9/11 Widows Keep On Asking The Tough Questions - Video Inside
9/11 Widows Keep on Asking the Tough Questions
http://www.muckrakerreport.com/id358.html
Kyle Hence Confronts Dennis Kucinich About Unanswered Questions 1/27/2007
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Note to Reader: The Muckraker Report stands by the Jersey Widows in their fight to learn the truth about 9/11. We encourage you to sign their petition, which you can either do HERE , or at the link at the end of this article. As Lorie Van Auken puts it below, “if we were to get 15,000 names on this petition, we’d take it to Washington.” Due to polls suggesting that nearly half of the country has doubts about the official story of 9/11, however, we at the Muckraker Report expect far more than 15,000 signatures.
Joseph Murtagh
February 12, 2007 -- When it comes to 9/11, America right now is divided between two camps, those who trust the official account of the attacks, and those who, well, have questions. It’s occasionally the case that the first camp will publicly denounce the second camp as a bunch of nutcases, and when this happens, it’s usually the rowdier section of Camp Two, the Loose Change, bullhorn-wielding, “death to the New World Order” crowd, that takes the most heat.
What tends to get ignored, however, is the quieter section of Camp Two, and especially a group of widowed mothers from New Jersey and New York who over the last six years have worked harder than just about anyone to protect the country from terrorism. Few people realize that had it not been for the tireless efforts of the “Jersey girls” – Mindy Kleinberg, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Patty Casazza, and Monica Gabrielle – not only would the 9/11 Commission never have happened, but there most likely never would have been any investigation into what was the worst loss of life on American soil since the Civil War. No inquiry into our failed military defenses, or the collapse of the towers, or just why it was that President Bush sat in that Florida classroom for a full seven minutes after the second plane struck. No scientific reports, no effort to discover what went wrong, no hearings of any kind. No attempt to figure out the details of the whole who, what, where, when and why of the attacks. And again, what few people realize is that today, six years later, the Jersey girls are still fighting the exact same fight they were fighting on September 12, 2001, and for the same reason: to keep you, and me, and everyone we know, safe from terrorism.
“The story of how we got started with this is really simple,” says Mindy Kleinberg, who lost her husband Alan in WTC I. “After my husband was killed, I got involved with a support group that included family members of the victims of Pan AM 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. And I realized that if the government had only hardened cockpit doors like those family members had demanded prior to 2001, the 9/11 hijackings never could have taken place. And I felt terrible, personally responsible for not having spoken up sooner. But it also made me realize that there are practical steps people can take to keep horrible things like this from happening. So that’s why we went to Washington. It was a moral obligation. There was no agenda, nothing political. We just wanted to do whatever needed to be done to make sure the country would be safe for our kids.”
Long before the Jersey girls ever began appearing on national TV, they were leaving their children with friends and relatives and making repeated trips to Washington, where they went from office to office, pressuring Congress into establishing an official investigation into the attacks. The 9/11 Commission was largely the work of the Family Steering Committee, a group formed by the Jersey widows along with several other 9/11 families who, after reading everything they could get their hands on about 9/11, drew up a voluminous list of questions they wanted to see answered, the goal being to provide the 9/11 Commission with every piece of information it would need to do a solid investigation.
The questions covered everything from the president’s actions on the morning of 9/11, to why hijacked airplanes were permitted to fly around for nearly two hours in U.S. airspace without any military response, to why no one at any level of the government has ever been held responsible for the many failings leading up to the attacks. The widows had high hopes for the 9/11 Commission Report, but when it was published in July of 2004 they were bitterly disappointed. While the public moved on, widely assuming 9/11 to be a bygone issue, the widows were stuck with the frustrating realization that the investigation they’d worked so hard to achieve had utterly failed to meet their expectations.
