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This column ran on page 1 in the 2/16/2004 edition of The New York
Observer.
by Gail Sheehy
[You may reach Gail Sheehy via email at: gsheehy@observer.com]
===============
Hearing the taped voice of a courageous flight attendant as she calmly
narrated the doomed course of American Airlines Flight 11 brought it all
back. The frozen horror of that September morning two and a half years
ago. The unanswered questions. Betty Ong narrated that first hijacking
right up to the moment that Mohamed Atta drove the Boeing 767 into the
north tower of the World Trade Center.
Twenty-three minutes into her blow-by-blow account, Ong's voice abruptly
ceased. "What's going on, Betty?" asked her ground contact, Nydia
Gonzalez. "Betty, talk to me. I think we might have lost her."
Emotional catharsis, yes. There was scarcely a dry eye in the Senate
hearing room where 10 commissioners are probing the myriad failures of our
nation's defenses and response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But
answers? Not many. The most shocking evidence remains hidden in plain
sight.
The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public
airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the
American public and most of the victims families heard for the first time
on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the
crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by
another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney.
They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses
which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as
a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant
conflict.
"My wife's call was the first specific information the airline and the
government got that day," said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy
Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11. She gave
seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed
officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men by name even before the
first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a
traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account
of a bomb on board.
"How do you know it's a bomb?" asked her phone contact.
"Because the hijackers showed me a bomb," Sweeney said, describing its
yellow and red wires.
Sweeney's first call from the plane was at 7:11 a.m. on Sept. 11 - the
only call in which she displayed emotional upset. Flight 11 was delayed,
and she seized the few moments to call home in hopes of talking to her
5-year-old daughter, Anna, to say how sorry she was not to be there to put
her on the bus to kindergarten. Ms. Sweeney's son Jack had been born
several months premature, and she had taken the maximum time off over the
previous summer to be with her children. "But she had to go back that
fall, to hold the Boston-to-L.A. trip," explained her husband.
American's Flight 11 took off from Logan Airport in Boston at 7:59 a.m. By
8:14 a.m., the F.A.A. controller following that flight from a facility in
Nashua, N.H., already knew it was missing; its transponder had been turned
off, and the controller couldn't get a response from the pilots. The
air-traffic controller contacted the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175,
which at 8:14 also left Boston's Logan bound for California, and asked for
his help in locating Flight 11.
Sweeney slid into a passenger seat in the next-to-last row of coach and
used an Airfone to call American Airlines Flight Service at Boston's Logan
airport. "This is Amy Sweeney," she reported. "I'm on Flight 11 - this
plane has been hijacked." She was disconnected. She called back: "Listen
to me, and listen to me very carefully." Within seconds, her befuddled
respondent was replaced by a voice she knew.
"Amy, this is Michael Woodward." The American Airlines flight service
manager had been friends with Sweeney for a decade, so he didnt have to
waste any time verifying that this wasn't a hoax. "Michael, this plane has
been hijacked," Ms. Sweeney repeated. Calmly, she gave him the seat
locations of three of the hijackers: 9D, 9G and 10B. She said they were
all of Middle Eastern descent, and one spoke English very well.
Mr. Woodward ordered a colleague to punch up those seat locations on the
computer. At least 20 minutes before the plane crashed, the airline had
the names, addresses, phone numbers and credit cards of three of the five
hijackers. They knew that 9G was Abdulaziz al-Omari, 10B was Satam
al-Suqami, and 9D was Mohamed Atta - the ringleader of the 9/11
terrorists.
"The nightmare began before the first plane crashed," said Mike Sweeney,
"because once my wife gave the seat numbers of the hijackers and Michael
Woodward pulled up the passenger information, Mohamed Atta's name was out
there. They had to know what they were up against."
Mr. Woodward was simultaneously passing on Sweeney's information to
American's headquarters in Dallas-Fort Worth. There was no taping facility
in his office, because the most acute emergency normally fielded by a
flight service manager would be a call from a crew member faced with 12
passengers in first class and only eight meals. So Mr. Woodward was
furiously taking notes.
Amy Sweeney's account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was
occurring. She told Mr. Woodward she didn't believe the pilots were flying
the plane any longer. She couldn't contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have
ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news
to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat. In professional
lingo, she said: "Our No. 1 has been stabbed," referring to a violent
attack on the plane's purser, "also No. 5," another flight attendant. She
also reported that the passenger in 9B had had his throat slit by the
hijacker sitting behind him and appeared to be dead. Betty Ong relayed
this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North
Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open
line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company's Dallas
headquarters.
