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Bush's 9/11 coverup?

By Eric Boehlert

Sally Regenhard, left, and Monica Gabrielle, whose son and husband, respectively, died in the World Trade Center attacks, attend a public hearing on the attacks before a joint House-Senate Intelligence Committees hearing in September 2002.

Family members of victims of the terror attacks say the White House has smothered every attempt to get to the bottom of the outrageous intelligence failures that took place on its watch.

For family members of those who died on Sept. 11, last week brought a rare chance to meet face-to-face with a man who's become a symbol of their dissatisfaction -- FBI director Robert Mueller. The bureau had quietly invited several dozen family members to Washington to hear a presentation on the war on terrorism, but for the small band of husbands, wives and parents who successfully lobbied Congress last year for an independent 9/11 commission to investigate the attacks, it was a chance to ask some of the troubling questions that they have about that day.

They weren't simply queries about the national security collapse that occurred on 9/11, and how a hijacked plane, flying hundreds of miles off course, was able to dive-bomb untouched into the Pentagon a full hour after the World Trade Center had already been attacked twice. Or how more than a dozen terrorists were able to enter America illegally and then live here undetected for weeks and months, and why U.S. intelligence sources failed to piece together significant clues that emerged in advance of the attack.

Family advocates also wanted to know why the government -- and specifically the Bush administration -- has been so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures.

While the administration of President George W. Bush is aggressively positioning itself as the world leader in the war on terrorism, some families of the Sept. 11 victims say that the facts increasingly contradict that script. The White House long opposed the formation of a blue ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush.

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