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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

On 9/11, Was W. AWOL?
The mysterious case of the president's dysfunctionality on the day the
U.S. was attacked

The attacks of 9/11 have turned out to be the most consequential event
in world history since the assassination of President Kennedy. This is
due not to the attacks themselves, but to America's wildly
counterproductive overreaction to them. These are likely the most
heavily covered events of the past half-century. (I know I have written
more about them during the past two decades than about anything else.)
Twenty years later, one could focus on literally hundreds of aspects of
the phenomena that the attacks led to. I want to look at just one rather
small question: What the heck was happening with George W. Bush?

I choose this because with all that attention to that fateful day,
nobody seems to know the answer to that particular query. Even after 20
years, we have no credible and consistent account of why Bush and his
entourage took the actions they did that day. No less disturbing was the
mainstream media's eagerness to allow all the various inconsistencies
in the stories Americans were told to go unexamined, as if it would have
been somehow unprofessional to ask too many uncomfortable questions.
Personally, I have always believed that Bush may have had a breakdown of
some sort that day, but that journalists were so nervous about the
fearful implications of accurately reporting this possibility, they all
simply ignored it. Recall that when the congressionally appointed 9/11
Commission-chaired by the Republican ex-New Jersey Gov. Thomas
Kean-took testimony from Bush, he would only agree to appear together
with Dick Cheney, and no recordings or transcripts were allowed. What
were they trying to hide? We still don't know.

Recall that on August 6, when Bush was handed an intelligence briefing
entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," he allegedly
replied, "All right. You've covered your ass, now," and went back
to "clearing brush" on his mini-ranch. This reaction is of a piece
with the widespread impression that he was totally unprepared to be
president, having been little more than a professional greeter for the
Texas Rangers and a largely figurehead governor of that state. At the
time, historian Fred Greenstein noted that "there was a widespread
view in the political community that Bush was out of his depth in the
presidency." Not once before the attack had America's president
addressed the nation from the Oval Office, nor had Bush convened a
single full-fledged, prime-time press conference. His approval rating
was already down 17 points since his inauguration and some aides,
including speechwriter David Frum, had already decided to jump ship.
Now, the dialectic of history had put its proverbial hand on his
shoulder, and his first reaction was to crumble before it. As I wrote in
The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America
(co-authored with Mark Green and
published originally in 2004, where one can find footnoted sources for
the information below), there were, and remain, massive inconsistencies
between what the public was told about Bush's reactions and what could
possibly have happened.

Bush had been visiting the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota,
Florida, on the morning of September 11. On December 4, he was asked:
"How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?" He
replied, "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I
saw an airplane hit the tower-the TV was obviously on. And I used to
fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it
must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I
didn't have much time to think about it." Bush repeated the same
story the following January 5, stating, "First of all, when we walked
into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building.
There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error and I
was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake."

But Bush was lying. No one watching television saw the first plane crash
into the tower until the following day when a videotape turned up. Other
versions abound of these same events circulated by both Bush himself and
by top members of his staff, whose accounts also contradicted Bush's.
Bush told an interviewer that Chief of Staff Andrew Card had been the
first person to let him know of the crash, explaining: "'Here's
what you're going to be doing; you're going to meet so-and-so,
such-and-such.' Then Andy Card said, 'By the way, an aircraft flew
into the World Trade Center.'" Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
repeated this same story, claiming that Card had told Bush about the
crash "as the President finished shaking hands in a hallway of school
officials." But other sources, including Bob Woodward's allegedly
authoritative account, have Karl Rove telling Bush the news. All we can
say for certain is that whatever he knew, Bush continued to read to the
children and pose for the cameras long after the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command
(NORAD), the National Military Command Center (NMCC), the Pentagon, the
White House, the Secret Service, and Canada's Strategic Command were
all aware that three commercial jetliners had been hijacked. Today, Bush
tells the Andrew Card version of the story
,
with Rove telling him of the initial crash before he entered the school,
which he assumed was a pilot error, and Card informing him of the second
one while reading to the children. (Here
is a photo.) White House staff
members would claim that Bush remained with the children as long as he
did so as not to "upset" or "alarm" them. This is a bewildering
rationale, for if the country was under attack, its president, of all
people, might be forgiven for upsetting a few schoolkids. If Bush was in
danger, then so, obviously, were those children. Fighter jets had
already been dispatched to defend New York City, for goodness' sake.

A panic motif runs through the president's actions for the remainder
of the day. When Bush's motorcade did finally head for the airport,
the White House claimed that he spoke to Dick Cheney and ordered all
flights nationwide to be grounded. Transportation Secretary Norman
Mineta has also tried to take credit for the order. In fact, according
to USA Today, it was FAA administrator Ben Sliney who issued this order.
As he boarded Air Force One, nearly 90 minutes into the crisis, Bush had
done nothing at all to take charge of the situation. Four planes had
been hijacked. The Twin Towers and the Pentagon were on fire. And George
W. Bush was, in his own words, "trying to get out of harm's way."
Amazingly, Air Force One took off without any military protection and
remained unprotected in the sky for more than an hour, though Florida
had many nearby Air Force bases with planes that are supposed to be on
24-hour alert. If the president and his entourage were primarily
concerned about Bush's own safety and ability to conduct operations,
they could hardly have devised a less effective way of ensuring it.

A minor controversy quickly arose as to why the president felt it
necessary to fly around the country instead of returning to Washington
to reassure a frightened nation. Bush's initial response to the
attack, an extremely brief, almost contentless explanation of what had
happened

delivered from the school itself, did little to calm the nation's
nerves. The president then spent the rest of the day on Air Force One,
which initially landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for
fuel, before flying to the Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in
Nebraska and, finally, back to Washington, where Bush pulled himself
together sufficiently to give a coherent (for him) speech
from the Oval
Office that evening.

White House officials tried to explain Bush's AWOL performance by
insisting they were reacting to "hard evidence" that he was a target
of the terrorists who carried out the attacks. Karl Rove told reporters,
"We are talking about specific and credible intelligence, not vague
suspicions." Ari Fleischer added at a September 13 briefing that a
threat "using code words" had been phoned in against Air Force One.
He quoted the alleged caller, who was even said to know the proper code
words, warning, "Air Force One is a target." But here again, the
official account was nonsensical. If the White House had received a
"credible" threat to Air Force One, why would the president and his
men return to the target and take off unprotected? Asked about his claim
of "credible evidence" four days after the event, Fleischer replied,
"We exhausted that topic about two days ago," and continued to stick
to this silly story. Eventually, the White House admitted that Rove and
Fleischer were lying. All that had really taken place was that White
House telephone operators had "apparently misunderstood comments made
by their security detail." There were, in fact, no code words, no
"credible intelligence," and no threat to Air Force One.

All of the above is just a minor example of all of the lies and
dissimulations that characterized the Bush administration's reaction
to 9/11; lies that began, literally, the very moment of the attack and
which, we now see, resulted in two disastrously failed wars, the loss of
civil liberties, hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees,
and trillions of dollars wasted, among too many other catastrophes to
enumerate here. It would have been nice if reporters had bothered to get
to the truth when it mattered politically. It would be nice to know it
even 20 years later.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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