The Secret Service Failures on 9/11 – Kevin Ryan on GRTV w/James Corbett

Did leadership in the Secret Service know about the 911 attacks beforehand? You’ll recall on 9/11 President Bush was in Florida seen sitting in an elementary school classroom reading to the kids while jets were pummeling into the WTC Towers 1 & 2, the Pentagon and crashing/exploding in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Most American’s thought Bushs’ behavior to be a bit queer, and more importantly, his Secret Service details lack of immediate reaction. The official story behind this oddity didn’t add up for professional Chemist turned Journalist, Kevin Ryan. So, Ryan set out to learn what the Secret Service detail knew prior to that fateful morning and shares his findings w/James Corbett, GRTV.

The Secret Service Failures on 9/11: A Call for Transparency

by Kevin Ryan

The U.S. Secret Service failed to do its job on September 11, 2001 in several important ways. These failures could be explained if the Secret Service had foreknowledge of the 9/11 events as they were proceeding. That possibility leads to difficult questions about how the behavior of Secret Service employees might have contributed to the success of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Answering those questions will require the release of existing interview transcripts as well as follow-up questioning, under oath, of a few key people within the agency.

The most glaring example of Secret Service failure on 9/11 was the lack of protection for the President of the United States after it was well known that the country was facing terrorist attacks on multiple fronts.The interesting thing about this was that it was not a consistent approach. That is, the president was protected by the Secret Service in many ways that day but he was not protected from the most obvious, and apparently the most imminent, danger.

President Bush had been at risk earlier that morning when Middle-Eastern looking journalists appeared at his hotel in Sarasota, Florida claiming to have an appointment for an interview.A Secret Service agent turned them away in a move that might have saved Bush from an assassination attempt. [1]

Bush then traveled to an elementary school for a community outreach photo opportunity which had been well-publicized for several days. It was reported that “Police and Secret Service Agents were on the roof, on horseback and in every hallway” at the school. [2]Every visitor at the school was required to attend a preparation meeting two days before, and all the phone lines had been tapped.The school’s principal stated – “It was the safest place in the world. If you blew your nose and it wasn’t time for you to blow your nose, they knew it.” [3]

The agency was protecting Bush very well, but not from terrorists in hijacked airplanes. Bush entered the classroom at 9:03 am that day, after it was widely known that the country was under attack.As stated by authors Allan Wood and Paul Thompson:

“By that time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service, and Canada’s Strategic Command all knew that three commercial airplanes had been hijacked. They knew that one plane had been flown deliberately into the World Trade Center’s North Tower; a second plane was wildly off course and also heading toward Manhattan; and a third plane had abruptly turned around over Ohio and was flying back toward Washington, DC.” [4]

Given the widespread knowledge that terrorists were hijacking planes and that planes were crashing into buildings, the Secret Service should never have let the president enter the building where he was scheduled to be located.The situation got worse, however, because shortly after Bush sat down, he was informed by his Chief of Staff that the World Trade Center had been hit again, by a second plane. Still there was no intervention by the Secret Service to remove the president from this well-publicized location.

Either failure to protect the president, or knowledge that he was not a target

Bush remained at the school until 9:35 am, more than 35 minutes after he arrived. He even gave a televised speech during that time, letting the world know he was still there. The actions of Bush and his Secret Service detail indicate that they were not worried at all about a terrorist attack against the school.Philip Melanson, author of a book on the Secret Service, described how odd this was by writing that, in an “unfolding terrorist attack, the procedure should have been to get the president to the closest secure location as quickly as possible.” [5]

This failure to follow Secret Service standard procedures is a glaring discrepancy to this day and it leads to a number of important questions.Who was responsible for making the decision to leave the president and everyone in the building at risk?Were the Secret Service agents traveling with the president in contact with the agency’s offices in Washington or New York? The largest Secret Service field office in the country was located in WTC Building 7, which was evacuated by the time Bush was entering the classroom.

