OLEAN -- Almost unnoticed in the constant din of war news from Iraq, the special panel that's supposed to tell us where national security failed on Sept. 11, 2001 held its first public hearing earlier this month in New York City. Some of the testimony was astounding, and would certainly be front page news in quieter times. Yet it was roundly ignored by a magpie media preoccupied with the fighting in Iraq.
The irony here is almost circular. Were it not for the seminal catastrophe of Sept. 11, American troops likely would be unable to identify Baghdad from bagpipes. Yet the press, and a good portion of the American public, acts as if Sept. 11 never occurred. It may be that forgetting is good for the soul, but we fail to remember at our enduring peril.
Just saying the name of the Sept. 11 panel is a mouthful. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- which had much trouble and woe even coming into existence -- held its first hearing in the U.S. Custom House near the old Bowling Green in the south end of Manhattan, just a few blocks from Ground Zero, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell to terrorist hijackers 18 months ago.
If federal officials who picked the hearing site were trying to stir patriotic emotions, or summon the ghosts of national history and American heroes past, they knew what they were doing.
Bowling Green, the oldest existing public park in America, is where Peter Minuit, the Dutch governor when Holland owned New York, 377 years ago purchased Manhattan from the Indians for $24 in trinkets.
In July of 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was read to George Washington's troops in New York, they marched to Bowling Green with the Sons of Liberty, pulled down a statue of King George III, tore the head from it and put it on a spike, then sent the rest of the metal to a foundry in Connecticut and made 40,000 patriot bullets out of it.
When the whipped British redcoats finally sailed home in November of 1783, they mustered at Bowling Green before embarking. Minutes later, a triumphant George Washington rode in to grand acclaim. The new nation was on its way.
George Washington must still be spinning in his tomb from the Custom House testimony. You want outrageous? How's this for openers?
Securities and Exchange Commission Records show that during the week before Sept. 11, somebody purchased huge "put options" on American Airlines and United Airlines -- the two carriers whose planes went down on that calamitous fall day -- on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Put options, entirely legal, are basically stock gambles made by sophisticated investors who are betting in the short term that the market prices of certain shares -- in this case of American and United -- will tumble.
The bets on this happening were the largest trade options on the two airlines ever placed in the history of the Chicago Exchange. When the stock prices on American and United plummeted almost 60 percent in the days following the disaster, the big plungers made a killing -- more than $5 million.
The amount remains unclaimed in a Chicago Exchange account. According to the recent commission testimony, the Chicago Exchange has never disclosed the names of the big winners.
Translation: Somebody knew something.
And the SEC should have known something.
The SEC shares access to sophisticated "real-time" software monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies to keep track of trends in domestic and foreign exchanges that may indicate imminent market-influencing crimes. This little gem -- an option bet big enough to be a major market indicator -- was right in front of the SEC noses just days before Sept. 11.
Investigators for The National Commission on Terrorist attacks used a New Jersey housewife to bring this gross situation to the fore during the hearing. Mindy Kleinberg is the widow of Alan Kleinberg, who was a NASDAQ securities trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, the huge investment firm that was nearly wiped out by the terrorist attack. He was on the 104th floor of Tower One. No chance. He left two sons and a daughter.
The widow Kleinberg, a securities trader's wife who obviously understood the implication of the mammoth put options on American and United, asked in her testimony about Sept. 11 some pretty good questions:
Were the option bets foreign or domestic? Who, by name, was responsible for monitoring these activities? Have they been questioned?
"Why were these aberrant trades not discovered prior to 9/11?" asked Mindy Kleinberg. "Who were the individuals who placed these trades?"
There were ample instances at the hearing of other security breakdowns before Sept. 11 -- enough to make your blood boil. Yet more instances of bonehead bureaucracy were offered concerning the sorry Immigration and Naturalization Service -- a prime whipping-post agency for catching blame in this national disaster.
Most of the 19 terrorists involved in the hijackings were classic "over-stay candidates" -- that is, single, idle young adults from foreign lands with no specific destination in the United States and no compelling reason to be here.
Almost without exception, their visa forms were glaringly incomplete or incorrect -- yet the INS rubber-stamped them as if it were festival seating at a rock concert. Some of the suicide hijackers listed themselves as "students" but failed to jot down any school or college, a supposedly strict requirement. When asked for a destination, one terrorist wrote "hotel" and another put down "no."
When I moved back to New York State 11 months ago -- about a half-year after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks -- I had to make four separate, frustrating trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles for license and registration, mostly because I possessed a Virginia drivers license, same as seven of the Sept. 11 terrorists. This kind of vigilance, I supposed, is to be applauded. But it might have been nice if the bureaucrats had exercised a little of it before 3,000 innocent people lost their lives.
