class were unable to breathe. Another major clue to the hijackers' having a unique and violent intent came in Ong's earliest report: "The cockpit is not answering their phone. We can't get into the cockpit. We don't know who's up there." Contact with Sweeney was lost at 8:46, after her final words: "I see water. I see buildings. We're flying low, we're flying way too low. Oh, my God." Her husband says, "so sometime between 8:30 and 8:46, America must have known that the hijacking was connected to al-Qaeda." To the question of whether American Airlines officials monitoring the Sweeney and Woodward dialogue would have known right away that Mohamed Atta was connected to Al Qaeda, the answer, from commission member Bob Kerrey, is "probably yes, but it seems to me that the weakness here, in running up to pre-9/11, is an unwillingness to believe that the United States of America could be attacked. Then you're not putting defensive mechanisms in place. You're not trying to screen out people with connections to Islamic extremist groups."
Peg Ogonowski, the widow of Flight 11's captain, John Ogonowski, knew both Betty and Amy very well. "They had to know they were dealing with zealots," she says. "The words 'Middle Eastern hijackers' would put a chill in any flight-crew member's heart. They were unpredictable; you couldn't reason with them. ...When Amy picked up the phone...she had to know that, at that point, she might be being observed by another hijacker sitting in a passenger seat who would put a bullet through her head. What she did was incredibly brave." Ogonowski is incredulous that the commission either missed or ignored the facts from Sweeney's phone call: "It seems amazing to me that they didn't know." What her husband wants to know is this: "When and how was this information about the hijackers used? Were Amy's last moments put to the best use to protect and save others?" "We know what she said from notes, and the government has them," says Mary Schiavo, the former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation. Schiavo sat in on the commission's hearing on aviation security on 9/11 and was reportedly disgusted by what it left out. "In any other situation, it would be unthinkable to withhold investigative material from an independent commission," she complains. "There are usually grave consequences. But the commission is clearly not talking to everybody or not telling us everything."
Adding to the evidence that the commission is ignoring is the record of radio transmissions sent from the captain of Flight 11, John Ogonowski, that he sent surreptitiously from the cockpit. He gave unusual access to the drama inside his cockpit by triggering a "push-to-talk button" on the aircraft's yoke. "The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New York," said an FAA air-traffic controller the day after the attack. "He wanted us to know something was wrong. When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew there was this voice that was threatening the pilot, and it was clearly threatening." According to a timeline later adjusted by the FAA, Flight 11's transponder was turned off at 8:20, only 21 minutes after takeoff. (Even before that, by probably a minute or so, Amy Sweeney began her report to American's operations center at Logan.) The plane turned south toward New York, and more than one FAA controller heard a transmission with an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background, saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes." During these transmissions, the pilot's voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly audible, according to two controllers. All of it was recorded by a FAA traffic-control center in Nashua. Shortly after the attacks, federal officials arrived at the FAA facility and took the tape. Since then, there has been no public mention of the pilot's narrative since the news report on Sept. 12. Families of the flight crew have only heard about it, but when Peg Ogonowski asked American Airlines to let her hear it, she never heard back. Their FAA superiors forbade the controllers to talk to anyone else. It is doubtful if the FBI has turned the tape over to the commission. And according to Schiavo, there is no agency within the Bush administration that is pushing for results. Husband Mike Sweeney says of his wife's airline, American: "Ever since Sept. 11, AMR [the parent company of American Airlines] just wants to forget this whole thing happened. They wouldn't allow me to talk to Michael Woodward, and five months or so: they let him go."
The Families Steering Committee urged the commission to interview Michael Woodward about the Sweeney information, as did Betty Ong's brother. A couple of days before the hearing on aviation security, a staffer did call Woodward and ask a few questions. But the explosive narrative offered by Amy Sweeney in her last 23 minutes of life was not included in the 9/11 commission's hearing on aviation security. The timeline that is most disturbing belongs to the last of the four suicide missions, United Airlines Flight 93, later presumed destined for the Capitol, if not the White House. Huge discrepancies persist in basic facts, such as when it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside near Shanksville. The official impact time according to NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, is 10:03 Later, US Army seismograph data gave the impact time as 10:06:05. The FAA gives a crash time of 10:07 And the New York Times, drawing on flight controllers in more than one FAA facility, put the time at 10:10
Reporter Gail Sheehy writes, "Up to a seven-minute discrepancy? In terms of an air disaster, seven minutes is close to an eternity. The way our nation has historically treated any airline tragedy is to pair up recordings from the cockpit and air-traffic control and parse the timeline down to the hundredths of a second. But as Mary Schiavo points out, 'We don't have an NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigation here, and they ordinarily dissect the timeline to the thousandth of a second.' Even more curious: The FAA states that it established an open phone line with NORAD to discuss both American Airlines Flight 77 (headed for the Pentagon) and United's Flight 93. If true, NORAD had as many as 50 minutes to order fighter jets to intercept Flight 93 in its path toward Washington, DC. But NORAD's official timeline claims that FAA notification to NORAD on United Airlines Flight 93 is 'not available.' Why isn't it available? Asked when NORAD gave an order for fighter planes to scramble in response to United's Flight 93, the air-defense agency notes only that F-16's were already airborne from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to intercept American's Flight 77. The latter jet heaved into the Pentagon at either 9:40 AM (according to the FAA) or at 9:38 AM (according to NORAD). Although the F-16's weren't in the skies over Washington until 9:49, the question is: Did they continue flying north in an attempt to deter the last of the four hijacked jets? The distance was only 129 miles.
"The independent commission is in a position to demand such answers, and many more. Have any weapons been recovered from any of the four downed planes? If not, why should the panel assume they were 'less-than-four-inch knives,' the description repeatedly used in the commission's hearing on aviation security? Remember the airlines' first reports, that the whole job was pulled off with box cutters? In fact, investigators for the commission found that box cutters were reported on only one plane. In any case, box cutters were considered straight razors and were always illegal. Thus the airlines switched their story and produced a snap-open knife of less than four inches at the hearing. This weapon falls conveniently within the aviation-security guidelines pre-9/11. But bombs? Mace or pepper spray? Gas masks? The FBI dropped the clue that the hijackers had 'masks' in a meeting with the Four Moms from New Jersey, the 9/11 widows who rallied for this independent commission. The Moms want to know if investigators have looked into how the pilots were actually disabled. To think that eight pilots -- four of whom were formerly in the military, some with combat experience in Vietnam, and all of whom were in superb physical shape -- could have been subdued without a fight or so much as a sound stretches the imagination. Even giving the terrorists credit for a militarily disciplined act of war, it is rare for everything to go right in four separate battles. Shouldn't the families and the American people know whether or not our government took action to prevent the second attack planned for the command-and-control center in Washington?"
Melody Homer, the widow of 9/11 pilot LeRoy Homer, who died on board Flight 93, disputes the conventional story of heroic passengers struggling with the terrorists to prevent the plane from targeting another building. Sandy Dahl, a flight attendant for United whose husband, Jason Dahl, was captain of Flight 93, agrees. Dahl knows the layout of the 757. Melody Homer says, "We can't imagine that passengers were able to get a cart out of its locked berth and push it down the single aisle and jam it into the cockpit with four strong, violent men behind the door." She believes that the victims' family members who broke a confidentiality agreement and gave their interpretation of sounds they'd heard on the cockpit tape misinterpreted the shattering of china: "When a plane goes erratic, china falls." And the biggest question of all remains unanswered. The FAA and NORAD had at least 42 minutes to decide what to do about Flight 93. What really happened? As related by Sheehy, at 9:30 , six minutes after receiving orders from NORAD, three F-16's were airborne, according to NORAD's timeline. At first, the planes were directed toward New York and probably reached 600 miles per hour within two minutes, according to the adjutant general of the North Dakota National Guard, Major General Mike Haugen. Once it was apparent that the New York suicide missions were accomplished, the Virginia-based fighters were given a new flight target: Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The pilots heard an ominous squawk over the plane's transponder, a code that indicates almost an emergency wartime footing. General Haugen says the F-16's were asked to confirm that the Pentagon was on fire. The lead flier looked down and verified the worst. Then the pilots received the following order, from a voice identifying itself as a representative of the Secret Service. According to General Haugen, the voice said: "I want you to protect the White House at all costs."
According to Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, President Bush had already agreed to give the order that any commercial airliners controlled by hijackers be shot down if need be: "You bet," said Bush. That was before 10:00 But according to the Defense Department, Bush did not give authorization to shoot down an airliner "until after the Pentagon had been struck." The window of time -- 10 minutes or so -- covers the unexplained crash of Flight 93 in a Pennsylvania field. Sheehy asks, "so what happened in the period between just before 10:00 and 10:03 (or 10:06, or 10:07) -- when, at some point, the United jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania? Did the President act on Mr. Cheney's advice and order the last and potentially most devastating of airborne missiles brought down before it reached the Capitol? Did Mr. Cheney act on the President's OK? Did a US fighter shoot down Flight 93? And why all the secrecy surrounding that last flight?"