The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a
passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that
this was anything but a standard hijacking. "I don't recall any flight
crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my
career," said Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with
American for 28 years.
Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney also reported that the hijackers had used mace
or pepper spray and that passengers in business class were unable to
breathe. Another dazzling clue to the hijackers having a unique and
violent intent came in Betty Ong's earliest report: "The cockpit is not
answering their phone. We can't get into the cockpit. We dont know who's
up there."
A male colleague of Ms. Gonzalez then comes on the line and makes the
infuriating observation: "Well, if they were shrewd, they'd keep the door
closed. Would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?"
To which Ong replied: "I think the guys are up there."
Ms. Sweeney told her ground contact that the plane had radically
changed direction; it was flying erratically and was in rapid descent.
Mr. Woodward asked her to look out the window - what did she see?
"I see water. I see buildings. We're flying low, we're flying way too
low," Sweeney replied, according to the notes taken by Mr. Woodward.
Sweeney then took a deep breath and gasped, "Oh, my God."
At 8:46 a.m., Mr. Woodward lost contact with Amy Sweeney - the moment of
metamorphosis, when her plane became a missile guided into the tower
holding thousands of unsuspecting civilians. "So sometime between 8:30 and
8:46, American must have known that the hijacking was connected to Al
Qaeda," said Mike Sweeney. That would be 16 to 32 minutes before the
second plane perforated the south tower.
Would American Airlines officials monitoring the Sweeney and Woodward
dialogue have known right away that Mohamed Atta was connected to Al
Qaeda?
"The answer is probably yes," said 9/11 commission member Bob Kerrey, "but
it seems to me that the weakness here, in running up to pre-9/11, is an
unwillingness to believe that the United States of America could be
attacked. Then you're not putting defensive mechanisms in place. You're
not trying to screen out people with connections to Islamic extremist
groups."
Peg Ogonowski, the widow of Flight 11s captain, John Ogonowski, knew both
Betty and Amy very well. "They had to know they were dealing with
zealots," she said. "The words - Middle Eastern hijackers - would put a
chill in any flight-crew members heart. They were unpredictable; you
couldnt reason with them."
Ms. Ogonowski knew this from her nearly three decades of experience as a
flight attendant for American. She and her husband had dreamt of the time
in the not-so-distant future when their teenage children would be old
enough that the couple could work the same flight to Europe and enjoy
layovers in London and Paris together. She had been scheduled to fly
Flight 11 on Sept. 13. After Sept. 11, she imagined herself in Sweeney's
shoes: "When Amy picked up the phone - she was mother of two very young
children - she had to know that, at that point, she might be being
observed by another hijacker sitting in a passenger seat who would put a
bullet through her head. What she did was incredibly brave."
How, then, could the commission have missed - or ignored - crucial facts
that this very first of the first responders communicated to officials on
that fateful day?
"It seems amazing to me that they didnt know," said Mrs. Ogonowski. "The
state of Massachusetts has an award in Amy Sweeney's name for civilian
bravery." The first recipients were John Ogonowski and Betty Ong. A
full-court ceremony was held on Sept. 11, 2002, in Faneuil Hall in Boston,
with Senators Kennedy and Kerrey and the state's whole political
establishment in attendance.
Even the F.B.I. has recognized Amy Sweeney by bestowing on her its highest
civilian honor, the Directors Award for Exceptional Public Service. "Mrs.
Sweeney is immeasurably deserving of recognition for her heroic, unselfish
and professional manner in which she lived the last moments of her life,"
according to the F.B.I.
What her husband wants to know is this: "When and how was this information
about the hijackers used? Were Amy's last moments put to the best use to
protect and save others?"
"We know what she said from notes, and the government has them," said Mary
Schiavo, the formidable former Inspector General of the Department of
Transportation, whose nickname among aviation officials was "Scary Mary."
Ms. Schiavo sat in on the commissions hearing on aviation security on 9/11
and was disgusted by what it left out. "In any other situation, it would
be unthinkable to withhold investigative material from an independent
commission," she told this writer. "There are usually grave consequences.
But the commission is clearly not talking to everybody or not telling us
everything."
This is hardly the only evidence hiding in plain sight.
The captain of Americans Flight 11 stayed at the controls much of the
diverted way from Boston to New York, sending surreptitious radio
transmissions to authorities on the ground. Captain John Ogonowski was a
strong and burly man with the instincts of a fighter pilot who had
survived Vietnam. He gave extraordinary access to the drama inside his
cockpit by triggering a "push-to-talk button" on the aircrafts yoke (or
wheel). "The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New
York," an F.A.A. air-traffic controller told The Christian Science Monitor
the day after the catastrophe. "He wanted us to know something was wrong.