Had the INS and State Department foreign visa personnel followed even a loose interpretation of the entry laws, at least 15 of the terrorist hijackers would have been denied visas.
"Help us to understand how something as simple as reviewing forms for completeness could have been missed at least 15 times," said the widow Kleinberg to the commission in New York City. "How many more lucky terrorists gained unfettered access into this country?"
From elsewhere in commission testimony, we now know the national security response was pitiful after the first inkling of trouble. Both the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) scramble to defend the homeland -- portrayed in multiple movies as heroic and efficient -- came up fatefully lame on Sept. 11. NORAD's own records show it. Just 28 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 left Boston's Logan Airport on that morning, the cockpit became unresponsive to ground control. FAA radar showed deviation from declared flight path. Transponder contact went silent. And by that time two flight attendants on the doomed jet -- which eventually plowed into one of the trade center towers -- had even called American Airlines offices to report the hijacking, the presence of weapons and injuries to passengers and crew. Duh. Something seem out of the ordinary?
Yet, NORAD records -- the new terrorism panel was told -- show the defense command was not contacted until 20 minutes later, and fighter jets weren't scrambled until 12 minutes after that. That's a full 32 minutes to respond after loss of contact, and the North East Air Defense System part of NORAD had a full battle center staffed and fighter jets "cocked, loaded, and carrying extra gas" because it was in the middle of a training exercise called "Vigilant Guardian." How ironic can you get?
Similar delays were shown after knowledge of the other three hijacked flights on that bastardly day. And, catch this, responding fighter jets were not scrambled from the closest Air Force bases. For instance, to intercept the flight that eventually rammed into the Pentagon, jets were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., rather than from Andrews Air Force Base right across the Potomac River. The potentially life-saving interceptors were still miles away when the flight crashed into the Pentagon -- one hour and 11 minutes after NORAD confirmed the first hijacking. Plus, the belatedly scrambled fighter jets did not fly at maximum speed of engagement. Why?
Inside the Pentagon, it was even more embarrassing. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was having a routine meeting when he saw on television the first report of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, initially described as a commuter flight accident. Somebody apparently turned off the TV and he went ahead with the meeting. Meanwhile, the second tower is hit -- turning the odds against it being accidental to about a zillion to one. Nobody told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff! Nobody! He continued his meeting. He didn't know it was a terrorist attack until a third jet hit the Pentagon itself!
Same for the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The first he heard about the terrorist attacks was when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon at 9:41 a.m. and he felt the huge building shake. This despite the fact the National Military Command Center -- located in the very same building -- had been in contact with air traffic controllers and knew of the emergency situation since 8:46 a.m., 55 minutes earlier. Helloooooo? Ya think someone might tell the national leaders there's trouble afoot?
Why aren't Americans outraged by this? Why aren't the talking heads on TV screaming about this stuff instead of yapping empty narration as we watch Saddam's statue being hauled down for the 4,768th time in a row? One reason: None of this paper trail photographs very well. Television denies -- but still follows -- the sad maxim, "If it bleeds, it leads."
And don't count on the new commission to uncover all the answers, either.
The disdainful New York City mayor, fire chief and police commissioner stiffed the panel's Manhattan hearing, deliberately showing up on the wrong day and catching the commission members unprepared.
The House and Senate didn't get around to fully funding the panel (at $11 million) until Saturday, and President Bush -- who was tepid about the board of inquiry -- will probably sign the funding bill somewhat begrudgingly. His first tries at appointing someone to lead the vital panel at the end of last year were almost laughable.
Henry Kissinger was forced to resign the post when critics pointed out that his lucrative foreign consultancies to myriad questionable countries and characters provided as pure a conflict of interest as one could conceive. Former senator George Mitchell bailed with the lame excuse that he couldn't make enough money from his law firm if he took the time-consuming post. The panel is now headed by former New Jersey governor Tom Kean.
Trouble there, too. Kean is on the board of directors of Amerada Hess, a giant petroleum firm that participates with Delta Oil in a joint drilling venture in Azerbaijan, which possesses one of the largest undeveloped oil fields on the planet. So what, you say?
Delta Oil is a Saudi Arabian firm whose backers include Khalid bin Mahfouz. Guess who Mahfouz is married to? Answer: Osama bin Laden's sister. Mahfouz is also suspected of funding charities linked to al-Qaeda and is named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by families of Sept. 11 victims.
There aren't even six degrees of separation there. Irony rampant. Irony triumphant.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 15 2003 |