Melody Homer says, "Whether or not my husband's plane was shot down, the most angering part is reading about how the President handled this. ...I can't get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: 'That's some bad pilot.' Why did people on the street assume right away it was a terrorist hijacking, but our President didn't know? Why did it take so long to ground all civilian aircraft? In the time between when my husband's plane took off [at 8:41 ] and when the second plane hit in New York [9:02 ], they could have turned back to airfield." She says she later learned from a member of the Air Force who worked with her husband that "a couple of weeks before the incident, they were all sitting around and talking about the intelligence that was filtering through the military that something big was going to happen. For all of this to get ignored, it's difficult to excuse that." John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy and one of the most active interrogators among the commissioners, was told of some of the issues raised in Sheehy's article. "These are exactly the right questions," he responded. "We have to put all these details together and then figure out what went wrong. Who didn't do their job? Not just what was wrong with the existing system, but human beings."
Commission member Jamie Gorelick said in January that she was "amazed and shocked at how every agency defines its responsibility by leaving out the hard part." She blasted the FAA for ducking any responsibility for the prevention of terrorism. "We saw the same attitude in the FBI and CIA -- not to use common sense to evaluate a mission and say what works and what doesn't." During the hearings, Gorelick addressed a pointed question to James Loy, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the sprawling bureaucracy which now lashes together 22 federal agencies that didn't talk to one another before the terrorist attacks. "Who is responsible for driving the strategy to defeat al-Qaeda and holding people accountable for carrying it out?" Gorelick demanded. "The President is the guy," Loy responded. "And the person next to the President, who is the national security advisor." National security advisor Rice refused to testify unless the interviews were in private, were with only selected commission members, and were not under oath. She has not been subpoenaed. As of this writing, Bush has yet to agree to be interviewed. Democrat Bob Graham, the former senator who co-chaired the first inquiry into the attacks, says, "It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed." The Bush White House has ignored all but one or two of the joint inquiry's 19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of the inquiry's final report to be censored, claiming national security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission, whose mandate was to build on the work of the congressional panel, cannot read the evidence. Graham snorts, "It's absurd." (New York Observer [cached Google copy])
February 19: Newsday columnist Marie Cocco accuses the Bush administration of playing "bait-and-switch" games with the 9/11 commission. "Rumors of President George W. Bush's cooperation with the panel probing the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are unsubstantiated," she writes. "Unlike those Internet rumors that pop to electronic life and die quickly without fingerprints, this one is traceable directly to the con artist-in-chief. The world thinks Bush is cooperating with the 9/11 commission because he says he is." She quotes commission member Bob Kerrey as saying, "I've experienced two political bait-and-switches since I've been on the commission. ...The bait-and-switch in politics is a technique that is intentionally designed to lead the public [to believe] that you're going to do something that you're not going to do." Bush's latest game-playing comes from his agreement to be interviewed by the 9/11 commission. The White House made political hay with the announcement of his intent to cooperate, then immediately began backtracking.
Administration officials said any interview would be done in private, and that Bush would only talk with a selection of commissioners of his choosing. This follows the "bait-and-switch" surrounding the documents known as the Presidential Daily Briefing: first Bush agreed to allow the commission to review the documents, then reversed himself and only allowed a few commission members to look at and take notes -- but not make copies -- of the documents, then attempted to keep the commissioners from using their own notes in their deliberations. A third game is on the horizon, with Bush announcing with great fanfare that he will allow the commission two more months to complete its work, but with the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives refusing to pass the legislation necessary for the extention. Cocco concludes, "Does the president understand the dimension of failure that 9/11 represents? It shook his presidency and changed its course. He has led the nation to two wars to avenge the attacks and, he says, prevent another. Still he obstructs the full and fair accounting that the people are due. This must be counted as another failure of 9/11. It is an indignity to history that is, somehow, imposed without shame." (Newsday)
February 21: The 9/11 commission is pressing for the Bush administration to grant its repeated requests for an extended deadline, and says that if they fail to receive more time, they will have to scale back the scope of its inquiries and limit public hearings. Additionally, the commission is still deciding whether or not to accept Bush's offer to meet privately with only a few selected panel members instead of testifying before the entire commission as requested. And the commission continues to fight the administration for access to classified documents and materials it insists it needs to be fully informed. Republicans such as Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert resist extending the deadline because they don't want the inquiry continuing too far into the election season. (Washington Post/Boston Globe)
February 26: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert refuses the 9/11 commission's request for an extension on their May 27 deadline, saying that he doesn't want to "politicize" the commission's report by having them issue it closer to the November election. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has asked Hastert to reconsider, even though it is well known within government circles that the Bush administration does not want the deadline extended. Unless Congress acts, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi warns Hastert in a letter that "important investigative work will not be done, a result clearly not in the national interest." (Government Executive Magazine)
February 26: CIA director George Tenet gives one of the Bush administration's lamest excuses for not following up on information that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks, when asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee why the CIA never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11. Thirty months earlier, German intelligence had passed on a hot tip to the CIA: the al-Qaeda terrorist's first name and phone number. "The Germans gave us a name, Marwan -- that's it -- and a phone number," Tenet declares, adding: "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11, with then additional data." One disgusted observer notes, "I've tracked down women across the country with a lot less information than that." Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the 9/11 commission, told Chris Matthews, the US should have declared war on al-Qaeda as soon as it became apparent that the organization had an army with a "tremendous, sophisticated capability" and an ideology that dictated killing Americans. "To declare war on terrorism, it seems to me to have the target wrong," he said. "It would be like after the 7th of December, 1941, declaring war on Japanese planes. We declared war on Japan. We didn't declare war on their tactic.... Terrorism is a tactic." A Bush 41 official agreed: "You can't fight terrorism conventionally like a war. Any 16-year-old kid can strap on dynamite and take down any building. It must be fought clandestinely, dealing with the underlying causes and taking security measures in our own country." (New York Times/Information Clearinghouse)
March 2: The independent 9/11 commission rejects strict conditions from the White House in its interviews with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and renews its demands that national security advisor Condoleezza Rice testify in public. Several panel members say the commission had decided for now to reject a White House request that the interview with Bush be limited to one hour and that the questioners be only the panel's chairman and vice chairman. Bush and Cheney are expected to be asked about how they had reacted to intelligence reports before the 9/11 attacks suggesting that al-Qaeda might be planning a large attack. Panel members want to ask Rice the same questions in public.
"We have held firm in saying that the conditions set by the president and vice president and Dr. Rice are not good enough," says Timothy Roemer, a former Indiana congressman who is one of five Democrats on the 10-member commission. Roemer says that former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore had agreed to meet privately with the full bipartisan commission, and that Samuel Berger, Rice's predecessor, would testify in public. "It's very important that we treat both the Bush and the Clinton administrations the same," Roemer says. While the White House claims that it wants to cooperate with the commission, its actions have been anything but cooperative. A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said earlier that the White House believed it would be inappropriate for Rice to appear at a public hearing as a matter of legal precedent. "White House staff have not testified before legislative bodies," McCormack said. "This is not a matter of Dr. Rice's preferences." Commission officials say that if the White House continues to insist on limitations on the interviews with Bush and Cheney, there might be little that the panel could do to force the issue and that the commission might have to accept the White House's terms. (New York Times)
March 2: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert says he plans on introducing a bill in the House of Representatives that would give the 9/11 commission an extra 60 days to complete its information gathering and write its report. The Senate has already approved the extension. Hastert previously blocked attempts at such an extension. With the extension, the commission would have until July 26 for its final report. The panel had warned that if it was held to its original deadline of May 27, as mandated by Congress, it would be unable to complete a full investigation and would have to curtail public hearings. Hastert denies suggestions from Democrats that he had tried to block the extension as a favor to the White House, given Republican fears that the report might embarrass Bush during his re-election campaign. Hastert said he had no direction from the White House. "I didn't want it to become a political football," Hastert said of his initial opposition to the extension, adding that he had been chagrined when the White House said in February that it would back the extension. Referring to the commission, Hastert said he had changed his mind last week "after it became apparent that they couldn't get their work done." (New York Times)