When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew there was this
voice that was threatening the pilot, and it was clearly threatening."
According to a timeline later adjusted by the F.A.A., Flight 11's
transponder was turned off at 8:20 a.m., only 21 minutes after takeoff.
(Even before that, by probably a minute or so, Amy Sweeney began her
report to American's operations center at Logan.) The plane turned south
toward New York, and more than one F.A.A. controller heard a transmission
with an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background, saying, "We
have more planes. We have other planes." During these transmissions, the
pilot's voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly
audible, according to two controllers. All of it was recorded by a F.A.A.
traffic-control center in Nashua, N.H. According to the reporter, Mark
Clayton, the federal law-enforcement officers arrived at the F.A.A.
facility shortly after the World Trade Center attack and took the tape.
To this writer's knowledge, there has been no public mention of the
pilot's narrative since the news report on Sept. 12, 2001. Families of the
flight crew have only heard about it, but when Peg Ogonowski asked
American Airlines to let her hear it, she never heard back. Their F.A.A.
superiors forbade the controllers to talk to anyone else.
Has the F.B.I. turned this critical tape over to the commission?
At the commission's January panel on aviation security, two rows of gray
suits filled the back of the hearing room. They were not inspectors
general of any of the government agencies called to testify. In fact, said
Mary Schiavo, there is no entity within the administration pushing any
consequences. The gray suits were all attorneys for the airlines, hovering
around while the big bosses from American and United gave their utterly
unrevealing testimonies.
Robert Bonner, the head of Customs and Border Protection, finally shot
back at the panel with a startling boast.
"We ran passenger manifests through the system used by Customs - two were
hits on our watch list of August 2001," Mr. Bonner testified. "And by
looking at the Arab names and their seat locations, ticket purchases and
other passenger information, it didnt take a lot to do a rudimentary link
analysis. Customs officers were able to ID 19 probable hijackers within 45
minutes."
He meant 45 minutes after four planes had been hijacked and turned into
missiles. "I saw the sheet by 11 a.m.," he said, adding proudly, "And that
analysis did indeed correctly identify the terrorists."
How has American Airlines responded? According to the widower Mike
Sweeney, "Ever since Sept. 11, AMR [the parent company of American
Airlines] just wants to forget this whole thing happened. They wouldn't
allow me to talk to Michael Woodward, and five months or so: they let him
go." The Families' Steering Committee urged the commission to interview
Michael Woodward about the Sweeney information, as did Ms. Ong's brother,
Harry Ong. A couple of days before the hearing on aviation security, a
staffer did call Mr. Woodward and ask a few questions. But the explosive
narrative offered by Amy Sweeney in her last 23 minutes of life was not
included in the 9/11 commissions hearing on aviation security.
The timeline that is most disturbing belongs to the last of the four
suicide missions - United Airlines Flight 93, later presumed destined for
the U.S. Capitol, if not the White House. Huge discrepancies persist in
basic facts, such as when it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside
near Shanksville. The official impact time according to NORAD, the North
American Air Defense Command, is 10:03 a.m. Later, U.S. Army seismograph
data gave the impact time as 10:06:05. The F.A.A. gives a crash time of
10:07 a.m. And The New York Times, drawing on flight controllers in more
than one F.A.A. facility, put the time at 10:10 a.m.
Up to a seven-minute discrepancy? In terms of an air disaster, seven
minutes is close to an eternity. The way our nation has historically
treated any airline tragedy is to pair up recordings from the cockpit and
air-traffic control and parse the timeline down to the hundredths of a
second. But as Mary Schiavo points out, "We dont have an NTSB (National
Transportation Safety Board) investigation here, and they ordinarily
dissect the timeline to the thousandth of a second."
Even more curious: The F.A.A. states that it established an open phone
line with NORAD to discuss both American Airlines Flight 77 (headed for
the Pentagon) and Uniteds Flight 93. If true, NORAD had as many as 50
minutes to order fighter jets to intercept Flight 93 in its path toward
Washington, D.C. But NORADs official timeline claims that F.A.A.
notification to NORAD on United Airlines Flight 93 is "not available." Why
isn't it available?
Asked when NORAD gave an order for fighter planes to scramble in response
to United's Flight 93, the air-defense agency notes only that F-16s were
already airborne from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to intercept
Americans Flight 77. The latter jet heaved into the Pentagon at either
9:40 a.m. (according to the F.A.A.) or at 9:38 a.m. (according to NORAD).
