When American 11 struck the World Trade Center at 8:46, no one in the White House or traveling with the President knew that it had been hijacked. While that information circulated within the FAA, we found no evidence that the hijacking was reported to any other agency in Washington before 8:46. Most federal agencies learned about the crash in New York from CNN. Within the FAA, the administrator, Jane Garvey, and her acting deputy, Monte Belger, had not been told of a confirmed hijacking before they learned from television that a plane had crashed. Others in the agency were aware of it, as we explained earlier in this chapter. Inside the National Military Command Center, the deputy director of operations and his assistant began notifying senior Pentagon officials of the incident. At about 9:00, the senior NMCC operations officer reached out to the FAA operations center for information. Although the NMCC was advised of the hijacking of American 11, the scrambling of jets was not discussed. In Sarasota, Florida, the presidential motorcade was arriving at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School, where President Bush was to read to a class and talk about education. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told us he was standing with the President outside the classroom when Senior Advisor to the President Karl Rove first informed them that a small, twin-engine plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The President's reaction was that the incident must have been caused by pilot error. At 8:55, before entering the classroom, the President spoke to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who was at the White House. She recalled first telling the President it was a twin-engine aircraft-and then a commercial aircraft-that had struck the World Trade Center, adding "that's all we know right now, Mr. President." At the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney had just sat down for a meeting when his assistant told him to turn on his television because a plane had struck the NorthTower of the World Trade Center. The Vice President was wondering "How the hell could a plane hit the World Trade Center" when he saw the second aircraft strike the South Tower. Elsewhere in the White House, a series of 9:00 meetings was about to begin. In the absence of information that the crash was anything other than an accident, the White House staff monitored the news as they went ahead with their regular schedules.

What was the Vice president doing when he saw a second plane strike the South Tower and what did the rest of the White House staff do?

Former Long Beach Executive Director Toby Rothschild, now a policy wonk in Iwasaki's outfit, agreed. "To some extent, I did look at it and say, 'We are the littlest kid on the block, and we don't want to get beat up so we need a bigger protector,'" Rothschild said. "Once we got past that, it became a real positive for the Long Beach program and Long Beach clients." But to the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley legal aid program, the positives of merging with Dudovitz's program, San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, were never obvious. A meeting in late 1999 between Dudovitz and the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program's board showed how little the two programs had in common and how difficult bridging the gap between their ideologies would be, Dudovitz recalled. Although no merger plans were discussed, board members at the smaller program knew of Dudovitz's preference for impact litigation over direct services. "We had a discussion about what our separate views were," Dudovitz said. "The message we got was that they wanted their program to stay as it was." Lauralea Saddick, former executive director of the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program, said her board simply did not share Dudovitz's desire to spend money influencing social policy and participating in high-profile litigation over poverty-related issues. "Our board's philosophy was that the money given by the federal government was to help people with basic everyday needs," Saddick said. "It might take a little bit of humility to take those kinds of cases. Impact work is very important ... but what was the good of getting the law changed if no one is there to help the individual?" Before the San Gabriel program was subsumed by Dudovitz's group, it offered to merge with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County. The boards of both organizations eschewed impact litigation in favor of the 1960s model of providing direct client services. Supported by resolutions from the Pasadena, San Gabriel, Eastern and Foothill bar associations, the two programs drew up plans to merge and submitted them to the Legal Services Corp. Dudovitz won Iwasaki's backing to oppose the deal, and Legal Services Corp., the national funding source, overruled the proposed San Gabriel-Pomona Valley/Orange County merger. On Jan. 27, 2001, the federal agency awarded the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley service area to Dudovitz under the umbrella of an expanded San Fernando program, citing the location of both programs in Los Angeles, which would allow "better coordinated and more effective advocacy on county government policies." The San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program sued Legal Services Corp. to stop the takeover, claiming the federal program based the decision on favoritism for the politically active Dudovitz and the politically powerful Iwasaki. Though the federal suit accomplished little, it effectively suspended the end of the old program and the start of the new one for nearly a year.

Who made the following statement: "The message we got was that they wanted their program to stay as it was."

We do not know exactly how the hijackers gained access to the cockpit; FAA rules required that the doors remain closed and locked during flight. Ong speculated that they had "jammed their way" in. Perhaps the terrorists stabbed the flight attendants to get a cockpit key, to force one of them to open the cockpit door, or to lure the captain or first officer out of the cockpit. Or the flight attendants may just have been in their way. At the same time or shortly thereafter, Atta-the only terrorist on board trained to fly a jet-would have moved to the cockpit from his business-class seat, possibly accompanied by Omari. As this was happening, passenger Daniel Lewin, who was seated in the row just behind Atta and Omari, was stabbed by one of the hijackers-probably Satam al Suqami, who was seated directly behind Lewin. Lewin had served four years as an officer in the Israeli military. He may have made an attempt to stop the hijackers in front of him, not realizing that another was sitting behind him. The hijackers quickly gained control and sprayed Mace, pepper spray, or some other irritant in the first-class cabin, in order to force the passengers and flight attendants toward the rear of the plane. They claimed they had a bomb. About five minutes after the hijacking began, Betty Ong contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, via an AT&T airphone to report an emergency aboard the flight. This was the first of several occasions on 9/11 when flight attendants took action outside the scope of their training, which emphasized that in a hijacking, they were to communicate with the cockpit crew. The emergency call lasted approximately 25 minutes, as Ong calmly and professionally relayed information about events taking place aboard the airplane to authorities on the ground. At 8:19, Ong reported:"The cockpit is not answering, somebody's stabbed in business class-and I think there's Mace-that we can't breathe-I don't know, I think we're getting hijacked." She then told of the stabbings of the two flight attendants. At 8:21, one of the American employees receiving Ong's call in North Carolina, Nydia Gonzalez, alerted the American Airlines operations center in Fort Worth, Texas, reaching Craig Marquis, the manager on duty. Marquis soon realized this was an emergency and instructed the airline's dispatcher responsible for the flight to contact the cockpit. At 8:23, the dispatcher tried unsuccessfully to contact the aircraft.
Why might Lewin have been stabbed?