Clinton, Gore agree to testify; Bush, Cheney still refuse

March 3: The 9/11 commission has scheduled interviews with former president Clinton and former vice president Gore this month but is still struggling to get similar cooperation from President Bush and administration officials. Members of the bipartisan commission said they were considering a subpoena to force the public testimony of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. She has declined to appear at the panel's two-day hearing later this month. "The commission wants to go back in the court of public opinion and appeal to the administration for them to reconsider their first stand," says commissioner Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "If we don't get that kind of cooperation, compelling Dr. Rice to come before us is an option." While Clinton and Gore have consented to private questioning without a time constraint, Bush and Cheney have agreed only to private, separate, one-hour meetings with the commission's chairman and vice chairman, instead of the full panel. At the panel's next hearing on counterterrorism policy, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell are to testify, as well as their counterparts in the Clinton administration, William Cohen and Madeleine Albright. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, also is to appear at that open session, which commission officials say will be unprecedented in its review of high-level officials in Clinton and Bush administrations. Rice met with the panel for four hours at the White House on February 7. After the session, at least two commissioners, Roemer and Richard Ben-Veniste, another Democrat, said it would be useful to have Rice testify in public. Relatives of 9/11 victims say they are especially interested in Rice's testimony. They cited her May 2002 comments that the administration had no prior indication that terrorists were considering suicide hijackings. Reports later showed that intelligence officials had considered the possibility. (AP/San Jose Mercury News)
March 8: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accuses President Bush of "stonewalling" inquiries into the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks as well as into the intelligence that suggested Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "Why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into what happened and why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country?" Kerry asks. "The American people deserve an answer now. The immediate instinct of the Republicans and this administration was to shut it down. ...Nothing could be more important to the American people at this moment. They need to know why we had such a failure of intelligence." Bush's spokesman Scott Stanzel retorts, "This is another inaccurate attack by John Kerry. President Bush and his administration have extraordinary cooperation and unprecedented access" to the commission. (Guardian)
March 9: The White House says it may be possible President Bush could be questioned longer than the hour he agreed to by a commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, an apparent concession that comes after criticism from Democrat John Kerry. White House spokesman Scott McClellan, asked several times if Bush would stick to his insistence the session before the commission be restricted to one hour, says it was scheduled for an hour but that "the president of course is going to answer all the questions they want to raise." The shift in position came a day after Kerry attacked Bush on the issue at a time when the president was visiting a rodeo in Houston. "If the president of the United States can find the time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence and why we are not stronger today," Kerry says. Democrats say it is hypocritical for the Bush campaign to use 9/11 images in television advertisements to promote his national security credentials while the president has refused to meet for longer than an hour with the commission.
While leaving the door open to a longer session, McClellan says Bush would still only see the commission chairman and vice chairman, although the panel has been appealing for him to meet with all members. He said all 10 members typically have not shown up for every interview. As for Kerry's criticism, McClellan says, "It appears that he does not want to let the facts get in the way of his campaign." It recently questioned national security adviser Condoleezza Rice for four hours. McClellan said only five members of the commission "bothered to show up" for that session; what McClellan doesn't note is that only five members of the commission were allowed to appear under White House demands. Commissioner Jamie Gorelick says she finds it "infuriating" that McClellan would insinuate that the commission wasn't interested in Rice's testimony. Some commissioners have complained about their access to information from the White House, but McClellan said the Bush administration has given "unprecedented cooperation" to the panel, by providing more than 2 million documents, more than 60 compact disks of radar, flight and other information, more than 800 audio cassette tapes of interviews and other materials, more than 100 briefings and more than 560 interviews. "We have provided the commission access to every bit of information that they have requested, including our most sensitive national security documents," he says. (Reuters/My Way News, USA Today)

