9-11 Report does not explain top officials missing in action

[G_j]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/07/07_400.html

Who's in Charge Here?

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

July 22, 2004

“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.

Yet, even though the commission’s report paints a stark portrait of opportunities lost in defending against terrorism, many observers—especially the families of some 9/11 victims, who pushed hard for the commission’s creation—were disappointed in its failure to provide a timeline of the actions of the nation’s top leaders that morning. Such an analysis, they believe, would have shown conclusively that blame for failing to defend against the attacks goes all the way to the top.

My involvement with the families goes back almost three years to my first interviews with the four widows who became known as “the Jersey girls.” They were among the families I followed to write my book, Middletown, America. As early as April, 2003, three of the widows--Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg, and Kristen Breitweiser--had been aghast to discover that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared to have effectively sat out one of the worst foreign assaults on the American homeland in the nation’s history. In what may be one of the most remarkable statements in the report, the commission concludes that “he Secretary of Defense did not enter the chain of command until the morning’s key events were over.”

..more..

[wishlist]

1. Also no action taken after the August memo warning about Bin Laden

According to Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America when he questioned Condoleeza Rice, the report proves that no followups or inquiries were done by Bush Admin despite the alarming August memo about Bin Laden striking with U.S. that Bush got while in Crawford.

[KC21304]

2. Having read on Atrios just the part about warnings, chatter etc

from March until 9/11, I believe if a lot of people read this it will be far more effective than Fahrenheit/9/11 will ever be.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/