The Secret Service supervisor traveling with the president, who was in charge of the president’s movements that day, was Edward Marinzel.It was Marinzel who should have been in charge of the execution (or non-execution) of the emergency action protocols carried out as the attacks were proceeding. [6]

In an attempt to explain the failure to follow Secret Service procedures, the 9/11 Commission said in its report that Bush “told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis,” and that the Secret Service “told us they were anxious to move the president to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door.”These official responses from the Secret Service, given in the 9/11 Commission Report (911CR), were taken from an as-yet unreleased 2004 interview with Edward Marinzel. [7]However, the Commission said nothing about why Bush entered the classroom in the first place, when everyone in government knew that the country was under attack.

It seems possible that Marinzel’s authority was somehow overridden, because reporters noticed that it was White House spokesman Ari Fleischer who appeared to be calling the shots while Bush sat there doing nothing.As Bush’s Secret Service detail failed to protect him, Fleischer maneuvered to get his attention without alerting the press. Several reporters noticed that Fleischer had written the words “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET” in big block letters on a paper sign and was mouthing these words to Bush as he sat there. [8]

Another apparent failure of the Secret Service was that it did not immediately request air cover for either the president’s motorcade as it traveled to the airport, or for Air Force One, which took off at about 9:54. This seems to be another indication that the Secret Service knew that Bush was not in danger.

The lack of immediate request for air cover for the president’s escort becomes more difficult to understand considering the 911CR’s claims of “unnerving false alarm” which was a “threat against Air Force One itself.” This threat was later “run down to a misunderstood communication in the hectic White House Situation Room” (p 325).

The 911CR did not cover the failure to request immediate air cover, but it did attempt to address the circuitous travels of Air Force One after it left Sarasota.Air Force One was redirected throughout the day, first to Barksdale Air Force Base (AFB) in Louisiana and then on to Nebraska.The 911CR states that the reason for this wandering about the country was that the “Lead Secret Service agent…felt strongly that the situation in Washington was too unstable for the President to return there,” and although the Bush“strongly wanted to return to Washington,” the Secret Service won the argument.Again, the 9/11 Commission got its information on this subject from the unreleased 2004 interview with Edward Marinzel.

Exactly why Edward Marinzel’s interview has not been made publicly available is not clear.Given that it was the primary basis for the official account with regard to the failure to protect the president, it seems that the public has a right to see it.Did the Secret Service know that the president was not in danger and, if so, how did it know that?

Whatever the case might be, Marinzel’s actions or lack thereof were considered appropriate because his role in protecting the president continued.On Thanksgiving in 2003, Marinzel led the team that planned and executed President Bush’s covert visit to Baghdad which, at the time, “was the first operation in history that took a President of the United States into an active war zone.” [9]

Today, Marinzel works at a consulting company with Ralph Basham, the former Director of the Secret Service (2003-2006), as well as another person who played a critical role in George W. Bush’s travel, communications and protection. This was Joseph W. Hagin, who was Bush’s deputy White House Chief of Staff for Operations (2001-2008). Mr. Hagin had previously been an assistant to Vice President George H.W. Bush, from 1981 to 1985, and then Assistant to President Bush from 1989 to 1991.

Hagin came to the George W. Bush administration after eight years as a vice president for Chiquita Brands International.Formerly called United Fruit Company, the company was mired in scandal at the time of Hagin’s departure, due to an expose by the Cincinnati Enquirer which claimed that it mistreated the workers on its Central American plantations, polluted the environment, allowed cocaine to be brought to the United States on its ships, and bribed foreign officials.

On 9/11, Mr. Hagin had oversight responsibility for Air Force One, the White House Communications Agency, and the Secret Service PPD.Despite these far reaching responsibilities, his name does not appear in the 911CR.Hagin was later “one of the principals responsible for planning the formation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.” [10]When Hurricane Katrina occurred, Hagin was the White House point person in terms of overseeing response efforts.

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