Bush uses groundbreaking ceremony at WTC site to stage campaign fundraiser

March 11: President Bush ceremonially breaks the ground for a 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, but inflames many victims' family members by using the ceremony as an opportunity to hold a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser immediately outside the area. Bush tells the donors, who were treated to filet mignon while waiting for an opportunity to shake his hand, "On September 14, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the twin towers. I'll never forget that day. ...The men and women searching through the rubble took it personally. I took it personally. I have a responsibility that goes on." Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani tells the crowd of big-money donors, "I said to the police commissioner right next to me [on September 11], 'Thank God George Bush is the president of the United States.'" The Bush campaign calls the fundraising event a "coincidence" with the scheduling of the memorial, and says that Nassau County Democrats (!) are responsible for the timing. (Washington Post)
March 17: Three senior Bush administration officials, as well as several Clinton-era officials, will testify next week before the 9/11 commission. The witness list includes George Tenet, director of central intelligence in both administrations; Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessor, William Cohen; and President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel Berger. The list is notable for the absence of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, who has refused an invitation from the commission to testify in public. The White House has said Rice, on advice from White House lawyers, has told the panel that it would be improper under the separation of powers for an incumbent national security adviser to testify at a public hearing. She gave a private interview several weeks ago. (Washington Post)
March 18: Roger Cressey, a terrorism expert in both Democratic and Republican administrations, speaks out for the first time about his experiences with the fight against terror in the Bush administration; he says that before the 9/11 attacks, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden was not a major priority. "There was not this sense of urgency. The ticking clock, if you will, to get it done sooner rather than later," he says. Cressey and other witnesses have told the 9/11 commission of long gaps between terrorism meetings and greater time and energy devoted to Russia, China, missile defense and Iraq than al-Qaeda. For example, documents show that an urgent meeting of the administration's top-level officials was held on the subject of Iraq on February 1, 2001, less than two weeks after Bush was sworn in as president, yet no similar meetings on al-Qaeda were held until September 2001, days before the attacks. Cressey says that the administration was convinced that al-Qaeda was operating with the support of Saddam Hussein: "It was inconceivable to them that al-Qaeda could be this talented, this capable without Iraq, in this case, providing them real support." In the spring of 2001, Bush learned that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors, yet chose to do nothing in response. Cressey observes, "You would think after an attack that almost sank a US destroyer there would have been [a mandate] for some type of action. Yet we never saw that from the Pentagon." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice insists that Bush wanted to avenge the Cole, but not with a pinprick retaliatory strike: "We were concerned that we didn't have good military options. That really all we had were options like using cruise missiles to go after training camps that had long since been abandoned."
However, intelligence officials say that the terrorist camps in Afghanistan were thriving, and that the United States could have hit the camps and killed a large number terrorists. Rice dismisses the idea of such a strike: "Even if you'd been fortunate enough to -- to get a few people, it clearly wasn't going to impress al-Qaeda -- al-Qaeda had to be eliminated." One piece of evidence revealed to the 9/11 commission is a videotape from a Predator spy drone, made in late 2000, which apparently shows bin Laden walking in a known al-Qaeda camp. No administration official is willing to answer the question of why, if American spyplanes could capture such clear footage of bin Laden, wasn't he the focus of a military strike. Former Bush counterterrorism official General Wayne Downing is not so reticent. "We were not prepared to take the military action necessary. ...We should have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this intelligence, certainly cruise missiles -- either air- or sea-launched -- very, very accurate, could have gone in and hit those targets." Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says the White House required the CIA to attempt to capture bin Laden alive, rather than kill him. Schroen says the requirement that bin Laden be taken alive reduced the chances of getting to him: "It reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to, say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him."
Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the 9/11 commission, says there was a larger issue: the Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem. "The most important thing the Clinton administration could have done would have been for the president, either himself or by going to Congress, asking for a congressional declaration to declare war on al-Qaeda, a military-political organization that had declared war on us," Kerrey says. No one disputes that actually getting to bin Laden would have been extraordinarily difficult for either administration. He was a moving target deep inside Afghanistan. Most military operations would have been high-risk. Doubly crippling for Clinton was the fact that his administration was continually hammered by scandal-mongering, and Republicans in Congress actively opposed any military measures against any terrorist groups.
Clinton security officials say they did what they could in the political climate: "We used military force, we used covert operations, we used all of the tools available to us because we realized what a serious threat this was," says Clinton's former national security adviser James Steinberg. One Clinton Cabinet official says that, in hindsight, the military should have been more involved. "We did a lot, but we did not see the gathering storm that was out there." As has been documented elsewhere, in January 2001 the Bush administration decided to yank the Predator drones patrolling Afghanistan, the single best source for information that the US had on bin Laden and his terror activities. The decision was made, after a push by the CIA, to arm the drones with Hellfire missiles and send them back up, but the drones were not in operation until after 9/11. Daniel Benjamin, a member of President Clinton's counter-terrorism team, charges the Bush administration moved too slowly getting armed Predators ready and did not send unarmed Predators back to look for bin Laden. "We tied an arm behind our back," he says. "We lost the most promising new tool we had."
Part of the problem, everyone agrees, is bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and the Pentagon over who would pay and who would be blamed if something went wrong. The armed Predators passed final flight tests in June, and were slated to be sent up in September. Bush had said he was tired of "swatting flies." Rice insists that she and her team were behind getting the Predators up as soon as possible: "We did push very hard on getting the Predator back up. But you always have to be careful to make sure that you're going to have something that works." Government documents show senior intelligence officials thought the armed Predator still was not ready, even in September, saying, "The warhead's effectiveness argues against flying armed missions this fall." "The Predator was not a silver bullet," says Rice. "Let's be very clear about that. As hard as we tried to get the Predator up, as much as we worked to get it up, that would not have prevented September 11th." Soon after 9/11, the armed Predator was launched and proved a success -- helping kill al-Qaeda military chief Mohammed Atef and his associates -- and is being used now to hunt bin Laden. (MSNBC, MSNBC, MSNBC)

"I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.... I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism. ...We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al-Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months." -- former counterterrorism director Richard Clarke, March 21, during a CBS interview

March 21: A highly classified FBI program called "Catcher's Mitt" was drastically scaled back in the months before 9/11 after a federal judge criticized the FBI for improperly seeking permits to wiretap terror suspects. The program was designed to monitor and track terrorists in the United States. Further information about Catcher's Mitt can be found in the March 2003 page of this site. (Newsweek/Yahoo! Finance, Newsweek)
March 21: The 9-11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch demand the resignation of Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission. The demand comes shortly after former counterterrorism director Richard Clarke told the New York Times that Zelikow was present when he gave briefings on the threat posed by al-Qaeda to National Security Advisor Rice from December 2000 to January 2001. The Family Steering Committee, a group of 9/11 victims' relatives, writes, "It is clear that [Zelikow] should never have been permitted to be a member of the commission, since it is the mandate of the commission to identify the source of failures. It is now apparent why there has been so little effort to assign individual culpability. We now can see that trail would lead directly to the staff director himself." Zelikow has been interviewed by his own commission because of his role during the transition period. A spokesman for the commission claims that having Zelikow recuse himself from certain topics is enough to avoid any conflicts of interest. (Beyond Comfortably Numb)

