The 9 11 Commission Report Omissions And - Amazon Noir

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CHAPTER FOUR 43 The 9/ 11 Commission should have had some pointed
questions for the president's Secret Service detail, to which they
should have demanded satisfactory answers. But here is the Commission's
entire statement about why the Secret Service did not whisk President
Bush to safety once it was clear the country was undergoing an attack by
terrorists using hijacked airplanes: The Secret Service told us they
were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not
think it imperative for him to run out the door. (39) It evidently did
not occur to any of the Commissioners to point out that there would have
been an option somewhere between "run[ning] out the door" and remaining
at the school for another half hour. The agents could, for example, have
simply walked out the door with the president, gotten into one of the
cars, and driven to an undisclosed location. But the Commissioners
appear to have accepted the Secret Service's totally unsatisfactory
explanation. To accept that explanation would require us to believe that
these highly trained Secret Service agents were, like the president,
more concerned about appearances than about the possibility that a
hijacked airliner might crash into the school, killing the president and
everyone else, including themselves. As far as we can tell, no one on
the Commission found this sense of priorities strange. The Kean-Zelikow
Commission's evident lack of curiosity is suggested by the fact that its
"exacting investigative research" on this matter was evidently limited
to an interview with one member of the Secret Service (463n204). The
fact that the president should have been regarded as in real danger is
suggested in the account provided of that morning by Richard Clarke, who
was the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism. In his
2004 book, Against All Enemies, Clarke says that shortly after the onset
of the teleconference he was running from the Situation Room in the
White House, he and the others paused to listen to the president's
speech from the Sarasota school. During this pause, says Clarke, Brian
Stafford, the Director of the Secret Service, pulled him aside and said:
"We gotta get him out of there to someplace safe... and secret," after
which Clarke told his assistant to work with Stafford to "[f]igure out
where to move the President." 6 Although this account suggests some
later sensitivity to criticism, it