Although the F-16's werent in the skies over Washington until 9:49, the
question is: Did they continue flying north in an attempt to deter the
last of the four hijacked jets? The distance was only 129 miles.
The independent commission is in a position to demand such answers, and
many more.
Have any weapons been recovered from any of the four downed planes? If
not, why should the panel assume they were "less-than-four-inch knives,"
the description repeatedly used in the commissions hearing on aviation
security? Remember the airlines' first reports, that the whole job was
pulled off with box cutters? In fact, investigators for the commission
found that box cutters were reported on only one plane. In any case, box
cutters were considered straight razors and were always illegal. Thus the
airlines switched their story and produced a snap-open knife of less than
four inches at the hearing. This weapon falls conveniently within the
aviation-security guidelines pre-9/11.
But bombs? Mace or pepper spray? Gas masks? The F.B.I. dropped the clue
that the hijackers had "masks" in a meeting with the Four Moms from New
Jersey, the 9/11 widows who rallied for this independent commission.
The Moms want to know if investigators have looked into how the pilots
were actually disabled. To think that eight pilots - four of whom were
formerly in the military, some with combat experience in Vietnam, and all
of whom were in superb physical shape - could have been subdued without a
fight or so much as a sound stretches the imagination. Even giving the
terrorists credit for a militarily disciplined act of war, it is rare for
everything to go right in four separate battles.
Shouldn't the families and the American people know whether or not our
government took action to prevent the second attack planned for the
command-and-control center in Washington?
Melody Homer is another young widow of a 9/11 pilot. Her husband, LeRoy
Homer, a muscular former Air Force pilot, was the first officer of
United's Flight 93. The story put out by United - of heroic passengers
invading the cockpit and struggling with the terrorists - is not
believable to Melody Homer or to Sandy Dahl, widow of the planes captain,
Jason Dahl. Mrs. Dahl was a working flight attendant with United and knew
the configuration of that 757 like the back of her hand.
"We can't imagine that passengers were able to get a cart out of its
locked berth and push it down the single aisle and jam it into the cockpit
with four strong, violent men behind the door," said Ms. Homer. She
believes that the victim's family members who broke a confidentiality
agreement and gave their interpretation of sounds theyd heard on the
cockpit tape misinterpreted the shattering of china. "When a plane goes
erratic, china falls."
Now, the most disturbing disconnect of all: The F.A.A. and NORAD had at
least 42 minutes to decide what to do about Flight 93. What really
happened?
At 9:30 a.m., six minutes after receiving orders from NORAD, three F-16s
were airborne, according to NORAD's timeline. At first, the planes were
directed toward New York and probably reached 600 miles per hour within
two minutes, said Maj. Gen. Mike J. Haugen, adjutant general of the North
Dakota National Guard. Once it was apparent that the New York suicide
missions were accomplished, the Virginia-based fighters were given a new
flight target: Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The pilots heard
an ominous squawk over the planes transponder, a code that indicates
almost an emergency wartime footing. General Haugen says the F-16s were
asked to confirm that the Pentagon was on fire. The lead flier looked down
and verified the worst.
Then the pilots received the most surreal order of the morning, from a
voice identifying itself as a representative of the Secret Service.
According to General Haugen, the voice said: "I want you to protect the
White House at all costs."
During that time, Vice President Richard Cheney called President George W.
Bush to urge him to give the order that any other commercial airliners
controlled by hijackers be shot down. In Bob Woodward's book, Bush at War,
the time of Mr. Cheney's call was placed before 10 a.m. The Vice President
explained to the President that a hijacked airliner was a weapon; even if
the airliner was full of civilians, Mr. Cheney insisted, giving American
fighter pilots the authority to fire on it was "the only practical
answer."
The President responded, according to Mr. Woodward, "You bet."
Defense officials told CNN on Sept. 16, 2001, that Mr. Bush had not given
authorization to the Defense Department to shoot down a passenger airliner
"until after the Pentagon had been struck."
So what happened in the period between just before 10:00 a.m. and 10:03
(or 10:06, or 10:07 ) - when, at some point, the United jet crashed in a
field in Pennsylvania? Did the President act on Mr. Cheney's advice and
order the last and potentially most devastating of airborne missiles
brought down before it reached the Capitol? Did Mr. Cheney act on the
Presidents O.K.? Did a U.S. fighter shoot down Flight 93? And why all the
secrecy surrounding that last flight?
Melody Homer, the wife of Flight 93s first officer, was at home in
Marlton, N.J., the morning of Sept. 11 with their 10-month-old child.