Montague interview proves Bush lied about his putting military on alert

March 22: An interview with General Montague Winfield and a high-ranking White House official by the 9/11 commission elicits the fact that George W. Bush lied about a small but critical aspect of the events of September 11. At least twice, Bush has claimed that he was the one who ordered the US military to go to "Defcon III," the highest status of military alert reached since the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. During a town-hall meeting in Orlando on December 4, 2001, Bush said that after the attacks, "One of the first acts I did was to put our military on alert." Instead, it is now clear that Bush did not give the order. Air Force General Richard Myers actually gave the order to General Winfield to put the country on high alert. And in a speech that evening, Bush told the country that "immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency-response plans."
In reality, it was lower-level government employees activated the Interagency Domestic Terrorism Concept of Operations Plan (CONPLAN), a plan adopted under an executive order from then-president Bill Clinton that details the responsibilities of seven federal agencies in the wake of a terrorist or military attack. It gives the Federal Bureau of Investigation responsibility for activating the plan and alerting the other agencies that a terrorist attack has occurred. An FBI official has testified that CONPLAN was activated by lower-level government officials without any input from the president or the executive branch whatsoever. Because the Trade Center crashes were so widely known from television coverage, he said, most of the participating federal agencies swung into action without waiting for FBI notification. A former Bush White House official has confirmed that Bush "was actually not involved in making decision on 9/11 about emergency plans until he formally signed a disaster declaration" three days later, on September 14. (The White House has so far refused to respond to questions about the president's role in activating CONPLAN.)
The Wall Street Journal notes that these are just some of a number of inconsistencies and misstatements made by the administration about the events of 9/11: "scores of interviews with those who played key roles that day or directly witnessed events suggest that some official accounts of Sept. 11 are incorrect, incomplete or in dispute. Among other things, the commission is examining such questions as how long Mr. Bush remained in a Florida classroom just after the World Trade Center strikes, whether there really was a threat to Air Force One that day, how effectively American fighter jets reacted to the attacks, and who activated the national-emergency-response plan." While both sides of the bipartisan committee understand that the chaotic events of that day ensured that some amount of confusion and inconsistencies in recollections are inevitable, a concern is that the Bush administration has deliberately lied about some of the events: "Democratic members of the commission have said they are looking at whether some inaccurate accounts, rather than due to confusion, may have reflected administration efforts to make its response seem faster and better coordinated than it was. Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner, said the panel is also examining whether official accounts of that day could have diverted attention 'from an overall level of unpreparedness.'"
The commission is investigating the myriad of inconsistencies and misinformation surrounding the supposed threat made against Air Force One, and Bush's decision not to return to the White House until that evening. Communications director Dan Bartlett says that the idea of a threat to the president's plane had arisen from miscommunications and the improper use of the nickname for Air Force One, "Angel," on the airwaves. Vice President Cheney insisted for days after Bartlett and others had confirmed that such an attack was never launched that the attack couldn't be disproved. Cheney also insisted that he received information about an attack on Air Force One from the Secret Service, which has always denied it passed any such information on to Cheney. Later a Cheney spokesperson changed Cheney's story, saying that Cheney actually received the information from an unidentified "person in uniform" rather than Secret Service agents. Political strategist Karl Rove has claimed that one reason Bush remained incommunicado for so long was that the White House was receiving reports as late as 4 PM that afternoon that civilian jetliners were still aloft and unaccounted for, posing possible threats to the president's safety. Rove's assertions have been disproven by Benjamin Sliney, the senior Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of nationwide air-traffic control that day. Sliney has testified that that there were no such reports. He and an FAA spokeswoman said that at 12:16 PM, the FAA informed the White House, Pentagon, and other arms of the government that there weren't any additional hijacked jets aloft, as all commercial planes had landed or been diverted away from the US.
Other government officials have testified that Bush received a briefing before 1 PM while at an Air Force base in Barksdale, Louisiana, during which he was told that the skies were clear of any potentially hijacked planes. Bartlett testified that he didn't know where Rove got the information about planes still being in the air in the late afternoon. The commission is also looking into the tremendous delays in scrambling US military aircraft to counter the hijacked jetliners. The Air Force has long insisted that no aircraft within 130 miles of either Washington or New York City were armed and on alert that morning, even though many other sources have disputed that claim and a large-scale military exercise, "Vigilant Guardian," was running at the time of the hijackings. Fighters that scrambled from Otis Air Force Base were unable to reach New York City in time to intercept the second WTC-bound jetliner. NORAD officials have testified that, as the Journal writes, "fighter basing on Sept. 11 reflected Cold War-era fear of attacks from overseas, not from hijacked domestic airliners. Since Sept. 11, the Pentagon has said it has moved additional fighters closer to Washington, New York and other major cities to protect against domestically launched terrorist attacks." A pilot based at Langley AFB has testified that, although it is conceivable he and his colleagues may have been able to reach Washington in time to shoot down the plane that struck the Pentagon, no planes were scrambled from Langley for "a full 50 minutes after Norad had learned from the FAA that passenger jets had been hijacked, and 27 minutes after the second World Trade Center tower had been hit."
The commission wants to know why that delay occured. Retired Air Force Major General Larry Arnold, who was in command of all NORAD fighters in the US on 9/11, said in an interview that the slow reaction at Langley reflected initial confusion about whether an attack on the US was really under way. He also blamed what he said was relatively late notification by the FAA that one or more hijacked planes seemed to be headed for Washington. Arnold also said an overall shortage of armed-and-ready aircraft at the time caused Norad to hold back until it knew where the danger was coming from. "We had so few airplanes on alert anywhere," he said. "If we got a resource airborne, and it went in the wrong direction, we didn't have anything else to back it up."
The FAA has denied being late in notifying the military, saying that it told the military immediately when it determined that one or more jets had probably been hijacked. Additionally, some scrambled planes, including the jets from Langley, followed peacetime noise restrictions during their flights, which mandate taking off over water (i.e. away from Washington) and subsonic flight speeds. Other aircraft, including those from Otis, did not observe peacetime noise restrictions. Another question involves when the president issued orders to shoot down civilian aircraft that were threatening to ram buildings. Bush has repeatedly insisted that he gave such orders, but no one will confirm when those orders were issued. The panel also wants to know why those orders, when given, only applied to planes targeting Washington, DC targets; other planes that may have been approaching other targets were not cited as targets for possible shoot-downs.
And another focus of controversy surrounds the Secret Service supposedly ordering the scrambling of the District of Columbia Air National Guard. Brigadier General David Wherley, who was in charge that day of the 113th Fighter Wing of the DCANG, has said in an interview that minutes after the Pentagon was hit, the Secret Service phoned the fighter wing's operations center. Wherley said Becky Ediger, a senior Secret Service agent on duty at the White House, told him the president had authorized the vice president to pass along orders to shoot down hijacked civilian jets, if that was necessary to keep them from hitting any building near the White House. Two White House officials have testified that the Secret Service acted on its own. But the Secret Service denies that in a written statement responding to questions. "The Secret Service is not authorized to, nor did it, direct the activation or launch of Department of Defense aviation assets," the statement reads. Current senior Secret Service officials said that the agents' actions on September 11 had been ordered by the vice president.
A Cheney spokesperson says that he doesn't know if Cheney ordered the agents to call the fighter wing or not, and that he would not be able to find out. Wherley has said he swiftly sent aloft four of his F-16s at Andrews, after first getting permission from Norad. However, these fighters weren't on active duty protecting against threats to the country, and as a result, the first two fighters to take off weren't armed. Bartlett says that a swifter military response to the terrorist attacks would have been impossible because of "the unconventional nature of this attack." Even after the second Trade Center tower was hit, he says, "specific commands would have required much deeper knowledge of the [terrorist] operation that was under way." (Wall Street Journal)

