WHAT DID PRESIDENT BUSHKNOW, AND WHEN?

Despite the government's systematic failure to respond to the 9/11 attacks themselves, reaction after the fact came so swiftly that it lent support to the disconcerting idea that planning for such a reaction had been made months before. Perhaps the most remarkable and puzzling instance of this apparent foreknowledge is the actual behavior of President Bush himself.

About ten minutes after the North Tower of the WTC was struck, Bush arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, for a photo op with grade school kids. CNN had already interrupted broadcasting to tell of the strike two minutes after it happened, yet reportedly Bush remained unaware until he was briefed shortly after arriving at the school. Or was he?

On more than one occasion Bush said he saw the first plane strike the WTC North Tower. “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘There's one terrible pilot.’” The oddity here is that no video of the strike on the North Tower was available until that evening, when a French camera team revealed that they had accidentally filmed the hit while shooting a documentary in Manhattan.

Could Bush have seen the hit via an unannounced private broadcast? This possibility was hinted at when Vice President Cheney, during an interview with Meet the Press on September 16, 2001, said, “The Secret Service has an arrangement with the FAA. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was…” He ended his statement and moved on to other matters. If Bush indeed witnessed the first strike, why have all later official versions of the school events stated otherwise?

Bush told the school principal that “a commercial plane has hit the World Trade Center and we're going ahead and…do the reading thing anyway.” Bush then entered the classroom at about the same time as the second plane struck the WTC South Tower. Moments later, then Chief of Staff Andrew Card entered the front of the room and whispered to Bush, alerting him that a second plane had struck and that this was clearly a terrorist attack. To the later amazement of many, Bush calmly continued his interaction with the second-graders—even as the rest of country watched terrorist mayhem consume lower Manhattan, and while two additional hijacked planes remained in the air over American territory.

In an effort to address criticism of Bush's lack of immediate action, Card later altered the time frame by telling newsmen that after he informed the president of the second strike, “Not that many seconds later the president excused himself from the classroom.” It is now known, however, and supported by video tapes of the photo op, that Bush remained in the classroom until 9:16 am, more than seven hundred seconds after Card's notification.

Adding to this puzzling behavior on the part of the nation's commander-in-chief is the fact that his Secret Service detail surely must have realized the danger to the president inherent in a large-scale terrorist attack. Yet, Bush was allowed to finish his chat with the elementary students and calmly leave the school after making general comments to the media. He also left by the same motorcade and along the originally planned route even after officials were alerted that White House security codes had been compromised. Air Force One then left Florida with no military jet escort—disconcertingly odd behavior considering the potential danger to the president.

What did the president know, and when? Was the threat to Air Force One an attempt to terrorize the president himself? “The guess here is that Bush knew far less than many of his most severe critics might surmise,” wrote Webster Griffin Tarpley, a veteran journalist, lecturer, and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror. “Bush's crime was not the crime of knowing everything in advance; it was rather the crime of not knowing what he should have known, and then compounding that by capitulating, by turning the US Government and policy in the direction demanded by the terror plotters…Students who build their work around the thesis that ‘Bush Knew’ are on treacherous ground.”