Great Arricle By Gail Sheehy on 911 Investigation.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=17128&mode=nested&order=0 Gail Sheehy: 'Who's in charge here?'
Posted on Saturday, July 24 @ 09:25:00 EDT
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What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action.
By Gail Sheehy, Mother Jones
"Who's our quarterback" in case of a future terrorist attack? "Who's in charge?" That was the core question members of the 9-11 commission put to every government official they interviewed. "The reason that you're hearing such a tone of urgency in our voices is because the answer to the question was almost uniform," said commissioner Jamie Gorelick at the press conference following today's release of the 600 page final 9-11 Commission Report. The person in charge, she said the commissioners had been told over and over again, would be the president.
"It is an impossible situation for that to remain the case," Gorelick observed. Impossible, because the commission's report clearly shows that on the morning of September 11, 2001, the president and the other top officials in charge of the systems to defend the country from attack were, in essence, missing in action: They did not communicate, did not coordinate a response to the catastrophe, and in some cases did not even get involved in discussions about the attacks until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed.
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"We still don't have a full accounting of Rumsfeld's whereabouts and knowledge on the morning of 9-11," Gorelick acknowledged after the commission's final public hearing. "We don't have answers to the questions that you're asking. But I'm going to make sure it's nailed down," she promised. Yet the final published report offers no further details on Rumsfeld's inactions or the reason he was "out of the loop" (as the secretary himself put it) that morning.
The National Military Command Center (NMCC) inside the Pentagon was the nerve center of the military's response to the attacks on 9-11. But the lead military officer that day, Brigadier General Montague Winfield, told the commission that the center had been leaderless."For 30 minutes we couldn't find
." Where was Rumsfeld on 9-11? I put the question to the commission's vice chair, Lee Hamilton, following the release of the report the commissioners call "the definitive account of 9-11."
"We investigated very carefully Mr. Rumsfeld's actions," said Hamilton. "He was having breakfast with Congressional leaders, and they hear a plane has hit the Pentagon, and he runs out."
"He had to have been told before the Pentagon was hit that two trade centers were hit and the country was under attack," I suggested.
Was the commission comfortable with the fact that the country's Secretary of Defense was not in the chain of command or present in the Pentagon's command center until all four suicide hijacked planes were down?
"I'm not going to answer that question," said Hamilton, and turned away. The commission did provide some detail on the movements of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but none that offers much reassurance. The report shows that nothing Bush and Cheney did or said that day had any effect on the devastation planned by 19 suicide hijackers and their lethal leader--despite warnings going back to 1996 that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network were an urgent threat to America's national security.
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