More 911 Questions from The 911 Report

What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action.

Gail Sheehy In Mother Jones asks the question Who's in Charge Here?.

.....The person in charge, she said the commissioners had been told over and over again, would be the president.

“It is an impossible situation for that to remain the case,” Gorelick observed. Impossible, because the commission’s report clearly shows that on the morning of September 11, 2001, the president and the other top officials in charge of the systems to defend the country from attack were, in essence, missing in action: They did not communicate, did not coordinate a response to the catastrophe, and in some cases did not even get involved in discussions about the attacks until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed.

So, where were they?

• Dubya: We all know by now that the pResident was reading a book about a goat to school children in Florida, that's OK. What's not OK is that he continued to read the book about a goat to school children after he was told about the attack.


• Rummy:He was having breakfast with Congressional leaders, and they hear a plane has hit the Pentagon, and he runs out.

  The National Military Command Center (NMCC) inside the Pentagon was the nerve center of the military’s response to the attacks on 9-11. But the lead military officer that day, Brigadier General Montague Winfield, told the commission that the center had been leaderless.“For 30 minutes we couldn’t find [Secretary Rumsfeld].
  ......Don Rumsfeld is known as a take-charge kind of guy. Why was he so uncharacteristically passive in the face of terrorists who were able to kill nearly 3,000 Americans in one morning?

So what was Rummy thinking after the attack?

Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld set up “a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” In May, 2002, Time reported that “Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of September 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed.”