September 11 in Three Parts

Part I: So You Think You Know What Happened?
9/11 Truth and My Dad


The last time I saw my father alive and well, we talked about 9/11. It was September 10, 2005. He had come to New York to visit me and my daughter and sister; that weekend it was my sister’s birthday.
We met at John’s, an Italian restaurant on East 12th Street, because my husband was having dinner there with some activists from the 9/11 truth movement; they were planning a march the next day, the first for 9/11 truth in America.
My dad asked what it was all about. I told him and he raised and eyebrow at me and said teasingly, “Who shot JFK?”
My dad was a lawyer, a good one and a smart one, and so I knew the place to start in sharing my questions with him about September 11 was 9/11 as a crime.
To this day, five years after the murder of 2,972 people, from 80 countries, on American soil, this crime has still not been solved.
For five years the Bush administration has resisted the still unanswered questions posed by the victims’ families as well as millions of Americans (upwards of 70 million, according to recent polls).
The prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, has now been taken off the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list; the FBI has shut down its bin Laden investigation, saying that it doesn't have enough evidence to connect him with 9/11. The CIA also closed its special bin Laden unit (last week, the Senate tried to pressure the White House to reinstate it, as President Bush traveled the country campaigning for Republicans while sounding the alarm, once again, for this un-sought after bogeyman).
Saddam Hussein has been captured and put on trial, but not for the crimes of that day. Last week, the Senate released a 400-page document admitting that Hussein had nothing to do with September 11. When asked, recently, what Iraq in general had to do with it, President Bush himself said, “Nothing.”
And yet, as many American men and women have now died in the war in Iraq as died on 9/11; all in the name of 9/11.
But if Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were not responsible for this abomination, then who was? The 19 hijackers alone?
“Like Lee Harvey Oswald?” I asked my dad.
He gave a rueful laugh. Even he, a conservative on most issues (other than the social ones), had finally relented after all these years and acknowledged that the Warren Commission report had a few problems.
Today, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, it’s plainer than ever that the first, best way to honor the dead is to commit ourselves to finding out who was behind their murders.
In the beginning, the Bush administration seemed gung-ho on catching those behind the attacks, rounding up the usual suspects—mainly, innocent people of Arab descent, mostly Muslims.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that there were 75…then 485…then 1,000 accomplices in the United States (continually changing the number like the presidential candidate in The Manchurian Candidate who can’t get the stats on the “known” communists straight). Of all those arrested on suspicion of complicity in 9/11, only a handful are still in custody at Guantanamo Bay.
The victims’ families wanted answers to questions which, in the beginning, only they seemed to be asking. Not the media, whose responsibility it was to ask; not the stunned American people; but the families, whose burden it became to think hardest and deepest about exactly how and why their loved ones had perished.
And they had many, many questions.
How, for example, had the United States air defense failed to intercept the four hijacked planes?
How had the two World Trade Center towers come down in seconds-long free-falls, when no steel-framed building had ever before collapsed due to fire?
Where was the evidence of a crashed plane at the Pentagon? Where was the evidence of a crashed plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania? What warnings had the United States received about terrorist attacks on America prior to the attacks?
And so on. But no answers came. The Bush administration actually moved to block an investigation, focusing instead on leading the country in cries for revenge as the media wallowed in stories about patriotism and pain.
And then, led by the four widows who became known as “the Jersey Girls”—Lorie Van Auken, Patricia Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg, and Kristen Breitweiser—and others, the victims' families finally met in Washington in June of 2002 to demand a formal investigation. Vice President Dick Cheney warned that such an investigation would interfere with the war on terror.
But the families had discovered they had political power; in terms of getting the government to respond to America’s desire and need for 9/11 truth, they seemed to be the only Americans with any power at all.
In November of 2002, finally giving in to public pressure (the Jersey Girls had disovered the media, and vice-versa), the Bush administration announced that it would convene a 9/11 Commission.
