A Pretext for War by James Bamford Read Free Book Online

agency’s perimeter-security antiterrorism program, all vehicles and cargo passing through the inner fences must first be inspected for bombs and other threats in a $4 million screening center. There, an Explosive Detection Canine Unit, consisting of a team of handlers and eleven specially trained Dutch Shepherd and Belgian Malinois bomb-sniffing dogs, inspect the vehicles.
    The agency also has its own police force, complete with a mobile Emergency Response Communications Command Post equipped with both STU-III secure cellular telephones and also encrypted closed-circuit television systems. Should a threat be detected, the director could call out the agency’s Special Operations Unit/Emergency Reaction Team. Dressed in black paramilitary uniforms and wearing special headgear, they brandish an assortment of weapons, including Colt 9mm submachine guns. Attached to the team are two military medics assigned to NSA’s Medical Center. During periods of heightened alert, and at other times as a deterrent, the team, known as the “Men in Black,” are posted at the perimeter gates.
    But all of that security was designed to prevent a ground attack. From the air, NSA was just as vulnerable as a large unprotected shopping mall.
     
     
    Disturbingly, the story George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the attacks cannot possibly be true. “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in,” he told an audience in Florida on December 4, 2001, “and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’” He repeated the story a month later, on January 5, 2002, to another audience in California. It is the version that is on the White House Web page. “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.”
    The problem with the account is that there was no video of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center until later that day. The only video was of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center at 9:02:54. It’s possible that he saw those images on live television when he ducked into an empty room set up so he could talk with Condoleezza Rice at the White House. He reportedly did not enter the class until 9:04, more than a minute after the United Flight 175 smashed into Tower Two. Thus, he may have learned of the second plane even before he went in to address the seven-year-olds. That would raise a serious question of judgment: How could a president ignore what to millions of people was an obvious terrorist attack and just go about a political photo op as if nothing had happened?
    If he had not seen the second attack and could not have seen the first attack, then how could he make the later claims? Few people can ever forget the moment they first learned of the events of 9/11, especially if the person happens to be the President of the United States.
    Whether or not Bush learned of the second attack before he went into Sandra Kay Daniels’s second-grade class, he certainly knew about it after his chief of staff, Andrew Card, notified him of the event minutes later, at 9:06. “A second plane hit the second tower,” said Card. “America is under attack.” At that moment, a look of befuddlement passed over the President’s face, the look of a man who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe what he was hearing.
    Bush would later boast to reporters that at that moment he made his decision in favor of war. “They had declared war on us,” he said, “and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war.”For a commander-in-chief who had just decided to launch his country into a war, a rare and enormous event, George Bush seemed strangely uninterested in further information. He did not demand to speak to the