Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: NYT: Four Days That Transformed a President, a Presidency and a Nation, for All Time

ASHINGTON, Sept. 15 President Bush was sitting in a second-
grade classroom in Sarasota, Fla., on Tuesday morning, his eyes
and his smile fixed on 7-year-olds showing off their reading
skills. But his mind was clearly fixed on the news he had heard
just moments before: a passenger jet had crashed into one of the
World Trade Center towers.
At 9:05 a.m., the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card
Jr., stepped into the classroom and whispered into the
president's right ear, "A second plane hit the other tower, and
America's under attack."
The president blanched. But he stayed put, occasionally arching
his eyebrows at the children. "Really good readers, whew," he
said. "This must be sixth grade."
Minutes later, 900 miles to the north, a squad of Secret Service
agents burst into the West Wing office of Vice President Dick
Cheney, grabbing his arms, his shoulders and his belt. "They
literally propelled him out of his office," one witness said.
The agents all but carried Mr. Cheney down to the White House's
deepest sanctum, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a
tubelike structure designed to withstand a nuclear blast.
Another hijacked plane was bearing down on Washington, the
agents said, and the White House was almost certainly its
target.
In the course of the next four days, George W. Bush was
transformed into a president at the helm of a White House, and a
nation, in crisis.
On Monday night, he was laughing over dinner with his brother
Jeb at a seaside Florida resort, posing for pictures with the
restaurant staff and dodging questions from reporters about
looming battles over the vanishing budget surplus. By this
morning, with downtown Washington locked down by the military,
he was conducting a war council at Camp David and demanding that
countries around the world, starting with the Arab world,
declare whether they were allies in the war on terrorism.
As he rode Marine One from Andrews Air Force Base to the White
House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush watched the smoke billowing
from the jagged gash in the Pentagon and seemed to recognize how
profoundly his young presidency had been transformed.
"The mightiest building in the world is on the floor," he told
an aide riding with him. "That's the 21st- century war you just
witnessed."
4-Mile Run, Then Disbelief
President Bush awoke around 6 a.m. on Tuesday at the Colony, a
tennis resort in Longboat Key, Fla.
Eager to start his day with exercise, he took his motorcade to a
nearby golf course and ran hard for four and a half miles. He
returned to his hotel for a shower and his daily intelligence
briefings, which apparently included reference to heightened
threats of terrorism. Then he took the 20-minute ride to the
Emma E. Booker Elementary School, the second event in two days
staged to galvanize support for an education bill languishing in
Congress.
He arrived just before 9. Right before the event, Karl Rove, one
of his most trusted aides, whispered news of what appeared to be
a chilling accident, a plane crash into the upper floors of the
North Tower of the World Trade Center. Mr. Bush was briefed by
phone by Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser,
calling from the White House. He decided to go ahead with the
short school event.
But as beepers lit up with the news, reporters and a few of Mr.
Bush's senior staff members slipped across the schoolyard to
watch the disaster unfold in a classroom where the television
networks had set up their equipment and monitors. They had just
assembled when the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175,
slammed into the South Tower.
A minute later, Mr. Card whispered the news in the president's
ear.
"It was a surreal moment," Mr. Card recalled late this week. "It
was immediately obvious that it was neither an accident nor a
coincidence."
Mr. Bush has not said why he lingered in the room for another
six minutes, but it was a testament to either his calm or his
acting ability. But at 9:12, he abruptly retreated, speaking to
Mr. Cheney and New York officials.
Hurriedly Mr. Bush wrote a statement on a yellow pad with a
black felt-tip pen. At 9:30, he appeared in a large media room,
where charts about the education budget had been whisked away.
With children, teachers and Florida Republicans jammed into the
room, he faced the cameras, noticeably shaken.
"Today we had a national tragedy," he said. "Two airplanes have
crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist
attack on our country."
Then, lapsing into some informal language, he vowed "to hunt
down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism
against our nation will not stand." He said he was returning to
Washington immediately.
But as he spoke, panic had spread in the White House. Mr. Cheney
was swept into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center,
along with his wife and Ms. Rice and other senior staff members.
They were told, administration officials say, that American
Airlines Flight 77 was bearing down on the White House. Bomb
squads were already racing through the upper floors of the Old
Executive Office Building, screaming, "Get out, get out, this is
real!"
In only minutes Mr. Bush and his agents raced back to Air Force
One, which hastily departed Sarasota at 9:55. No one aboard 
White House aides, flight crew members or Secret Service agents
claimed to know the plane's destination. By then, the jetliner
possibly headed for the White House had taken out one side of
the Pentagon, and another seemed on the way.
Moments after he was aloft, Mr. Bush opened a line to Mr. Cheney
and kept it open. "That's what we are paid for, boys," Mr. Bush
told the vice president, according to the account of an aide.
"We are going to take care of this. When we find out who did
this, they are not going to like me as president. Somebody is
going to pay."
By 10:30, a call had come to the White House that "Air Force One
is next." What sent chills through the White House is that the
caller had used code words that showed familiarity with how the
president moves about the country.

 .....
Impossibile sapere se si tratta di illazioni e arbitrarie ricostruzioni
giornalistiche.
E' già sorprendente che non sia stato abbattuto l'aereo che ha colpito
la seconda torre 18 minuti dopo il primo.  Ancor più sorprendente che
dopo
due colpi di quel genere .... ben 30 minuti dopo, un altro aereo abbia
potuto abbattersi avvicinarsi a Whashington ed abbattersi sul Pentagono
se, come dice l'articolo, gli agenti sapevano che "quasi certamente
l'obiettivo era la Casa Bianca".
Perché quell'aereo non é stato abbattuto ?
Nella buona sostanza tra le righe di quell'articolo c'é scritto che al
Pentagono erano tranquilli e non hanno fatto nulla perché erano sicuri
che l'aereo puntasse sulla Casa Bianca ?
Che gli americani, nuovi ad attacchi del genere sul loro territorio,
fossero impreparati ad un colpo del genere é comprensibile anche se
con un certo stupore.  Che al Pentagono stessero tranquilli perché
sapevano che l'aereo voleva distruggere solo ... la Casa Bianca, se
quello che hai riportato senza citarne l'origine é l'articolo di un
giornare, é una palese cialtroneria giornalistica.
g



In questi tempi ci si deve aspettare qualsiasi cialtroneria e falsità,
guarda solo l' ernesto cosa sta postando, segue proprio quella linea e
naturalmente è il rappresentante da noi dei falsatori, disturbatori,
quinte colonne esterne.