“Now what,” I asked my dad, “do you typically think of a witness who tries his damndest to avoid being questioned?”
“Nobody likes to be questioned,” he said, reasonably enough, playing devil’s advocate. “And most people do avoid it if possible.”
“Yes,” I said, “but these were elected officials of a government by and for the people, supposedly. And we had been attacked. Didn’t they owe it to us to at least try and find out how this happened?”
"Of course they did," my dad said, smiling a little. "But they were acting like clients."
President Bush’s first choice to head the 9/11 Commission was Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner and so-called “Butcher of Santiago.” But after the family members met and questioned Kissinger about his own consulting relationships with various Saudis and a family called the bin Ladens, he quickly resigned his post.
He was replaced by Tom Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and close Bush ally (and oil man. Kean is the director of, and a shareholder in, Amerada Hess Corp., an oil company which has business ties with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia). Philip Zelikow was appointed as the Commission’s executive director. In that position, Zelikow would have the power to say who was interviewed and who was not; what direction the investigation would take and what issues it would avoid; what would go into the final report and what would not.
Philip Zelikow had been a member of the National Security Council, along with Condoleeza Rice, his close friend, in the administration of George Bush, Sr. He was a member of the George W. Bush transition team in 2001. He drafted the administration’s justification and plans for the War on Terror.
When the Family Steering Committee called for his resignation, Zelikow refused, and Kean refused to insist that he resign.
“Do you think this Commission was independent? Would you have asked this guy to remove himself?” I asked my dad.
He thought a moment.
“How about if I had been in one of the Towers?” I asked him.
He gave me a look.
In March, 2003, the 9/11 Commission convened, 441 days after the attacks. Just $3 million—later $14 million—was allocated for the investigation of what the Bush administration kept telling us had "changed the world" (the investigation of Bill Clinton's sexual peccadillos cost American taxpayers' $100 million).
By now, we had already invaded two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, in response to 9/11; and yet we hadn’t with any certainty identified the people behind the attacks.
No one questioned by the 9/11 Commission was ever put under oath, despite the demands of the victims’ families, who grew more and more frustrated with what they saw as the makings of a cover-up: softball questions and time taken up with accolades thrown at witnesses, including former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani.
The long lists of questions the families had meticulously assembled were overlooked. The boxes of documents that appeared from Washington did not contain the documents requested by the members of the Commission. Furthermore, the White House issued a rule that only certain Commission members would be allowed to see all the documents, and when they did, their notes would be subject to scrutiny.
“It’s a scam,” complained former Georgia Senator and Commission member Max Cleland. “It’s absolutely disgusting. We cannot fulfill our responsibility if we don’t all of us have access to all of the documents we need.”
“Didn’t it seem a little Eastern bloc-ish to you?” I asked my dad.
“Presumably they were worried about revelations giving aid to terrorists,” he said.
“But that’s ridiculous," I said. "Bob Kerry”—another Commission member denied access to the documents—“is gonna call up Osama bin Laden?”
“I’m speaking as their attorney,” said my father, laughing.
It had become just that kind of ugly, litigious battle, instead of a good faith search for the truth of how nearly 3,000 innocent people had died. Especially when it came to the testimony of three key people: then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George Bush.
It wasn’t until March of 2004, after former National Security advisor Richard Clarke apologized to the families, before the Commission, saying, “Your government failed you. I failed you,” that these three decided they had to budge.
That same month, under enormous pressure from the media storm around Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, the White House agreed to allow Rice to testify, and Bush and Cheney also agreed to do so—but together, not separately, as they had been asked; and not under oath. Behind closed doors, with no transcript or recording. There would be no accounting to the families of the 9/11 dead from the American president.
“Why?” I asked my father. “He’s the friggin’ president of the United States and this was an attack on America!”
“Friggin’ president of the United States!” said my daughter, giggling; she was 5 at the time.
“See what you’re doing?” said my dad.
