For Relatives Of 9/11 Victims, Activism And Altered Views

For relatives of 9/11 victims, activism and altered views

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...bush-911_N.htm

By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Kristen Breitweiser, like many other widows who demanded a government inquiry into the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, wasn't that interested in geopolitics before the day her husband died.

"I was not a very actively engaged American citizen. I was a housewife, I had a little baby, my husband worked on Wall Street," says Breitweiser. In 2000, she had voted for George W. Bush.

As Bush leaves office eight years later, his presidency has been shaped by the attacks that killed Ronald Breitweiser and nearly 3,000 others. Bush's security policies that grew out of the attacks — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and efforts to improve intelligence, boost emergency preparedness and control illegal immigration — have been followed intensely by the families of those killed on 9/11.

Breitweiser and other family members have been key players in persuading the White House and Congress to create the 9/11 Commission that examined the attacks, and also in ongoing campaigns aimed at improving national security. Other family members have been less public, but their worldviews have been altered forever by 9/11 and Bush's actions afterward.

Like the nation as a whole — public opinion surveys show nearly 68% of the public disapprove of the job Bush is doing — many family members give the president harsh reviews. Others offer more understanding.

"His response (was) to rally the nation to come together," says Cathie Ong-Herrera, whose sister Betty was a flight attendant on a Los Angeles-bound jet that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. "Our country was united. That feeling was very much appreciated. But unfortunately that feeling is gone. Our nation is not … where it should be."

To Breitweiser, Ong-Herrera and other 9/11 victims' family members, Bush's legacy is shaped largely by how they believe he performed on issues that mean the most to them.

For Bill Doyle, father of Joey, it's rooting out the financing of terrorism.

For Donn Marshall, widower of Shelley, it's the execution of the Iraq war.

For Lynn Faulkner, widower of Wendy, it's Bush's attempt to overhaul immigration.

Here's how some victims' family members see Bush's legacy:

The Jersey girl
"When my husband was killed, it was a huge awakening to me," Breitweiser says.

She was one of four widows — they called themselves the "Jersey girls" — who, along with other families, lobbied for the creation of the 9/11 Commission, which said in its report in 2007 that the U.S. government had underestimated the terrorist threat in part because intelligence agencies had not shared information.

Today, Breitweiser has moved from New Jersey to New York and is raising her daughter, who was a toddler when Ronald was killed. Breitweiser also writes political commentary for the Huffington Post website.

"I don't think people are really, really sitting down and digesting the real effects of this presidency," Breitweiser says.

"I don't think I'm stretching that far out of the box to say his administration showed a breathtaking ineptitude in leading this country toward a safer tomorrow," she says.

The war in Iraq and the detainment of foreign terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has made the nation less safe, not more so, she says. With resources drained by the war in Iraq, the administration has not done enough to protect potential terrorist targets such as chemical and nuclear facilities and transportation systems, she says.

Breitweiser criticizes federal prosecutors' track record in terrorism convictions, many of which have been plea bargains.

"In years to come, people are going to get killed in hotels and subways and buses all around the world because of payback" by terrorists, she says. "There are more people in the world today hating Americans because of President Bush's bad decisions. The only thing I can say is that I don't blame just him."

As the economy plunges into recession, "I know it's easy to forget about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and say, 'It was a mistake and we were lied to' and move on," she says. "But that's a lot of lives that were lost because of this president's bad decision-making."

The negotiator
Mary Fetchet also was new to political activism when she began lobbying alongside Breitweiser for the probe into the 9/11 attacks. Before Fetchet's son Bradley died in the World Trade Center, she was a social worker.

"I really didn't follow politics closely before 9/11," says Fetchet, who heads Voices of September 11th, a family support agency that is creating an online memorial to those killed in the attacks. "I don't know that I had an opinion" about President Bush.

She acquired one when she spent months in Washington lobbying for the commission's creation and then for legislation to implement its recommendations for improving U.S. intelligence.

"It was an uphill battle, working with the administration," she says, citing White House "reluctance" to create the commission. As a result, she is reluctant to give Bush credit for preventing another terrorist incident here.

"Our country's safer than it was post-9/11," she says, "but it was a collective effort of many like-minded people."

The sister
Cathie Ong-Herrera didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but when she was invited by the New York mayor's office to be part of a family honor guard for the president on Sept. 11, 2002, to mark the first anniversary of the attacks, she was pleased.

Even before she knew her sister was on one of the crashed planes, Ong-Herrera had been dismayed by Bush's initial response the day of the attacks. He was reading to schoolchildren in Florida when his chief of staff whispered the news in his ear.

"He appeared as if he didn't know what to do and just kept reading to the children," says Ong-Herrera, who lives in Bakersfield, Calif., and now runs the Betty Ann Ong Foundation, dedicated to children's health.

Even so, Ong-Herrera says she was "very honored to be asked" to be at the Trade Center site when Bush laid a wreath there. Her pleasure turned to hurt when Bush didn't speak to her as he greeted the families.

"When he first came down the ramp and I was watching him, I just felt like, 'Wow, it's going to be OK.' There was power there. Things were going to be OK. But as he walked past me and never said anything or even turned to acknowledge (me), I was kind of like, 'Wow.' … I was standing right next to him by the wreath there. I never got to talk to him, or shake his hand."