Within minutes of seeing the second plane turn into a fireball, Ms. Homer
called the Flight Operations Center at John F. Kennedy International
Airport, which keeps track of all New York-based pilots. She was told that
her husband's flight was fine.
"Whether or not my husband's plane was shot down," the widowed Mrs. Homer
said, "the most angering part is reading about how the President handled
this."
Mr. Bush was notified 14 minutes after the first attack, at 9 a.m., when
he arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He went into a
private room and spoke by phone with his national security advisor,
Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room. Mrs. Homer's soft voice
curdles when she describes his reaction: "I can't get over what Bush said
when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: That's some
bad pilot. Why did people on the street assume right away it was a
terrorist hijacking, but our President didn't know? Why did it take so
long to ground all civilian aircraft? In the time between when my
husband's plane took off [at 8:41 a.m.] and when the second plane hit in
New York [9:02 a.m.], they could have turned back to airfield."
In fact, the pilots of Flight 93 are seldom mentioned in news
reports - only the 40 passengers. And Mrs. Homer says that hurts. "My
husband fought for his country in the Persian Gulf War, and he would
have seen his role that day as the same thing - fighting for his country.
- It's my belief, based on what I've been told by people affiliated with
the Air Force, that at least one of the pilots was very instrumental in
the outcome of that flight. I do believe the hijackers may have taken it
down. But stalling the impetus of the plane so it didnt make it to the
Capitol or the White House - that was one of the pilots."
Melody LeRoy later learned from a member of the Air Force who worked
with her husband that "a couple of weeks before the incident, they
were all sitting around and talking about the intelligence that was
filtering through the military that something big was going to happen.
For all of this to get ignored," she said as she swallowed a sob, "it's
difficult to excuse that."
John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy and one of the most active
interrogators among the commissioners, was told of some of the issues
raised in this article. "These are exactly the right questions," he
said. "We have to put all these details together and then figure out
what went wrong. Who didn't do their job? Not just what was wrong with
the existing system, but human beings."
After 14 months of watching while commissioners politely negotiated with a
White House that has used every known ruse and invented some new ones to
evade, withhold and play peekaboo with the commissioners, the Four Moms
and their Families' Steering Committee feel frustrated almost to the
boiling point.
Who is going to take a long, hard look at the policy failures and the
failures of leadership? This seems to be where some members of the 9/11
commission are heading. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, winding up after
the two-day hearings in January, said she was "amazed and shocked at how
every agency defines its responsibility by leaving out the hard part." She
blasted the F.A.A. for ducking any responsibility for the prevention of
terrorism. "We saw the same attitude in the F.B.I. and C.I.A. - not to use
common sense to evaluate a mission and say what works and what doesn't."
Finally, Ms. Gorelick addressed a pointed question to James Loy, the
deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the vast,
Brobdingnagian bureaucracy which now lashes together 22 federal agencies
that didn't talk to one another before the terrorist attacks.
"Who is responsible for driving the strategy to defeat Al Qaeda and
holding people accountable for carrying it out?" Ms. Gorelick demanded.
"The President is the guy," said Mr. Loy. "And the person next to the
President, who is the national security advisor."
The widows are furious that Dr. Rice was allowed to be interviewed in
private and has not agreedn - or been subpoenaed - to give her testimony,
under oath, before the American people.
When 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean gave his sobering assessment last
December that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented, the Bush White
House saw the bipartisan panel spinning out of its control. In the
President's damage-control interview with NBCs Tim Russert last weekend,
Mr. Bush was clearly still unwilling to submit to questioning by the 9/11
commission. "Perhaps, perhaps," was his negotiating stance.
Asked why he was appointing yet another commission - this one to quell the
uproar over why we attacked Iraq to save ourselves from Saddam's mythical
W.M.D. - the President said, "This is a strategic look, kind of a
big-picture look about the intelligence-gathering capacities of the United
States of America . Congress has got the capacity to look at the
intelligence-gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look
forward to all the investigations and looks."
Congress has already given him a big-picture lookin - a scathing 900-page
report by the joint House and Senate inquiry into the intelligence
failures pre-9/11. But the Bush administration doesn't look at what it
doesn't want to see.
"It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to
aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed," fumes Senator
Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003.
The Bush White House has ignored all but one or two of the joint inquiry's
19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next
attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of
the inquiry's final report to be censored (redacted), claiming national
security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission - whose
mandate was to build on the work of the congressional panel - cannot read
the evidence.
Senator Graham snorted, "Its absurd."