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Friday, February 13, 2004

Never mind Drudge-- read Sheehy

From the February 16 issue of the New York Observer, Gail Sheehy’s remarkable article on what we still haven’t learned about 9/11, thanks to White House stonewalling:

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims’ families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict. . . .

Melody Homer, the wife of Flight 93’s first officer, was at home in Marlton, N.J., the morning of Sept. 11 with their 10-month-old child. Within minutes of seeing the second plane turn into a fireball, Ms. Homer called the Flight Operations Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, which keeps track of all New York-based pilots. She was told that her husband’s flight was fine.

“Whether or not my husband’s plane was shot down,” the widowed Mrs. Homer said, “the most angering part is reading about how the President handled this.”

Mr. Bush was notified 14 minutes after the first attack, at 9 a.m., when he arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He went into a private room and spoke by phone with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room. Mrs. Homer’s soft voice curdles when she describes his reaction: “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 a.m.] and when the second plane hit in New York [9:02 a.m.], they could have turned back to airfield.” . . .

After 14 months of watching while commissioners politely negotiated with a White House that has used every known ruse and invented some new ones to evade, withhold and play peekaboo with the commissioners, the Four Moms and their Families Steering Committee feel frustrated almost to the boiling point. . . .

The widows are furious that Dr. Rice was allowed to be interviewed in private and has not agreed-- nor been subpoenaed-- to give her testimony, under oath, before the American people.

When 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean gave his sobering assessment last December that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented, the Bush White House saw the bipartisan panel spinning out of its control. In the President’s damage-control interview with NBC’s Tim Russert last weekend, Mr. Bush was clearly still unwilling to submit to questioning by the 9/11 commission. “Perhaps, perhaps,” was his negotiating stance.

Asked why he was appointing yet another commission-- this one to quell the uproar over why we attacked Iraq to save ourselves from Saddam’s mythical W.M.D.-- the President said, “This is a strategic look, kind of a big-picture look about the intelligence-gathering capacities of the United States of America. Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence-gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks.”

Congress has already given him a big-picture look-- in a scathing 900-page report by the joint House and Senate inquiry into the intelligence failures pre-9/11. But the Bush administration doesn’t look at what it doesn’t want to see.

“It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed,” fumes Senator Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003. 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 (redacted), 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.

Senator Graham snorted, “It’s absurd.”

Actually Bob Graham is quite wrong about this, on two counts.  One, it’s entirely comprehensible, and two, it’s not absurd-- it’s obscene.

But it would appear that Al-Qaeda’s recent endorsement of Bush is looking better and better.

Full story right here.  And write a nice letter to Ms. Sheehy while you’re at it.

Posted by Michael on 02/13 at 07:47 AM
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