"...a stonewalling job of far greater importance than Watergate."

http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage3.asp

August 22, 2003|10:59 AM

Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush

by Gail Sheehy

In mid-June, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III and several senior agents in the bureau received a group of about 20 visitors in a briefing room of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The director himself narrated a PowerPoint presentation that summarized the numbers of agents and leads and evidence he and his people had collected in the 18-month course of their ongoing investigation of Penttbom, the clever neologism the bureau had invented to reduce the sites of devastation on 9/11 to one word: Pent for Pentagon, Pen for Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the four planes that the government had been forewarned could be used as weapons—even bombs—but chose to ignore.

After the formal meeting, senior agents in the room faced a grilling by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow whose cohorts are three other widowed moms from New Jersey.

"I don’t understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn’t you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"

"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn’t have investigated them all and found these few guys."

"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

"We got lucky," was the reply. <snip>

Gordon25

I read it this morning and decided to copy it. I plan to pass it on to friends as well.

Her email addy is on the bottom of the article. Thank her for writing it and encourage her to write more.

She is the writer who got heat for saying that Bush was dyslexic.

I am copying to e-mail around.

Most people are probaly a bit numb to 9/11 now, but this story brings it all back into crystal clear focus.

Sheehy has the track record and the reputation to get this story some play -- as it well deserves.



"I'm the master of low expectations."
- George W. Bush, Aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

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