Los Angeles Times
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 could n'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 b een 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 t ower 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?
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