Home > Why Were Bush and Rumsfeld AWOL on 9-11?
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
"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 "[t]he Secretary of
Defense did not enter the chain of command until the
morning’s key events were over."
Rumsfeld’s public testimony before the commission last
March was bizarre. When Gorelick asked the Secretary of
Defense 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." (So, observers were left to wonder,
should the FBI be out with shoulder-launched missiles?)
"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 [Secretary Rumsfeld]." 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.
When President Bush finally agreed to have a
"conversation" with the 9-11 commissioners—provided it
was not under oath, not recorded, and Cheney was at his
side—the account the two top leaders gave was murky and
unverifiable. On the crucial matter of whether fighters
should be sent up to protect the nation’s capital, for
example, the final report says that "the Vice President
stated that he called the President to discuss the rules
of engagement for ordering [air cover]." But, it
continues, the two did not order air cover because it
would "do no good unless pilots had instructions on
whether they were authorized to shoot if the plane would
not divert." The job of issuing such instructions
belonged to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
The commission’s staff report had earlier cited the
legal chain of command in case of hijackings: "If a
hijack was confirmed, procedure called for "the
President to empower the Secretary of Defense to send up
a military escort, and if necessary, give pilots shoot-
down orders." The final report confirms the same chain
of command and adds this detail: "The president
apparently spoke to Secretary Rumsfeld for the first
time that morning shortly after 10:00"—more than an
hour after the first World Trade Center tower was hit,
20 minutes after the Pentagon was attacked, and moments
before Flight 93 was wrestled to the ground by
passengers. And even in this brief conversation, the
urgent question at hand doesn’t seem to have come up:
The report states that "no one can recall the content of
this conversation but it was a brief call in which the
subject of the shootdown authority was not discussed."
The President emphasized to the commissioners that he
had authorized the shootdown of hijacked aircraft. But
the final report states flatly that "there is no
documentary evidence for this call." It notes that
neither Cheney’s chief of staff nor his wife Lynne, both
of whom were taking notes that morning, made note of a
call between the President and Vice President. Only when
a military aide rushed into the White House bunker to
announce—erroneously, as it turned out—that Flight 93
was 80 miles away from Washington, did Cheney apparently
take it upon himself to give the order for fighter
aircraft to engage the inbound plane.
Don Rumsfeld is known as a take-charge kind of guy. Why
was he so uncharacteristically passive in the face of
terrorists who were able to kill nearly 3,000 Americans
in one morning? It is impossible to answer, and now that
the commission has rolled up its report, there will be
no forum for follow-up questions. But it is worth noting
the ideological context: For years, the secretary had
focused on what he considered to be America’s most
pressing national security need—and it wasn’t fighting
Al Qaeda.
Even before the 2000 presidential election, Rumsfeld
commissioned a "blueprint for maintaining global U.S.
pre-eminence" along with his future deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, and future-Vice President Cheney, as well as
President Bush’s brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. The
plan shows that Bush intended to take military control
of Persian Gulf oil, whether or not Saddam Hussein was
in power, and intended to retain control of the region
even if there was no threat.
The report, written by the neo-conservative think tank
Project for the New American Century, also advocated
"regime change" in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and
Iran. An unnamed British member of Parliament was quoted
as saying of the report: "This is a blueprint for U.S.
domination—a new world order of their making." The
report also complained that the changes it recommended
were likely to take a long time, "absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl
Harbor." In the summer of 2001, when security agencies
were regularly warning of a catastrophic attack by Al
Qaeda, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office "sponsored a
study of ancient empires-Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols-to
figure out how they maintained dominance," according to
the New York Times.
Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was given
information that three of the names on the airplane
passenger manifests were suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
The notes he composed at the time asserted that he
wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough
hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL.
[Usama bin Laden] Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things
related and not." He presented the idea to Bush the next
day. Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke later wrote
in his book Against All Enemies, "At first I was
incredulous that we were talking about something other
than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a
sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld
and [Assistant Defense Secretary] Wolfowitz were going
to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to
promote their agenda about Iraq."
Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld set up "a small team of
defense officials outside regular intelligence channels
to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-
Qaeda and other terrorist networks." In May, 2002, Time
reported that "Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a
rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he
asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the
terror attacks of September 11. The intelligence agency
repeatedly came back empty-handed."
Gail Sheehy is the author of 14 books, the most recent
being Middletown, America, about the families of 9/11
victims. She covered the 9/11 commission hearings for
Pacifica Radio.