FBI's counter-terrorism budget gutted after 9/11

March 22: In the days after 9/11, the Bush administration cut an emergency request for the counterterrorism budget of the FBI, the prime agency investigating the attacks, by nearly two-thirds. Documents show that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for "collaborative capabilities." The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks. White House spokesman Taylor Gross notes that FBI funding has increased by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2004, not including supplemental funds such as those requested after Sept. 11. Under President Bush, "the FBI has been reformed to make counterterrorism its No. 1 priority," Gross says. "No matter what sort of rhetoric gets thrown about in a campaign season, it doesn't change the fact that this president is committed to fighting the war on terrorism."
Five days after Ashcroft agreed to reduce the FBI emergency request from $1.5 billion to $531 million, the White House asked Congress for a similar amount, $538.5 million, for the FBI as part of a $20 billion supplemental spending package responding to the Sept. 11 attacks. Just over two months later, Congress approved the $20 billion package as part of a defense spending bill but gave the FBI $745 million. Amendments that would have increased FBI funding further failed under the threat of a Bush veto if the package exceeded $20 billion. "Despite multiple terror warnings before and after 9/11, [Bush] repeatedly rejected counterterrorism resources that his own security agencies said was desperately needed to protect America," says David Sirota of the Center for American Progress.
The group released two other administration documents, parts of which have already been made public, showing that just before the Sept. 11 attacks, Ashcroft did not agree to $588 million in increases that the FBI was seeking for 2003. That request included funds to hire 54 translators and 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff. But in his 2003 request sent to the White House, dated Sept. 10, 2001, Ashcroft did not propose that any FBI programs get increases above previously set levels and proposed small cuts to some programs related to counterterrorism. Other documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's "strategic Plan" from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. After the attacks, fighting terrorism became the department's primary goal. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism "the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area." (Washington Post)
March 23: The day before the testimony of former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, the 9/11 commission releases its interim report on its findings so far. It finds that the Clinton administration began as early as 1995 to focus on al-Qaeda as a primary source of terror activities. Clinton issued the first directive regarding US policy on terrorism since 1986. It said in part that the United States saw "terrorism as a potential threat to national security as well as a criminal act and will apply all appropriate means to combat it. In doing so, the U.S. shall pursue vigorously efforts to deter and preempt, apprehend and prosecute, or assist other governments to prosecute, individuals who perpetrate or plan to perpetrate such attacks." It finds that reports of Sudan being able to turn over Osama bin Laden to US custody were not entirely credible. It calls Saudi Arabia "a problematic ally" in the US efforts to combat terror, and says that, unlike the Bush administration, the Clinton administration had little confidence in Saudi Arabia's willingness to help counter Islamic terror threats, and notes that before 9/11, the Sauds were uncooperative in providing intelligence and assistance to the US. The report is incomplete and inconclusive; further material is yet to be incorporated. (MSNBC)

"scapegoat" Tenet testifies

March 23: CIA director George Tenet attempts damage control during his testimony in front of the 9/11 commission, saying that the Bush administration took the threat from al-Qaeda very seriously. "Clearly there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced," he tells the commission, testifying before former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. Tenet says that despite intense efforts by his agency to tackle al-Qaeda, the CIA had no prior warning of the 9/11 plot: "We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was," he tells the commission. "We didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data, notwithstanding enormous efforts to do so." He says both the Clinton and Bush administrations took the threat of terrorism seriously, but that the country was not "systemically protected." "The most important systemic lesson from all this, is that for a period in the '90s we raced from threat to threat.... But the country was not systemically protected, because there was not a system in place saying you gotta go back and do this and this and this." Tenet says that a special unit was set up track Osama Bin Laden in 1996, under Bill Clinton's presidency. (He fails to mention that the unit was all but discarded in the early months of the Bush administration.)
When Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996, the CIA set up a "dedicated component with a mission of disrupting his operations." In 1999, in an operation known as 'The Plan,' the CIA set up a network of agents in Afghanistan to counter bin Laden. "We disrupted terrorist attacks that saved lives. There were actions in 50 countries, involving dozens of suspects, many of who were followed, arrested or detained," Tenet testifies. During the summer of 2001, which Tenet calls an "intense period," there were arrests or detentions in Bahrain, Yemen and Turkey. "We halted, disrupted or uncovered weapons caches and plans to attack US diplomatic facilities in the Middle East and Europe," he says. "But despite these efforts we did not penetrate the plot that led to the murder of 3,000 men and women" on 9/11. Tenet acknowledges that US intelligence agencies needed to improve their performance. "We need to have a...seamless flow of data from intelligence community to law enforcement community, so there is never the assertion that 'I didn't see this piece of information, it could've saved lives,'" he says. "Probably we had a lot of data that we didn't know about." In a preliminary report on its findings so far, the commission said the Clinton and Bush administrations were too slow in moving away from diplomatic pressure to direct military action as a way of dealing with the al-Qaeda leadership. (BBC)
March 23: Clinton administration secretary of state Madeline Albright testifies before the 9/11 commission that her administration took the threat of Islamic terrorism, and al-Qaeda in particular, very seriously. She states that Clinton was prepared to order the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden after the 1998 US embassy attacks. Albright says the day of the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa had been the worst during her time in office -- and days after learning that al-Qaeda had been behind the attacks, President Clinton had authorized cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda targets. "The president was prepared to order military action to capture or kill bin Laden," she testifies. "If we had had the predictive intelligence we needed, we would have done so...and I would have strongly supported that step." She says that she told Bush admininstration officials that al-Qaeda was not a military organisation - it was an ideology that needed to be fought. "Al-Qaeda is an ideological virus," she recalls telling them. "Until the right medicine is found, the virus will continue to spread. ...We must be sure that Bin Laden goes down as a murderer, traitor to Islam and a loser." She warns that, after the recent Madrid train bombings, Americans should expect more attacks on their soil. But she also advises the Bush administration to recognise America's limits. "If we pursue goals that are unnecessarily broad such as the elimination not only of threats but also of potential threats, we will stretch ourselves to the breaking point and become more vulnerable not less to those truly in a position to harm us," she warns. Before Albright's testimony, commission chairman Thomas Kean says he regrets that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has declined to give evidence. (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3561827.stm)

