When it comes to 9/11, America right now is divided between two camps, those who trust the official account of the attacks, and those who, well, have questions. It’s occasionally the case that the first camp will publicly denounce the second camp as a bunch of nutcases, and when this happens, it’s usually the rowdier section of Camp Two, the Loose Change, bullhorn-wielding, “death to the New World Order” crowd, that takes the most heat.
What tends to get ignored, however, is the quieter section of Camp Two, and especially a group of widowed mothers from New Jersey and New York who over the last six years have worked harder than just about anyone to protect the country from terrorism. Few people realize that had it not been for the tireless efforts of the “Jersey girls” – Mindy Kleinberg, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Patty Casazza, and Monica Gabrielle – not only would the 9/11 Commission never have happened, but there most likely never would have been any investigation into what was the worst loss of life on American soil since the Civil War. No inquiry into our failed military defenses, or the collapse of the towers, or just why it was that President Bush sat in that Florida classroom for a full seven minutes after the second plane struck. No scientific reports, no effort to discover what went wrong, no hearings of any kind. No attempt to figure out the details of the whole who, what, where, when and why of the attacks. And again, what few people realize is that today, six years later, the Jersey girls are still fighting the exact same fight they were fighting on September 12, 2001, and for the same reason: to keep you, and me, and everyone we know, safe from terrorism.
“The story of how we got started with this is really simple,” says Mindy Kleinberg, who lost her husband Alan in WTC I. “After my husband was killed, I got involved with a support group that included family members of the victims of Pan AM 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. And I realized that if the government had only hardened cockpit doors like those family members had demanded prior to 2001, the 9/11 hijackings never could have taken place. And I felt terrible, personally responsible for not having spoken up sooner. But it also made me realize that there are practical steps people can take to keep horrible things like this from happening. So that’s why we went to Washington. It was a moral obligation. There was no agenda, nothing political. We just wanted to do whatever needed to be done to make sure the country would be safe for our kids.”
Long before the Jersey girls ever began appearing on national TV, they were leaving their children with friends and relatives and making repeated trips to Washington, where they went from office to office, pressuring Congress into establishing an official investigation into the attacks. The 9/11 Commission was largely the work of the Family Steering Committee, a group formed by the Jersey widows along with several other 9/11 families who, after reading everything they could get their hands on about 9/11, drew up a voluminous list of questions they wanted to see answered, the goal being to provide the 9/11 Commission with every piece of information it would need to do a solid investigation.
The questions covered everything from the president’s actions on the morning of 9/11, to why hijacked airplanes were permitted to fly around for nearly two hours in U.S. airspace without any military response, to why no one at any level of the government has ever been held responsible for the many failings leading up to the attacks. The widows had high hopes for the 9/11 Commission Report, but when it was published in July of 2004 they were bitterly disappointed. While the public moved on, widely assuming 9/11 to be a bygone issue, the widows were stuck with the frustrating realization that the investigation they’d worked so hard to achieve had utterly failed to meet their expectations.
“It was a pathetic excuse of a report,” says Lorie Van Auken, whose husband Kenneth was killed in WTC I. “Seventy percent of our questions went unanswered. The legislation gave the Commission eighteen months to do the investigation, and even though they had subpoena power from the start, they waited a full ten months to use it and then only reluctantly. Also, anyone who appeared for questioning, from Rudy Guliani to George Tenet, was handled with kid gloves and lauded with accolades. The Commissioners would say, ‘You’re fabulous, you did a fantastic job on 9/11,’ and they would run out the clock. We couldn’t understand what the point was in having a hearing if no substantive questions were being asked or answered.”
http://www.muckrakerreport.com/id358.html