“It was a pathetic excuse of a report,” says Lorie Van Auken, whose husband Kenneth was killed in WTC I. “Seventy percent of our questions went unanswered. The legislation gave the Commission eighteen months to do the investigation, and even though they had subpoena power from the start, they waited a full ten months to use it and then only reluctantly. Also, anyone who appeared for questioning, from Rudy Guliani to George Tenet, was handled with kid gloves and lauded with accolades. The Commissioners would say, ‘You’re fabulous, you did a fantastic job on 9/11,’ and they would run out the clock. We couldn’t understand what the point was in having a hearing if no substantive questions were being asked or answered.”
Particularly frustrating for the widows was the way the White House initially responded to the idea of an investigation, and they were astonished to find the Bush administration stacking the odds against them. Vice-President Cheney answered their call for legislation by personally phoning congressmen to voice his opposition, and he publicly stated that “an investigation must not interfere with the ongoing efforts to prevent the next attack, because without a doubt a very real threat of another perhaps more devastating attack still exists.” But it was the widows’ opinion that another attack couldn’t be prevented without first knowing what had gone wrong. Caving under political pressure in the end, the White House grudgingly agreed to cooperate, appointing Henry Kissinger as Chairman of the Commission. Kissinger later stepped down when he was unwilling to release his confidential client list and was replaced by former New Jersey governor Tom Kean.
But the widows’ struggles were far from over. The White House named Philip Zelikow, a Bush-appointee who served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Executive Director of the Commission. A close friend of Condaleeza Rice’s, Zelikow had co-authored a book with her and helped in drawing up the plans for the invasion of Iraq. Based on these conflicts of interest, the Jersey widows called for his resignation, but their request was ignored.
“It’s hard for us to come to any other conclusion than that the 9/11 Commission was a political cover-up from the word go,” says Patty Casazza, who lost her husband John in WTC I. “We were so naïve, we had no idea we were going to run into this kind of fight. We just wanted an investigation into the attacks, for safety reasons. And yet it took President Bush fourteen months to agree to the 9/11 Commission. This was the man I’d voted for in 2000, and all of a sudden he was my biggest adversary. I look back, and I think, well, at least we got them to put down their version of the events on record, so you can see where they weren’t being thorough. It was supposed to be a complete account, but it was anything but. If my husband had been run over by a car I’d know more.”
I asked the widows their opinions on the legislation recently passed through Congress implementing several of the 9/11 Commission recommendations.
“You know, on certain issues,” says Van Auken, “it’s a no-brainer. Hardening cockpit doors, securing our ports, checking luggage, these are all commonsense things that should be happening anyway, we shouldn’t have needed a 9/11 Commission report to get them done. But as for the rest of it, no, we don’t believe the recommendations are complete because the report is incomplete. We wish the Commission had been handled more like a trial, with actual evidence produced to back up statements, like they do in a courtroom. But that never happened.”
Many of the original questions put to the 9/11 Commission by the Family Steering Committee have since become staples of what’s known as the 9/11 truth movement. For instance, as the widows point out, exactly what made WTC 7 collapse when it was never hit by a plane is still just as much of an enigma today as it was prior to the 9/11 Commission, and they also wonder why NORAD’s protocols weren’t followed during the attacks. Moreover, they find it strange that 9/11 isn’t listed on Osama bin Laden’s FBI most wanted poster, when the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa are. (In June of 2006, Muckraker Report editor Ed Haas spoke on the phone with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI, who told him the reason why 9/11 wasn’t listed on the poster was because Osama bin Laden had never been formally indicted by the Justice Department in connection with 9/11 and the FBI has no hard evidence linking him to the attacks).
“There are just so many unanswered questions,” says Van Auken. “I would say you need roughly 400 hours of research to graduate from 9/11 kindergarten class. That’s why it’s so hard to keep people on the same page, because they’re coming at this issue from a million different angles. A friend might tell them about building 7, or they might watch Loose Change on the internet ,or they’ll say, ‘Hold it a second, you can’t make cell phone calls from an airplane .’ And then suddenly a little alarm bell goes off in their brain, and they say, ‘Wow, we don’t know the whole story about this.’ That’s all it takes, the little alarm bell, and then, bam, welcome to the place we’ve been living in for the last six years.”
End Part I
