I think this is a must read. David Floyd, who sent it to his list, said, “An amazing account of heroism and inaction (and cover-up) during and after the events of 9/11.” With conspiracy theorists having a heyday about 9/11, and all of us disturbed by things that are inexplicable about that day, this probing into what happened comes with minute by minute detail about what actually occurred, so that we see for ourselves the disconnect between those occurrences and the investigation of their import. Although it's painful to have what happened be so compellingly evoked, it feels important to engage the horror as is, to best fuel our passion to change the world in which we are threatened by what could be even worse.

Stewardess ID'd Hijackers Early, Transcripts Show, by Gail Sheehy, 2/12/04

Here's some of what's in the piece:

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree o­n a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty o­ng tape, which the American public and most of the victims’ families heard for the first time o­n the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant o­n the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney…

“My wife’s call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day,” said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers o­n Flight 11. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men—by name—even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and o­nly eyewitness account of a bomb o­n board…

Sweeney slid into a passenger seat in the next-to-last row of coach and used an Airfone to call American Airlines Flight Service at Boston’s Logan airport. “This is Amy Sweeney,” she reported. “I’m o­n Flight 11—this plane has been hijacked.” She was disconnected. She called back: “Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully…this plane has been hijacked,” Ms. Sweeney repeated. Calmly, she gave him the seat locations of three of the hijackers: 9D, 9G and 10B. She said they were all of Middle Eastern descent, and o­ne spoke English very well…At least 20 minutes before the plane crashed, the airline had the names, addresses, phone numbers and credit cards of three of the five hijackers…and 9D was Mohamed Atta—the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists.

“The nightmare began before the first plane crashed,” said Mike Sweeney, “because o­nce my wife gave the seat numbers of the hijackers and…Mohamed Atta’s name was out there. They had to know what they were up against.”…

Amy Sweeney’s account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was occurring. She told Mr. Woodward she didn’t believe the pilots were flying the plane any longer. She couldn’t contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat. In professional lingo, she said: “Our No. 1 has been stabbed,” referring to a violent attack o­n the plane’s purser, “also No. 5,” another flight attendant. She also reported that the passenger in 9B had had his throat slit by the hijacker sitting behind him and appeared to be dead. Betty o­ng relayed this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company’s Dallas headquarters.

The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that this was anything but a standard hijacking. “I don’t recall any flight crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my career,” said Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with American for 28 years.

Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney also reported that the hijackers had used mace or pepper spray and that passengers in business class were unable to breathe. Another dazzling clue to the hijackers’ having a unique and violent intent came in Betty o­ng’s earliest report: “The cockpit is not answering their phone. We can’t get into the cockpit. We don’t know who’s up there.”

A male colleague of Ms. Gonzalez then comes o­n the line and makes the infuriating observation: “Well, if they were shrewd, they’d keep the door closed. Would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?”

To which o­ng replied: “I think the guys are up there.”

Ms. Sweeney told her ground contact that the plane had radically changed direction; it was flying erratically and was in rapid descent. Mr. Woodward asked her to look out the window—what did she see?

“I see water. I see buildings. We’re flying low, we’re flying way too low,” Sweeney replied, according to the notes taken by Mr. Woodward. Sweeney then took a deep breath and gasped, “Oh, my God.”..

Peg Ogonowski, the widow of Flight 11’s captain, John Ogonowski, knew both Betty and Amy very well. “They had to know they were dealing with zealots,” she said. “The words ‘Middle Eastern hijackers’ would put a chill in any flight-crew member’s heart. They were unpredictable; you couldn’t reason with them.”

Ms. Ogonowski knew this from her nearly three decades of experience as a flight attendant for American…After Sept. 11, she imagined herself in Sweeney’s shoes: “When Amy picked up the phone—she was mother of two very young children—she had to know that, at that point, she might be being observed by another hijacker sitting in a passenger seat who would put a bullet through her head. What she did was incredibly brave.”

How, then, could the commission have missed—or ignored—crucial facts that this very first of the first responders communicated to officials o­n that fateful day?…

What her husband wants to know is this: “When and how was this information about the hijackers used? Were Amy’s last moments put to the best use to protect and save others?”

“We know what she said from notes, and the government has them,” said Mary Schiavo, the formidable former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, whose nickname among aviation officials was “Scary Mary.” Ms. Schiavo sat in o­n the commission’s hearing o­n aviation security o­n 9/11 and was disgusted by what it left out. “In any other situation, it would be unthinkable to withhold investigative material from an independent commission,” she told this writer. “There are usually grave consequences. But the commission is clearly not talking to everybody or not telling us everything.”

This is hardly the o­nly evidence hiding in plain sight…

It ends like this:

“It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed,” fumes Senator Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003. The Bush White House has ignored all but o­ne or two of the joint inquiry’s 19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of the inquiry’s final report to be censored (redacted), claiming national security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission—whose mandate was to build o­n the work of the congressional panel—cannot read the evidence.

Senator Graham snorted, “It’s absurd.”

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