Posted on 04/09/2004 7:11:25 AM PDT by finnman69
Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims ripped into Condoleezza Rice yesterday after she insisted the Bush administration had no clue the U.S. would be attacked.
"Shame," Terry McGovern, a New Yorker whose mother was killed, yelled at the national security adviser during Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission.
Other relatives ridiculed Rice's assertion that she had no idea that Osama Bin Laden's men would hijack planes and crash them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
"How could she not know that?" asked Kristen Breitweiser, who lost her husband in the attacks. She noted that several similar threats were made, including during the Atlanta Olympics.
"It's her job to know about national security threats facing the nation. If she doesn't know that, than who does? Who else is responsible?" Breitweiser asked.
Unlike former terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Rice did not apologize to the family members for the government's failure to prevent the catastrophe.
"As an officer of government on duty that day, I will never forget the sorrow and the anger I felt," Rice said.
But Rice's words won few converts in the audience.
It was angry relatives such as Breitweiser and McGovern who pressured the White House into allowing Rice to testify about the massive intelligence failures that led up to the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.
For the first hour, they and the other relatives in the audience sat quietly as Rice primly read from a prepared statement and answered the commissioners' questions.
But when Rice disclosed that five weeks before the attacks, President Bush got a secret CIA briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," many in the audience gasped and shook their heads.
"I said 'shame' because we didn't know about that until today," McGovern said.
Mary Fetchet, whose son Brad was killed, shook her head as Rice justified the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror.
"It was a public relations campaign for actions this administration has taken since 9/11," Fetchet said.
Abraham Scott of Springfield, Va., was angered by Rice's lengthy answers, which ate up each commissioner's 10 minutes of questioning.
Rice "was talking around the questions," said Scott, whose wife, Janice Marie, was killed at the Pentagon. "She wasn't saying anything of substance."
When Rice finished, a couple of family members embraced her. It was a sharp contrast to the teary group hug that Clarke got.
"We had to beg for this commission, we've had to beg for answers," Breitweiser said later on MSNBC's "Hardball." "It's 2-1/2 years later, and we finally hear from the national security adviser, and we had to beg for it."
Not all the family members were furious with Rice.
Ernest Strada, the mayor of Westbury, L.I., and father of slain Cantor-Fitzgerald worker Thomas Strada, thanked Rice for coming and hugged her.
"I thought she was very candid," he said.
Debra Burlingame, who lives in Westchester and whose brother Charles was a pilot on the plane that hit the Pentagon, said Rice "acquitted herself brilliantly."
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Terry McGovern lost her mother on September 11th who worked at AON in the WTC. She is on leave from her position as an Associate Professor of Clinical Health and Director of the Women's Health Advocacy Project at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Ms. McGovern cares for her father, who lives in Long Island, and resides in Manhattan with her 10-year old son. Source: http://www.9-11usg.org/article.asp?id=688&page=ADVISOR
She's a fully grown liberal with an agenda.
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Theresa M. McGovern, founder The HIV Law Project, Inc., was its Executive Director for ten years. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of Public Health and is an Individual Project Fellow at the Open Society Institute. Source:http://www.newschool.edu/centers/socres/vol68/issue681.htm
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And what is the "HIV Law Project"?
The HIV Law Project seeks to redress discrimination and protect the rights of people living with HIV through a four-tiered strategy: free direct legal services; large-scale impact litigation; public policy advocacy and advocacy training; community organizing and leadership development.
Source:http://www.hivlawproject.org/AboutHLP.htm
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So, what we have are a number of issue advocates who also lost family members in the attacks of 9/11. However, these folks have specific issues they are trying to support. Moreover they are not a representative sample of ALL 9/11 families.
I intend to research every single one of these people and make sure the press knows who they are.
"At 32, with a head of unruly, sun-tinged curls and a shy smile that can instantly grow wide as the surf, Breitweiser still appears very much the beach rat she was while growing up in the Shore town of Manasquan. Though her father, John L. Winterstella, got involved in local government when she was a toddler and has been the town's mayor since 1984, it would be a mistake to assume his daughter inherited his civic-mindedness; too many interrupted family events over the years had soured Kristen on politics and government. After graduating from Rutgers, she earned a B average and a law degree from Seton Hall Law School in 1996, with an eye toward doing criminal work. But she wound up getting sidetracked into family law, and just three days into her career at a firm specializing in divorce, she quit the profession, finding it corrosive to her psyche. She needed to find a new direction, and, fortunately, she could take her time finding it. The summer of her bar exam, she'd started dating Ron Breitweiser, a rising money manager from Rutherford, and five months later they eloped to a secluded Caribbean island. By the time Kristen quit her job, she and Ron had settled into a spacious house in a verdant corner of Monmouth County near Sandy Hook, where she tended a garden and indulged her sartorial preference for blue jeans and baggy sweaters. Her new mission in life arrived in the form of a strawberry blonde daughter, Caroline, now four years old. After that, being with Ron and Caroline, taking care of the house, and planning for holidays was all Kristen wanted in the way of worldly responsibilities.
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Kristen's maiden name is 'Winterstella.' Her father is 'John Winterstella.' Here is his information:
"He went on to say that there is no dispute that Mr. Winterstella, a Democrat, has contributed enormously to the community over the last 20 years, but the council was divided, so that is why he chose to deny him the honorary title of Mayor Emeritus."
I've lost all respect for them. The downside of their antics is the public will quickly lose respect for these 'victims' of 9/11 and thus, lump in all 9/11 victims.
Unless other 9/11 families start to speak out against these partisan hacks, their entire base of support and sympathy will go away...fast.
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