Letters at 3AM

Illustration By Jason Stout

The authorized edition of The 9/11 Commission Report runs 547 pages. Incredibly, only 11 (pp. 35-46) focus on President Bush and his administration's behavior on 9/11. Eleven happens also to be the number of hours that Bush was absent from public view that day, from 9:35am to 8:31pm Eastern Time, when he finally spoke live from the White House. His orchestrated photo ops after 9/11 successfully erased from public memory his indecision and absence on the day of the attack – a day for which there is shockingly little solid evidence about the choices of anyone in high authority.

9/11, 8:46am, the first jet hit the World Trade Center. The Report, p.35: At that point "no one in the White House or traveling with the President knew that it had been hijacked." Bush is in Sarasota, Fla., about to address a grade-school class. Just before he does so, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card tells him that a small two-engine plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Bush phones Condoleezza Rice at the White House, who tells him roughly the same thing. We are all familiar, by now, with the footage of Andrew Card interrupting Bush's classroom event and, whispering, according to Card, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." What's most remarkable about that moment is that Bush doesn't ask a question. He just sits there for nearly seven minutes. Conspiracy theorists claim he just sat there because he already knew the attack was coming and it was all according to plan. No. If that were true the White House would have staged a grand response: Bush racing back to Washington, emoting stirring pre-scripted heroics, etc. Rather, the record indicates confusion and indecision. We don't know why Bush just sat there. He claims he wanted to project an image of calm – thus he himself admits that, even at such a crucial moment, image mattered more to him than action. Our commander in chief waited seven minutes to ask a question when the nation was under attack and anything might be happening. That's astounding, no matter what the motive.

The Report, p.39: "No one in [the President's] traveling party had any information during this time [the half hour following Bush being told] that other aircraft were hijacked or missing ... no one with the President was in contact with the Pentagon. The focus was on the President's statement to the nation." Again: image over action. The Report makes clear that the chain of command is from the president to the secretary of defense. If orders for a response are to be given, that's how they're to be given. Yet a half hour's gone by, and Bush hasn't contacted the Pentagon. Again, that's astounding.

The Report, p.39: Bush wants to go back to Washington, but the Secret Service and Cheney don't want him to; he "grudgingly" agrees "to go elsewhere." Quickly, the White House circulated the story that Air Force One was hopping all around the country because of reports that it too was a target. The Report mentions briefly, on p.325, that this "threat was eventually run down to a misunderstood communication in the hectic White House Situation Room that morning." Only in a footnote (p.554) is it admitted that "during the day" – that is, the afternoon of 9/11 – the Secret Service learned the threat was false. But no one told the media. The next day Ari Fleischer insisted to the press that the threat was "real and credible." A lie to protect Bush's image.

Page 40-41: Bush "could not reach key officials, including Secretary Rumsfeld, for a period of time. The line to the White House shelter conference room – and the Vice President – kept cutting off." It is now a little after 10am. Supposedly, there is a phone conversation between Bush and Cheney in which Bush authorizes Cheney to give military orders. But (p.41) "among the sources that reflect other important events of that morning, there is no documentary evidence for this call. ... Others nearby who were taking notes [my italics], such as the Vice President's chief of staff Scooter Libby, who sat next to him, and Mrs. Cheney, did not note a call between the President and Vice President." Only two in that room attest the call: Cheney and Rice. Yet people sitting right next to them didn't notice it. It's highly unlikely that call took place, which means that Bush, Cheney, and Rice have lied about it, with Ari Fleischer lying to support them in later testimony. But what if the call was real? The Report passes over the strangeness of a president immediately delegating military command to his vice president though no one has concrete information and no one's yet talked to the Pentagon. Whether lie or truth, it is, again, astounding.

Page 41: Cheney gets word that an unauthorized aircraft is flying toward Washington and orders it shot down. "At the conference room table was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. Bolten watched the exchanges, and, after what he called 'a quiet moment,' suggested that the Vice President get in touch with the President and confirm the engage order. Bolten told us he wanted to make sure the President was told that the Vice President had executed the order. He said he had not heard any prior discussion on the subject with the President." Bolten is of the inner circle, yet he gave testimony that undermines the Bush-Cheney version. He must have been very uncomfortable with the truth: The President was out of the loop, the vice president acted without authority ... so poor Bolten piped up, in "a quiet moment," to make things appear constitutional.

Cheney's information about the approaching plane came from the Secret Service via the Federal Aviation Authority; the Pentagon hadn't yet entered the discussion. Where did Cheney get his information? Page 35: "Most federal agencies learned about the crash in New York from CNN." The footnote to that statement cites the White House Situation Room log! A hundred exclamation points can't express how astounding that is. The West Wing wouldn't depict such a Situation Room because nobody would believe it and the Right would howl about "the liberal media." Yet in real life on 9/11 the Situation Room received its "intel" from CNN. And the intel was wrong. When Cheney finally gets through to Rumsfeld, he says: "It's my understanding that [our jet fighters] have taken a couple of aircraft out." Where he got such "understanding," no one knows. What's known (pp. 43-45) is that the pilots protecting Washington were ordered not to engage, merely to observe; meanwhile pilots with orders to engage were chasing a blip, a plane that turns out not to have existed. No one in the White House or the Pentagon was aware of this. And Bush was utterly in the dark. So was the second-in-command of our military, Donald Rumsfeld, who said to Cheney: "We're told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it." Another strange "understanding," for no one shot anything down, and, as The Report states (p.45), "the Langley pilots were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled." The pilot leading the group told the commission, "No one told us anything."

Which is probably just as well, because on 9/11, according to the record, at the highest levels of our government everything anybody was saying to anybody was either mistaken or fabricated.

But for a generalized page-and-a-half summary on p.325, the Report does not record anything substantive about what the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, or anyone else in the administration, did or said after 10:39am. We have no idea why it took another 10 hours for Bush to address the nation from Washington. We do not know what was discussed, attempted, or accomplished during that time. Yet the commission states in its introduction: "Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned." Clearly that was not done, because Bush – who only agreed to convene the commission after public outcry from 9/11 victims – didn't want an account on record. Then both Bush and Cheney refused to testify in public and refused to testify under oath, while Rice testified in public and under oath only after enormous public pressure was brought to bear. The United States is being led by people who are afraid to talk to us except under conditions completely under their control. Is that democracy?

The Report's preface hints, for a brief sentence, at what they suspect and could not say, and at what they were not permitted to know: "New information will inevitably come to light." Let us hope so. Right now we know only that we do not know – we don't know what our government did on one of the most important days of our history. That knowledge is being kept from us. The little we do know, 11 pages of it, must shock and dismay anyone who cares for our republic. And there's been nothing since to indicate that action matters more than image to those who presently occupy the highest office of the land.