Damning testimony from Richard Clarke

March 24: Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke gives damning testimony before the 9/11 commission. He begins by apologizing to the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks, saying bluntly, "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness." Under questioning, Clarke says the Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than combating terrorists while the Bush administration made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" in the months before Sept. 11, 2001.
Clarke's criticism contradicts testimony given to the panel Tuesday and Wednesday from Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. All said the administration grasped the threat posed by al-Qaeda and was working hard to fight it. Democrats were pleased with his testimony, but Republican commission members question Clarke's integrity, morality and candor. They also accuse him of trying to spur sales of his book or boost the candidacy of Bush's rival John Kerry. The White House takes the unusual step of identifying Clarke as the senior official who had praised Bush's anti-terrorism efforts in an anonymous briefing for reporters in 2002. "He needs to get his story straight," says Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser and Clarke's former boss, who has refused to testify in public to the commission. At the hearing, Republican commissioner James Thompson held up Clarke's book and a text of the briefing and challenged the witness, "We have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?" Clarke says both were true. He was still working for Bush at the time of the briefing and was asked to highlight the positive aspects of the administration's counterterrorism efforts and minimize the negative, he says. Seeking to counter White House suggestions that he is seeking a job in a future Kerry administration, Clarke says he wouldn't accept a position, and notes he is under oath. (AP/Guardian)
March 24: Little, if any, bipartisanship is on display as the 9/11 commission grills former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke (see above item). Clarke, who has served under three Republican administrations and one Democrat until his resignation in 2002, gives damning testimony before the commission. Democrats were quick to support his testimony, while Republicans, using information funnelled to them from the White House via Fox News, attack Clarke's credibility and character. "You've got a real credibility problem," Republican commissioner John Lehman says to Clarke, the author of a new book eviscerating Bush's terrorism policies, Against All Enemies. "And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you," he continues, "I hope you'll resolve that credibility problem, because I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book." Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey counters Lehman's attacks: "Well, Mr. Clarke, let me say at the beginning that everything that you've said today and done has not damaged my view of your integrity," says the former Nebraska senator. Shortly before the hearing, the White House violates its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary reads passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who has declined to give public testimony to the commission, calls reporters into her office to highlight the discrepancy. "There are two very different stories here," she says. "These stories can't be reconciled."
In the hearings, Republican commissioner Jim Thompson waves the transcript in one hand and a copy of Clarke's book in the other, demanding "Which is true?" while folding his arms and glowering down at the witness. Clarke, very calm under fire, replies, "I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done. I've done it for several presidents." With each effort by Thompson to highlight Clarke's inconsistency -- "the policy on Uzbekistan, was it changed?" -- Clarke tutors the commissioner about the obligations of a White House aide. Thompson, who far exceeds his allotted time in his attempts to smear Clarke, finally frowns, "I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this." During a second round of questioning, Thompson returns to the subject, questioning Clarke's "standard of candor and morality." "I don't think it's a question of morality at all; I think it's a question of politics," Clarke retorts. Thompson, a long-time political veteran, says he is ignorant of how Washington works, and leaves the hearings.
Commissioner Timothy Roemer gets Clarke, who served in four administrations, to say that there was "no higher" priority than terrorism under President Bill Clinton, but the Bush administration "either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem." Kerrey did his part to counter the Republican attempts to paint Clarke as a liar. "I feel badly," he says to Clarke, "because I presume that you are at the moment receiving terrible phone messages and e-mail messages." Democrat Jamie Gorelick continues to counter the attacks, saying after one Clarke statement, "Well, that's a very sobering statement, particularly from someone whose reputation is as aggressive as your reputation is." Republican commissioners labored to change that reputation. Fred Fielding implied that Clarke may have perjured himself when he spoke to a congressional investigation into the attacks but did not raise complaints about Bush's Iraq policy then. Clarke continues to respond calmly, though the back of his neck and head are fiery red by this point, "I wasn't asked, sir." Finally, Lehman takes his turn at bat. "I have genuinely been a fan of yours," he says, and adds how he had hoped Clarke would be "the Rosetta Stone" for the commission. "But now we have the book," Lehman says, suggesting it was a partisan tract. Clarke responds severely, "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he says, noting that he registered as a Republican in 2000 and served President Ronald Reagan. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," Clarke says. "so let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one." Lehman, and no other Republicans, have any further questions for Clarke. (Washington Post)
March 24: Richard Clarke tells the 9/11 commission that before the terror attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, Bush and his administration did not treat terrorism as "an urgent issue," and ignored or sidetracked his calls for action to be taken. He testifies that in the Clinton administration, there was no higher priority that fighting terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particular: "My impression was that fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al-Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly no higher priority. There were priorities probably of equal importance such as the Middle East peace process, but I certainly don't know of one that was any higher in the priority of that administration. ...[A]lmost everything I ever asked for in the way of support from [Clinton national security director Sandy Berger] or from President Clinton, I got." He notes that the Clinton administration began taking military action against Islamic terrorists in the first five months of its tenure, in early 1993. But, "the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue." He and CIA Director George Tenet "tried very hard to create a sense of urgency: "Although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way." His and Tenet (another Clinton holdover)'s urgings went unheeded even though the threat level in the summer of 2001, in Clarke's words, "exceeded anything that George Tenet or I had ever seen."
Clarke testifies that he was so frustrated by Bush's lack of attention to the threat that he asked to be reassigned to cybersecurity in May or June of 2001. "My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, didn't either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem," he says. "And I thought, if the administration doesn't believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there's an urgent problem and if it's unprepared to act as though there's an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job. I thought cybersecurity was and I still think cybersecurity is an extraordinary important issue for which this country is very underprepared. And I thought perhaps I could make a contribution if I worked full time on that issue." The commission also hears of confusion within the nation's intelligence community during both the Clinton and Bush administrations about whether the CIA had the authority to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. However, even if bin Laden had been assassinated, Tenet testifies that his death probably would not have stopped the attacks. "I believe that this plot line was off and running," Tenet testifies. "Operators were moving into this country.... This plot was well on its way. Decapitating one person -- even bin Laden in this context -- I do not believe we would have stopped this plot."
In Clarke's testimony, he says he believes the Iraqi war has hindered the US efforts to curb terrorism: "By invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism." Clarke's now-famous requests for high-level meetings to consider the threat of al-Qaeda with the "principals" of the administration, repeatedly turned down by Condoleezza Rice and others, were also returned to him with instructions that he consider terror threats only "as part of a cluster of policy issues" that also included such matters as nuclear proliferation in South Asia and democratization in Pakistan, Clarke says. "President Bush was regularly told by the director of Central Intelligence that there was an urgent threat. On one occasion -- he was told this dozens of times in the morning briefings that George Tenet gave him. On one of those occasions, he asked for a strategy to deal with the threat. Condi Rice came back from that meeting, called me, and relayed what the president had requested. And I said, 'Well, you know, we've had this strategy ready since before you were inaugurated. I showed it [to] you. You have the paperwork. We can have a meeting on the strategy any time you want.' She said she would look into it. Her looking into it and the president asking for it did not change the pace at which it was considered. And as far as I know, the president never asked again; at least I was never informed that he asked again. I do know he was thereafter continually informed about the threat by George Tenet." (The Bush administration implemented almost all of Clarke's counterterrorism plan, part of an overall plan for countering Middle East terrorism known as the Delenda plan, after the 9/11 bombings.)
Clarke wrote a memo to Rice on September 4, 2001, that criticized the Defense Department for reluctance to use force against al-Qaeda and the CIA for impeding the deployment of unmanned Predator drones to hunt for bin Laden. The memo urged officials to imagine a day when hundreds of Americans lay dead from a terrorist attack and ask themselves what more they could have done. After the 9/11 attacks a week later, the administration rushed to implement his proposals, but Clarke muses, "I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been done in February" 2001. He says that with a more robust intelligence and covert action program in the years before the attacks, "we might have been able to nip [the plot] in the bud." But the gathering and sharing of intelligence was so poor that it hardly mattered that there was no specific information pointing to an attack in the United States before September 11 and that attention was focused overseas. "I hate to say it [but] I didn't think the FBI would know whether there was anything going on in the United States by al-Qaeda," he says. He adds that neither he nor senior FBI officials were provided with information that two known al-Qaeda members, who eventually participated in the attacks, had entered the United States.
To rebut Clarke's charges, the administration refused to allow the testimony of national security director Rice, but instead sends Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who insists, "I'm not here as Dr. Rice's replacement," and cites his own expertise on national security matters. In the usual administration sales-speak, Armitage tells the commission that there had been "stunning continuity" between the Bush administration's initial approach to al-Qaeda and the policies of the Clinton administration and that the new government "vigorously pursued" policies inherited from Clinton while developing its own response to al-Qaeda. Armitage says that the only problem the Bush administration had was a too-deliberate approach: "We were on the right track. We weren't going fast enough." Earlier, Tenet told the commission that intelligence officials appreciated the danger of al-Qaeda and had a growing sense of urgency in the summer of 2001 about an impending disaster, but they thought it would come overseas, not in the United States. That, rather than the failure to kill bin Laden, was the more serious "systemic" failure.
Tenet also says that Bill Clinton was determined to have bin Laden killed, but that the CIA resisted the order: "[E]very CIA official interviewed on this topic by the commission," including Tenet, emphasized capturing bin Laden and the only "acceptable context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation." One former chief of the agency's bin Laden unit told the commission, "We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him." (Clinton security advisor Sandy Berger previously told the commission that the CIA did indeed have the necessary authorization to kill bin Laden. "If there was any confusion down the ranks, it was never communicated to me nor to the president, and if any additional authority had been requested I am convinced it would have been given immediately," Berger said.)
Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, asks Tenet about the lack of coordination among senior Bush administration officials about the threat, drawing a comparison with the Clinton senior-level meetings that took place almost daily in late 1999 to prepare for terrorist threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Gorelick says that the commission has been told that Bush's secretary of transportation did not know about the threats and senior officials did not know what data the FBI had in its files. Tenet said the Bush administration had a different manner of communication in the pre-9/11 period when dealing with terrorism. Under Bush he was talking to the president, the vice present and national security adviser every day. He says it took a "galvanizing force" to mobilize both the administration and the American public to take the steps needed to meet the terrorist threat. Tenet notes that even today, the CIA is still five years away from having the human intelligence capabilities to have access to the sanctuary areas where terrorist groups operate. He also notes the commission had to establish benchmarks for the future, saying he worried that other attacks will be coming while memories of the 9/11 attack fade. (Washington Post, Washington Post [transcript of Clarke testimony])
March 24: Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger tells the 9/11 commission that Clinton gave the CIA "every inch of authorization that it asked for" to carry out plans to kill Osama bin Laden, flatly disputing claims the spy agency lacked the authority it needed. "If there was any confusion down the ranks, it was never communicated to me nor to the president and if any additional authority had been requested I am convinced it would have been given immediately," Berger testifies. "some of these authorities were kill. Some of these authorities were capture or kill," he says. "There could have not been any doubt about what President Clinton's intent was after he fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at bin-Laden in August 1998," he continues, referring to strikes at a camp in Afghanistan where the al-Qaeda leader was believed present. "I assure you they were not delivering him an arrest warrant. The intent was to kill bin Laden," he says. Bin Laden escaped. Berger testifies a few hours after the panel releases a report that says CIA officials, Director George Tenet among them, had told investigators they did not believe they had the authority to assassinate the leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. A subsequent decision to rely on local Afghan forces sharply reduced the chances of his bin Laden's capture, the commission said. Tenet, who preceded Berger in the witness chair, was asked about the issue. "I never went back and said, I don't have all the authorities I need," he replies, apparently contradicting his earlier statements. "If I felt that I had developed access or capability that required dramatically different authorities, I would have gone in and said, 'This is what I have, this is what I think I can do; please [give] me these authorities,' and I don't doubt that they would have been granted," Tenet says. (AP/Guardian)
March 24: Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission sheds new light on the Bush administration's decision to allow 140 Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family as well as known terror suspects, to leave the US in the days following the terror attacks. He acknowledges that the Saudis did not help the US in its struggle against terrorism; "Indeed, it didn't really cooperate until after bombs blew up in Riyadh," he says. However, he says, that didn't stop the Saudi embassy from making an unusual request of the administration. "someone -- and I wish I could tell you, but I don't know who -- someone brought...a proposal that we authorize a request from the Saudi embassy. The Saudi embassy had apparently said that they feared for the lives of Saudi citizens because they thought there would be retribution against Saudis in the United States as it became obvious to Americans that this attack was essentially done by Saudis, and that there were even Saudi citizens in the United States who were part of the bin Laden family, which is a very large family, very large family. The Saudi embassy therefore asked for these people to be evacuated; the same sort of thing that we do all the time in similar crises, evacuating Americans. The request came to me and I refused to approve it. I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger manifest and that they approve it -- or not. I spoke with at that time the number two person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The FBI then approved -- after some period of time, and I can't tell you how long -- approved the flight. Now, what degree of review the FBI did of those names, I cannot tell you. How many people there are on the plane, I cannot tell you. But I have asked since: Were there any individuals on that flight that in retrospect the FBI wishes they could have interviewed in this country. And the answer I've been given is no, that there was no one who left on that flight who the FBI now wants to interview."
The statement that there were no people of interest to the FBI on those flights is an absolute lie. Clarke does not believe they were ever interviewed in this country; neither he nor the FBI are completely sure who was allowed to leave. As stated, he is unsure who make the request, though he says, "[T]he two possibilities that are most likely are either the Department of State, or the White House Chief of Staff's Office. But I don't know." (Democracy Now)

