Tuesday, September 16, 2003
From MSNBC's Hardball, 2003 September 11:MATTHEWS: They’ve become a force to be reckoned with on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department, and at the White House. . . .
Kristen Brietweiser lost her husband, Ron, who worked in the south tower. And Patty Casazza lost her husband, who was in the north tower.
Kristen, when you think back on that horrible day, in your mind’s eye, what do you think could have been done to prevent it?
KRISTEN BRIETWEISER, WIFE OF 9/11 VICTIM: Certainly, I think that the government could have acted more swiftly, acted more decisively.
When you have a president of the United States remaining seated, listening to second graders read to him for 25 minutes after the second tower was hit, certainly that could have been run more smoothly.
When you have a secretary of defense remaining at his desk at the Pentagon, and unknown to him was the plane that hit the Pentagon until the plane hit the building, you know, that’s a problem.
The plane that hit the Pentagon hit an hour after the attacks in New York. What exactly was the secretary of defense doing at his desk? He should have been in the war room. He should have been making decisions. He should have been protecting me and the 3,000 others who were in the towers.
I was under the understanding that when you took an oath of office, you swore to protect, lead and serve. On the morning of September 11, I question how many of our leaders actually were doing that.
MATTHEWS: Patty, do you share that criticism, that they just lacked the basic human instinct to go on the defensive and move?
PATTY CASAZZA, WIFE OF 9/11 VICTIM: I don’t know if it was a lack of human instinct or perhaps even something more sinister.
MATTHEWS: What do you think it was? When you think it hard.
CASAZZA: Well, when we looked at, when we investigated standard protocols and procedures of, let’s say, NORAD, who was supposed to scramble jets to accompany planes that were off course or whose transponders were turned off, those policies and procedures happen on a daily basis.
And on 9/11, no jets were scrambled until after the Pentagon was hit. That was at 9:38. The first plane was declared hijacked between 8:13 and 8:20. That’s an hour and a half time which NORAD had to scramble the jets.
In the case of Payne Stewart, they scrambled jets within six minutes.
And that was a well-documented rescue attempt. . . .
MATTHEWS: Let me ask Kristen, what do you think of President Bush in term of his handling of 9/11? Just as a person, from that first second when he got the word that the planes, a plane had hit one of the towers.
BREITWEISER: You know, I think that there seems to be no sense of urgency since 9/11 on behalf of the administration the president, certain members of Congress . . .
MATTHEWS: If you were sitting with vice president Dick Cheney now, who’s the real powerhouse in this administration, and could you grill him and he was under sodium pentathol, what would you want to know from him?
BREITWEISER: I would want to know exactly where he was on the morning of 9/11, at exactly what time the jets were scrambled, why was there a failure of the city of New York to effectively evacuate those buildings?
I would want to know why certain members of the bin Laden family and certain Saudi individuals were flown out of the country a few days after the attacks, prior to them being asked questions by the FBI.
I would want to know whether the FBI was, in fact, investigating any of the 19 terrorists.
I would want to know why 28 pages of the joint inquiries report are not being released to the American public.
I would want to know why the American public is not being fully informed as to what went wrong on the morning of September 11 and why there seems to be no sense of concern on behalf of the administration to assure the American public that things have been fixed and that they are safe living in this country. . .
MATTHEWS:Bill Clinton, do you blame him at all?
BREITWEISER: Listen, I think there were certainly some failures. When you look into the 9/11 hijackers, this goes back years. I mean, you look at the meetings in Malaysia. We’ve read GAO reports. We’ve read congressional testimony on behalf of FBI supervisors and, you know, the CIA directors.
This is not just about the Bush administration. This is about the Clinton administration. This is about the Reagan administration, the first Bush administration. I mean, this goes back. This is not just focused on, you know, Bush W.’s administration. There were clearly failures.
And you know what? We need to fix these problems. We need to look at our foreign policy. We need to really start informing the American people so that we can make decisions, both at the polls and at the pumps, because.
MATTHEWS: Who is winning, Kristen? You people, trying to open the files or the people like Cheney you say are trying to keep them closed?
BREITWEISER: All I can say, Chris, is that we’re not going away. .....---
.....| Posted at 00:27 | PERMA-LINK |
|
FEED
TOTAL411 PODCAST
SELECTED VIDEO ]