I said, “Sorry. But I don’t want her to think it’s all right for people in power to treat us like we just don’t matter. That’s what you always taught me—that we, the people, matter."
It was because of my dad that I went down to Belle Glade, Florida, in the summer of 2003 to investigate a story on the hanging death of a man named Ray Golden. Golden was African-American in a poor, rural town where blacks work long days in the sugar cane fields. The media had accepted the story of the local police when they said that Golden had been depressed and hung himself from a tree in his grandmother's backyard. I avoided the police for the first week I was there. I went around and talked to the people who knew Golden. By the end of three weeks (during which I eventually did visit the police station) it became pretty clear to me that he had been murdered.
While I couldn't finger the killer, I could poke enough holes in the police’s story to show how hard it was to believe that Golden's death had been a suicide. There was also a strong suggestion that someone had tampered with the evidence. It didn’t take Albert Einstein to find all this out—just a willingness to question authority and to care about a dead man who had no money and no power. Not long after my story was published—perhaps due in part to the story and to the work of local activists and politicians—the police chief of Belle Glade resigned. (And yet the Justice Department and Florida Governor Jeb Bush have not made any significant attempt to find Ray Golden’s killer, or killers, since then.)
I think it must have been that experience in Belle Glade, in 2003, that caused me to become even more skeptical about the official story of 9/11. There were just so many holes. And it is just so easy for people in power to lie. They have all the means at their disposal, including the presumption on the part of most people that they are telling the truth most of the time.
“These families just have to understand,” said Michael Hirsh, the editor of Newsweek, on CNN, just after the 9/11 Commission Report was released in July of 2004, “that there’s virtually no way these attacks could have been stopped even had the best things happened.”
That was the message of the 9/11 Commission Report: incompetence, ignorance, and a failure of imagination.
This was no different from the official story put out by the White House, since the day after the attacks. On September 12, 2001, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the country that there had been no specific warnings about 9/11. Vice President Cheney also said there were no specific threats. “I don’t think anybody could have predicted they would use a hijacked airplane as a missile,” Condoleeza Rice told reporters. “Nobody in our government could have envisioned planes flying into buildings,” said President Bush.
Of course, we now know this to be utterly false. There had been numerous and specific warnings from at least 14 countries that terrorists were planning to use hijacked airplanes to stage attacks inside the United States. Any journalist who knew how to use the Internet could have found this out; much of it had been reported openly in the press, going back as far as 1995.
In addition, there had been insistent warnings in the weeks and months leading up to 9/11 that terrorists were preparing for some kind of an attack inside the United States. Rice herself admitted before the 9/11 Commission that the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 had been entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S.”
“Mr. President, you knew they were in the United States,” said an angry Bob Kerry after the 9/11 Commission Report was released. “You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July and August there was a dire threat and you didn’t do anything about it…. You did nothing.”
“When people lie, don’t you wonder why they’re lying? What they’re covering up?” I asked my dad.
“Maybe just their own incompetence,” he said.
“That's their defense,” I said. “But if they’re so incompetent, why are they still in office? Why are people allowing them to lead us into war?”
By now my dad’s teasing attitude had changed. He looked troubled, and I was afraid I had gone too far. So the conversation turned to other things; we ate and drank and chatted. A few times, I caught my dad looking over at the table where the 9/11 truth activists were sitting. He didn’t look happy, and I wondered if he was disapproving of me for my questions or my husband for his activism.
When dinner was over, we went out on the street to get my dad a cab.
We hugged and kissed good bye. He grimaced, like he didn’t want to let go of something, and then he said, “I’m proud of you.”
He gave my husband a soul handshake, fingers interlocked; and then he got into a cab.
Two days later, on September 12, his 71st birthday, he was in an accident in another cab coming home from the Palm Beach Airport.
Three weeks later, on October 1, 2005, he died.
I miss him so much. He was a very cool cat. He had an open mind.



Parts II and III, What We Do Know Happened, and
What Will Happen Now?
to come…