Sibel Edmonds testifies

March 24: Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds says she was offered a substantial raise and a full-time job to encourage her not to go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of terrorist subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA. She says that Attorney General John Ashcroft made the offer in private. She has appeared on 60 Minutes, but after her appearance, was gagged by Ashcroft's invocation of the State Secrets Privilege; Edmonds has been threatened with jail if she speaks out. "My translations of the pre 9-11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date specific information enough to alert the American people, and other issues dating back to 1999 which I won't go into right now." She adds, "The Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission have heard me testify for lengthy periods of time [3 hours] about very specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weapons, and specific individuals and activities." Her testimony has never been made public. She says, "[T]ranslators before me had ongoing personal relationships with the subjects or targets of the FBI and DOJ pre 9-11 investigations -- linked to intercepts and other intelligence--in June - July - August, just prior to the attacks. ...I also became aware of a [terrorist] criminal investigation going on since 1998." Patty Casazza, one of the 9-11 family members, says, "sibel Edmonds told me that color coding terrorist threat alerts for the American people is reflective of the intercept translations received." Casazza and Edmonds give no indication as to whether FBI translators had doctored or adjusted translations [used in the decision-making process] for Homeland Security terrorist threat alerts, for political reasons. Edmonds concludes, "This whole situation is outrageous and I am going public." (Tom Flocco)

Bush before 9/11: "mistake" to focus on bin Laden

March 26: In April 2001, four months before the terror attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration released a report calling it "a mistake" to focus "so much energy on Osama bin Laden." The report directly contradicts the White House's continued assertion that fighting terrorism was its "top priority" before the 9/11 attacks.

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

Hell Yes They Knew:

2004

Commission members testify

Bush, Congressional Republicans oppose extension of commission deadline

Commission reveals numerous failed opportunities to discover or prevent attacks

White House blocks commission access to key documents

Rice agrees to appear before commission, but will not be sworn in or testify in public

Bush agrees to meet with commission, with Cheney, in private, and not under oath

Damning evidence from Flight 11 stewardess

Clinton, Gore agree to testify; Bush, Cheney still refuse

Bush uses groundbreaking ceremony at WTC site to stage campaign fundraiser

Montague interview proves Bush lied about his putting military on alert

FBI's counter-terrorism budget gutted after 9/11

"scapegoat" Tenet testifies

Damning testimony from Richard Clarke

Sibel Edmonds testifies

Bush before 9/11: "mistake" to focus on bin Laden