is more moderate than they would have suspected.” The New York Times’ Jim Yardley praised Bush’s “bipartisan, above-the-fray image,” while CNN trumpeted Bush’s supposed steps toward “healing a divided nation.”
On Bush’s selection as vice president, Representative Bill Paxon assured a CNN audience that “Dick Cheney is the ultimate man of moderation.” As for Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, CNN’s Tony Clark insisted she “doesn’t not believe the US military should be what is described as a 911 global police force.”
The neoconservatives that honeycombed the Bush administration had flown almost entirely under the media’s radar. A close look at the civilian wing of the Pentagon or the State Department’s Middle East handlers revealed a virtual government jobs program for the signers of PNAC. They included Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s undersecretary of Middle East affairs; Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, a “Clean Break” author hired as undersecretary of defense for policy; his mentor, Richard Perle, now chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; and David Wurmser, an advisor to Cheney on Middle East policy. Having burrowed deep within the administration’s bureaucracy without any real scrutiny, these figures maintained their laser-like focus on Iraq, bringing in Laurie Mylroie, the crank conspiracist who blamed Saddam for the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, as a terror consultant in the Pentagon.
On June 6, 2001, Wolfowitz appeared before an auditorium full of cadets to deliver the commencement address at the West Point Academy in New York state. His remarks centered on the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor and its relevance at the time. Years later, his words are chilling. “Interestingly,” Wolfowitz said, “that surprise attack was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals … Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re surprised by it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always, there have been warnings and signals that have been missed, sometimes because there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out.”
The following month, a senior executive intelligence brief was delivered to the White House entitled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” Wolfowitz dismissed the report out of hand, insisting to the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, that bin Laden was simply trying to study Washington’s reactions by leveling empty threats.
The US media spent the summer of 2001 swarming around the office of Representative Gary Condit, a previously unknown Democratic backbencher who was wrongly suspected of murdering Chandra Levy, his former intern and mistress who had disappeared while jogging in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park. In between fever-pitched dispatches about Condit’s whereabouts, the networks declared the weeks after July 4, 2001, “the summer of the shark,” blitzing viewers with reports of an unprecedented wave of Jaws-level carnage.
The number of shark attacks was actually down from the year before, but without any other source of sensational storylines, American media ginned up a Sharknado epidemic that was leaving half-chewed appendages bobbing in bloody seas. George Burgess, director of shark research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said he fielded thirty to fifty calls from reporters every day that summer. At the time, according to CIA director George Tenet, “the system was blinking red” with warnings about an imminent, massive terror attack on American soil.
Bush spent the summer of 2001 on the longest recorded vacation in presidential history. Tenet and National Security Council chief Condoleezza Rice were not present at his luxury ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he reviewed presidential daily briefings (PDBs) on August 6. That afternoon, Bush was handed one PDB with a headline that should have sent him rushing back to Washington. It read, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US.” The document was a page and a half—an exceptional length that highlighted its importance. Its source was described as an “Egyptian Islamic Jihad [EIJ] operative … a senior EIJ member [who] lived in California in the mid-1990s.” According to the brief, he warned that “a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim American youth for attacks.”
There was no doubt that that source was Ali Mohamed, who had by then been disappeared into federal custody. The “bin Laden cell” was a clear reference to the remnants of the Al-Kifah Center, which had served as one of the CIA’s major pipelines for sending jihadist fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, and then Bosnia and Chechnya throughout the ’90s. Deep within the federal prison system, where Mohamed had been registered as “John Doe,” the former triple spy appeared to be dishing everything he knew about Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and agenda.
While Bush reviewed the briefing document, several Al Qaeda operatives who had recently entered the country for the “Day of the Planes” plot maintained mailboxes at the Jersey City–based Sphinx Trading Company. This was the same mailbox center where Mohamed’s trainees and the Blind Sheikh exchanged dead drop messages. The owner of Sphinx, Waleed al-Noor, was well known to the FBI; he had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Blind Sheikh in 1995. But the bureau’s New York office was not paying attention to Sphinx or to al-Noor’s longtime business partner, Mohamed el-Atriss, who was selling fake IDs to several of the plotters, including Mihdhar. (During el-Atriss’s 2003 trial, where he was sentenced to six months’ probation, Passaic County detectives accused then-US Attorney Chris Christie, later the Republican governor of New Jersey and failed Republican presidential candidate, of bullying them into ending an investigation into el-Atriss’s links to the 9/11 hijackers.)
Bush did not appear to take the PDB seriously. He exuded an “expansive mood,” according to two Washington Post reporters, as he took a round of golf the day after reviewing the document. One week later, at the Pentagon’s annual convention on counterterrorism, CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black concluded his briefing by exclaiming, “we are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the US.”
Despite the doomsday predictions, Bush did not meet with his cabinet heads to discuss terrorism until September 4, his first meeting after returning from vacation. The “Day of Planes” plot would be executed a week later.
Pam Anderson’s Jet
The catastrophic and catalyzing events of September 11, 2001, unfolded live on one of New York City’s top morning talk shows. At 9:01, Howard Stern delivered a brief update about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, gashing open the face of the tower and sending plumes of smoke into the sky. “I don’t even know how you begin to fight that fire,” he commented. Then, without missing a beat, the legendary shock jock returned to an inane yarn about his date with former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson at a seedy Midtown bar called Scores.
“I felt her butt,” Stern bragged to his randy co-hosts. A highly involved discussion ensued about his failure to “bang Pam Anderson.” “I wasn’t gonna sit there and work it all night,” Stern explained moments before the second plane hit. Then, as soon as Tower 2 caught fire, he quipped, “I’m telling you, it was Pam Anderson’s jet.”
Minutes later, Stern’s producers began piping in audio from the local CBS affiliate, setting a traumatizing aural atmosphere that recalled Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.” Stern apparently realized the flames were the product of a terror attack, probably by Muslim extremists. Confronted with a national calamity, he and his shrieking sidekick Robin Quivers immediately shifted gears.
“We’ve gotta go bomb everything over there,” Quivers insisted.
“We’ve gotta bomb the hell out of them!” Stern added. “You know who it is. I can’t say but I know who it is. This is more upsetting than me not getting Pam Anderson!”
As the smoke engulfed lower Manhattan, Stern descended into a series of genocidal tirades. “We’ve gotta drop an atomic bomb,” he proclaimed.
“There has got to be a war,” Quivers demanded.
“But a devastating war, where people die. Burn their eyes out!”
Thirty minutes later, as the news of mass civilian casualties poured in, Stern had transformed into a cartoon villain: “Now is the time to not even