A Pretext for War by James Bamford Read Free Book Online Page A

Secretary of Defense. Nor did he ask for George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, to determine what kind of intelligence there was on what had taken place. There were no questions to Andy Card or Condoleezza Rice about whether there had been any additional threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to best protect the country from further devastation, or the current status of NORAD or the FAA or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nor did he ask that Air Force One prepare to return him to Washington at once.
    Instead, he simply turned back to the photo op. “Hoo!” he cheered as the electronic flashes continued to blink and the video cameras rolled. “These are great readers. Very impressive!” Precious minutes and seconds were ticking by and many more lives were still at risk, but the President of the United States did not budge from his small, second-grade chair. The enormity of the reality waiting for him would have to wait.
    By then, at one of the most critical moments in American history, the country had essentially become leaderless. Both towers of the World Trade Center had been blown up by large commercial airliners with thousands of people feared dead. One crash took place on live television. At least one other commercial jet—American Flight 77 from Washington’s Dulles Airport, bound for Los Angeles—was missing. And unknown yet was the presence of hijackers on a fourth plane waiting to take off at Newark International Airport. NORAD had launched fighters to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the aircraft, but such a decision would require the President’s order.
    “Really good readers, whew! These must be sixth-graders!” the President effused. “Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills. I bet they practice, too. Don’t you? Reading more than they watch TV? Anybody do that? Read more than you watch TV?”
     
     
    The U.S. military command was equally out of touch as the horror continued to unfold on television. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Henry Shelton, was somewhere over the Atlantic en route to Europe. That left his deputy, Air Force General Richard Myers, the Vice Chairman, in charge of the country’s armed forces. But incredibly, he would remain unaware of what was going on around him during the entire series of attacks.
    Myers was on Capitol Hill waiting to meet with Georgia Senator Max Cleland about his upcoming confirmation hearings to become the new Joint Chiefs chairman. While in Cleland’s outer office, he watched live television reports following the first crash into the World Trade Center and then went into Cleland’s office for his routine meeting. There he would remain for the next forty-five minutes, self-promoting his talents to lead the military as the rest of the targets were attacked and the country succumbed to enormous death and destruction.
    Through it all, the general in charge of the country’s military was completely ignorant of the fact that the United States was under its worst attack in nearly two centuries. Nor did he know that about forty minutes earlier, the President had decided to declare war. “It was initially pretty confusing,” Myers later said. “You hate to admit it, but we hadn’t thought about this.”
     
     
    As President Bush continued reading with the second-graders, the situation within the burning towers of the World Trade Center was becoming ever more desperate. At 9:06, NYPD helicopter pilot Timothy Hayes radioed the message “Unable to land on roof. . . . Captain, this is impossible. This is undoable. I can’t see the roof.” He later added, “The smoke had covered 90 percent of the entire roof, so I couldn’t even see the roof to make an evaluation of where we could go. We were looking at probably fifteen to twenty stories burning simultaneously. Probably well over a thousand degrees, you know, if not more. I never felt so helpless and guilty in my life. When you get there