Part II:

What happened next is, however, more interesting. He left the classroom just before 9:15 for a holding room and, while the Commission Report is painfully polite and circumspect about the minutes that follow, we do learn that "no one with the President was in contact with the Pentagon." (This was before the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines Flight 77 at 9:37:46 AM.). This, remember, is our future "war president" girding for action. As it turns out, the only significant thing discussed, according to the Report, seems to have been a statement he was going to make to the American people. In other words, at a time when we were "under attack," the only issue for the President and his aides was what he should say. ("The focus," as the Report puts it dryly, "was on the President's statement to the nation.") Words, explanation, spin, this was how our war president and his advisors initially reacted to the assaults.



"The only decision made during this time," the Report also claims, "was to return to Washington." In fact, as we know, the President did not "return to Washington." He and his aides boarded Air Force One and soon made a panic-stricken dash westward to nowhere in particular, landing first at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where the President made a stumbling statement to the nation ("which for security reasons was taped and not broadcast live," says the Commission Report without further comment), and then on to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. This, then, was our future war president's idea of leadership, something that looked remarkably like flight.



Put another way, the President froze initially; he and his advisors then thought only about what to say; they then panicked and headed or were directed away from the nation's capital, not even making a "live" statement to a traumatized nation. His safety, in other words, was made paramount over anything else at the very moment when hundreds of people in New York City were making the safety of others paramount over theirs. By any other name, this would be called, if nothing else, institutional cowardice.



In the meantime, Vice President Cheney in Washington, as James Mann reported in the Atlantic Magazine, had panicked in quite a different but interconnected way, flipping into behavior from a long-practiced "Armageddon Plan" meant for nuclear war that functionally imagined the nation's leadership beheaded. He promptly took over the government and was evidently himself most responsible for diverting the President away from Washington. (Who needed young George when everything was in Dick Cheney's hands?)



According to reporter Scott Paltrow in the Wall Street Journal, Cheney told the President or his advisors that there was "a specific threat that Air Force One itself had been targeted by terrorists. Mr. Cheney emphasized that the threat included a reference to what he called the secret code word for the presidential jet, 'Angel.'" This threat, Cheney later claimed, came to him from a Secret Service Agent or still later, from some unnamed "uniformed military person" who has never turned up again or been identified. The 9/11 Commission Report states (on p. 39) that "[t]he Vice President recalled urging the President not to return to Washington" and then (on p. 325) that this was due to "a misunderstood communication in the hectic White House Situation Room that morning." Similarly, the Vice President claims he had a telephone conversation with the President in which he received George Bush's personal directive to order the shooting down of hijacked planes (an order, his aide Scooter Libby says, he acted on decisively, "in about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing"). Of this conversation, too, there is no record. The 9/11 Commission Report says only, "Among the sources that reflect other important events of that morning [including other similar phone calls], there is no documentary evidence for this call, but the relevant sources are incomplete." (Even the Vice President's wife "did not note [such] a call between the President and Vice President" and she seems to have been noting just about everything.)



Finally, we have on p. 43 of the Commission Report, a remarkable exchange between the Vice President, already in his Armageddon bunker -- "the shelter," the Commission Report calls it -- and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in which the Vice President claims to have ordered the shooting down of hijacked aircraft and "it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out." It's hard not to read pride into these statements. As we know, the Vice President would from then on remain largely embunkered in one fashion or another for months to come, hunkered down for and geared up for acts of war.



This then is the record of the Bush administration on their first September 11th. It reflects much that was to come. First of all, as we saw with the staggering levels of security employed for the recent Republican Convention, whether Americans are safer or not, our leaders have certainly made themselves the safest men on Earth. Nothing can happen to them. Of course, this, too, is a form of cowardice. From second one, their embunkering and their safety was their primary impulse. Their fear was a second theme. It was visible in the President in that classroom. It was visible in the Armageddon-style and Armageddon-style actions of the Vice President. It was reflected in the very locations where they chose to spend their time.



For the President in particular, the first post-9/11 hours were, I'm convinced, a humiliation. Almost everybody has experienced some terrible moment when you freeze and do not act as you might have wished. But not everybody is the President of the United States. Much of the bluster to follow -- that "swagger" the President talked about in his Convention speech -- was on his part, I believe, a reaction to and a deep desire to cover up the look (and perhaps the feel) of this missed moment. A third theme was certainly panic and, in the Vice-President's case, rash and aggressive acts of war meant to take out... well, whomever.



Normally, the Vietnam-era records of these two men would not matter to me a bit. But in both cases they reflected a similar urge to duck at an earlier moment of crisis. What's more striking than Dick Cheney's various well-timed acts leading to deferments, or the string-pulling for George, or even his seeming avoidance of service for months at a time in those years is the fact that no record exists of their positions then. There are no statements at all from those years on the primary subject of that moment, wherever you stood, other than Cheney's classic comment, "I had better things to do." They didn't oppose or support, they just evaded. It wasn't draft-dodging; it was event dodging.



For them, those years are in a sense a blank. The only wars they had attended took place in the movie theaters of their childhoods where they watched mythologized versions of the World War II deeds of the previous generation. These were the thrilling visions of American victory which they carried, untarnished by the reality of war, untouched by the Vietnam years, right up to September 11, 2001 and into the years thereafter when George Bush would metamorphose into a swaggering "war president" with that crossed-out list of al-Qaeda "high value targets" in his desk drawer and his trophy from the unending war he did manage to start -- Saddam's pistol captured in that famed "spiderhole" -- now hanging in the Monica Lewinsky memorial room in the White House.



Sheltering America



Now, they have chosen the view from "the shelter" for all of us Americans. Their embunkered, panicky, fearful world is ours as well, and so many things Americans once thought valuable, freedoms especially, have been sacrificed thoughtlessly at its altar. For them, any carnage is permissible Out There as long as, first, they are safe, and second, Americans are safe. And now that we are even half-looking, it's tough indeed to get operatives from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, North Africa or wherever into this country to commit mayhem. This was hardly a difficult trick. But from a global perspective, the decision to make American safety the only significant safety, to fight, as they love to say, "on their soil, not ours," is perhaps the greatest cowardice of all. It represents an embunkering and a mad triumph of fundamentalist thought on all sides, political as well as religious, a formula guaranteed to terrorize our poor planet and sooner or later us as well. This is certainly the victory of Osama bin Laden.



So look at those many towers growing up right now in the soil of our damaged planet. Watch those distant figures dropping from their heights. Check out the piles of bodies rising ever higher. There's no need to return to September 11th 2001, not when you can welcome yourself into the world of September 33rd. taken from ZNet - ©by Tom Engelhardt