She was disappointed the president would not appear publicly before the 9/11 Commission. Instead, Bush met privately with the panel after initially agreeing to meet only with it leaders.

"Back then we were still almost lost, looking for information, trying to find information and grasp whatever information we could," Ong-Herrera says.

"It really cast some doubt in my mind as to how willing he was to help the families."

The firefighter
Bush first visited Ground Zero three days after the attacks.

Standing on the mountain of debris, the president put his arm around a retired firefighter, raised a bullhorn and said: "I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

Lee Ielpi was there. He didn't look up. He was searching for the body of his son, Jonathan, 29, a firefighter.

"We just said, everybody will do what they have to do but we're going to continue working," he says.

It took three months of digging before Jonathan's body was found. Now Ielpi, himself a retired firefighter, spends his days across the street from the World Trade Center site, at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, which he helped to found.

Unlike the Ground Zero memorial, still years away from completion, the tribute center has been open since 2006. Among its first visitors: Bush.

"I think he did the best he could under the circumstances," says Ielpi, who voted for Bush twice and supported the invasion of Iraq. "I was in favor, just like Congress was in favor."

Radical Islamic terrorism was a known threat well before Bush took office, Ielpi says, citing the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole

"What did we do after those events? We didn't do too much," he says. "We had missed opportunities to do away with this so-called bin Laden character. We fell back into complacency."

He worries about complacency now, as 9/11 becomes more distant. A young girl came to the center thinking that the destruction of the World Trade Center was simply a plane crash, he says.

"We have people coming to Tribute who don't know about (9/11)," Ielpi says. "I mean that."

He wants schools to have a curriculum on the events of 9/11.

"If we're not teaching our young, if we're not enlightening our young, how do we expect to enlighten anybody else?"

The networker
Bill Doyle also remembers his reaction to Bush's bullhorn talk.

"When he stood on that pile of rubble, I felt good: We're going to get after these people," says Doyle, whose son Joey, 21, died in the collapse of the towers.

Instead, he says, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden "is still hiding in the mountains" and the U.S. military has been more occupied with the aftermath of its Iraq invasion.

Doyle has been a key information source for 9/11 families by keeping an e-mail list that reaches nearly all of them. The Florida retiree is part of 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism, which has filed a lawsuit against banks and charities that allegedly helped fund the attacks.

He believes the Bush administration did not provide full information to the 9/11 Commission, which he calls "a sham," or to a congressional investigation of terrorism financing in 2002.

When the Doyle family received a condolence letter from the president for the loss of their son, they were so angry that Doyle's wife, Camille, tore it up.

Bush "made a sworn promise: The people that did this, we're coming after you," Doyle says. "He didn't keep it."

The defense analyst
Donn Marshall, a Pentagon defense analyst, believes that even before 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to go to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But when his wife, Shelley, who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was killed at the Pentagon, he put faith in the president.

"When a crisis hits, you look to your leader and you hope he has the intelligence and the skills to affect a positive change," says Marshall, who did not vote for Bush. "You give him the benefit of the doubt … and keep your fingers crossed."

Seven years later, he believes Bush's legacy will be one of "squandered opportunity," failing to address economic conditions overseas that allow terrorists to gain footholds.

"We had the opportunity to … 'drain the swamp.' You do that by providing economic opportunity and education. If you have a good job, if you have an education to give you prospects for a good job, you're less likely to blow yourself up" in a suicide bombing, Marshall says. "We haven't done that. We've gone around trying to shoot people and trying to torture people."

Marshall doesn't doubt that Bush felt enormous compassion toward him and the other families of those killed. "I think he was totally compassionate," he says. "But that's one thing. And then there's being an effective manager and an effective leader, … (and) he didn't have it."

The supporter
Bush's legacy "is something I've thought about quite a bit over the last month or two as the (presidential) campaign was going on," Lynn Faulkner says.

"It kind of caused me to be a little reflective on the whole thing, and the part that we played in the (2004) election," Faulkner says.

In 2004, Faulkner and daughter Ashley made an ad for Bush's re-election after the president met Ashley, then 15, at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio, and consoled her for the loss of her mother.

Since then, Ashley has been a White House intern, and her father has become unhappy with some of Bush's policies. When the Faulkners visited Bush in the Oval Office, they spotted an open, "well-used" Bible on the president's desk. That reassured Faulkner the president didn't think he could "do it on his own."

Faulkner, who runs a charitable foundation in Mason, Ohio, credits Bush and the Iraq invasion with preventing more attacks. "The greatest legacy that George Bush will leave with, and will probably serve him fairly well in … history, is that he and all of the administration and all of the support people have kept us safe for the last 7½ years."

But Bush is not as true to conservative ideals as he had hoped, Faulkner says. Faulkner thinks Bush was "dead wrong" when he proposed changing immigration laws to provide a route to citizenship to those in the country illegally. And with the federal bailout of financial institutions, including government purchase of large stakes in private financial firms, Bush and the country have "abandoned the free-market system in the last three months. We just threw it away."

"I still feel strongly that we supported the best candidate that was available to us in 2004," Faulkner says. "But I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm disappointed."