[Mb-civic] COMMENTARY Rumsfeld and Bush Failed Us on Sept. 11

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-sheehy13aug13.story

COMMENTARY

Rumsfeld and Bush Failed Us on Sept. 11
 By Gail Sheehy

 August 13, 2004

 Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief opponents of investing real power over
purse and personnel in a new national intelligence chief, told the 9/11
commission that an intelligence czar would do the nation "a great
disservice." It is fair to ask what kind of service Rumsfeld provided on the
day the nation was under catastrophic attack.

 "Two planes hitting the twin towers did not rise to the level of Rumsfeld's
leaving his office and going to the War Room? How can that be?" asked Mindy
Kleinberg, one of the widows known as the Jersey Girls, whose efforts helped
create and guide the 9/11 commission. The fact that the final report failed
to offer an explanation is one of the infuriating holes in an otherwise
praiseworthy accounting.

 Rumsfeld was missing in action that morning ‹ "out of the loop" by his own
admission. The lead military officer that day, Brig. Gen. Montague Winfield,
told the commission that the Pentagon's command center had been essentially
leaderless: "For 30 minutes we couldn't find" Rumsfeld.

 For more than two hours after the Federal Aviation Administration became
aware that the first plane had been violently overtaken by Middle Eastern
men, the man whose job it was to order air cover over Washington did not
show up in the Pentagon's command center. It took him almost two hours to
"gain situational awareness," he told the commission. He didn't speak to the
vice president until 10:39 a.m., according to the report. Since that was
more than 30 minutes after the last hijacked plane crashed, it would seem to
be an admission of dereliction of duty.

 Rumsfeld's testimony before the commission last March was bizarre. Asked
point-blank by Commissioner Jamie Gorelick what he had done to protect the
nation ‹ or even the Pentagon ‹ during the "summer of threat" preceding the
attacks, Rumsfeld replied simply that "it was a law enforcement issue." That
obfuscation ‹ was the FBI expected to be out on the Beltway with
shoulder-launched missiles? ‹ has been accepted at face value by the
commission and media.

 Rumsfeld is in charge of NORAD, which has the specific mission of
protecting the United States and Canada by responding to any form of air
attack. The official chain of command in the event of a hijacking calls for
the president to empower the secretary of Defense to send up a military
escort and, if necessary, give shoot-down orders.

 Yet President Bush told the panel he spoke to Rumsfeld for the first time
that morning shortly after 10 a.m. ‹ 23 minutes after the Pentagon was hit
and moments before the last plane went down. It was, says the report, "a
brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed."

 As a result, NORAD's commanders were left in the dark about what their
mission was. When fighters were told to scramble from Langley, Va., they
were sent not to cover Washington but on a fool's mission to tail and
identify American Airlines Flight 11, which was already boiling the first
Trade Center tower to the ground.

 Why wasn't Rumsfeld able to see on TV what millions of civilians already
knew? After the Pentagon was attacked, why did he run outside to play medic
instead of moving to the command center and taking charge? The 9/11 report
records the fatal confusion in which command center personnel were left:
Three minutes after the FAA command center told FAA headquarters in an
update that Flight 93 was 29 minutes out of Washington, D.C., the command
center said, "Uh, do we want to, uh, think about scrambling aircraft?"

 FAA headquarters: "Oh, God, I don't know."

 Command center: "Uh, that's a decision somebody's going to have to make
probably in the next 10 minutes."

 But nobody did. Three minutes later, Flight 93 was wrestled to the ground
by heroic civilians.

 How is it that civilians in a hijacked plane were able to communicate with
their loved ones, grasp a totally new kind of enemy and weaponry and act to
defend the nation's Capitol, yet the president had "communication problems"
on Air Force One and the nation's defense chief didn't know what was going
on until the horror was all over?

 The failures of 9/11 were not inherent in the system; they were human
failures. Yet, so far, no one has been fired, which leaves the 9/11 families
‹ and all of us ‹ in a conundrum.

 The inaction of both the president and the Defense chief under the ultimate
test offer little reassurance to a nervous nation under the shadow of new
terror warnings. Before we attempt to revamp the entire security system,
shouldn't our government look first at why the people in charge failed to
communicate or coordinate a response to the catastrophe?

 *


Gail Sheehy reported on the 9/11 commission's findings for Mother Jones. She
is the author of "Middletown, America: One Town's Passage From Trauma to
Hope" (Random House, 2003).




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