From fork-admin@xent.com Thu Sep 12 13:39:57 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.example.com Received: from localhost (jalapeno [127.0.0.1]) by jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1551816F03 for ; Thu, 12 Sep 2002 13:39:49 +0100 (IST) Received: from jalapeno [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 12 Sep 2002 13:39:49 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g8C9BtC24644 for ; Thu, 12 Sep 2002 10:12:04 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id D667E2940B0; Thu, 12 Sep 2002 02:08:04 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@example.com Received: from alumnus.caltech.edu (alumnus.caltech.edu [131.215.49.51]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1846129409A; Thu, 12 Sep 2002 02:07:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by alumnus.caltech.edu (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id g8C9AnSV012069; Thu, 12 Sep 2002 02:10:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: CBS News' interview w/Bush & reconstruction of his peregrinations Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed MIME-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v482) From: Rohit Khare To: fork@example.com Message-Id: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.482) Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@example.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 01:14:22 -0700 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by dogma.slashnull.org id g8C9BtC24644 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-5.7 required=7.0 tests=AWL,BALANCE_FOR_LONG_20K,BALANCE_FOR_LONG_40K, DEAR_SOMEBODY,KNOWN_MAILING_LIST,SPAM_PHRASE_01_02, SUBJECT_IS_NEWS,USER_AGENT_APPLEMAIL,YOU_WON version=2.50-cvs X-Spam-Level: "60 Minutes II" Bush Interview: (CBS) No president since Abraham Lincoln has seen such horrific loss of life in a war on American soil. No president since James Madison, nearly 200 years ago, has seen the nation’s capital city successfully attacked. But, one year ago, President George W. Bush was thrown into the first great crisis of the 21st century. This is the president’s story of September 11th and the week America went to war. 60 Minutes II spent two hours with Mr. Bush, one, on Air Force One and another in the Oval Office last week. Even after a year, the president is still moved, sometimes to the point of tears, when he remembers Sept. 11. “I knew, the farther we get away from Sept.11, the more likely it is for some around the world to forget the mission, but not me,” Mr. Bush says during the Air Force One interview. “Not me. I made the pledge to myself and to people that I’m not going to forget what happened on Sept. 11. So long as I’m president, we will pursue the killers and bring them to justice. We owe that to those who have lost their lives.” The memories come back sharp and clear on Air Force One, where Pelley joined the president for a recent trip across country. 60 Minutes II wanted to talk to him there because that is where he spent the first hours after the attack. Not since Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One has the airplane been so central to America in a crisis. For President Bush, Sept. 11 2001, started with the usual routine. Before dawn, the president was on his four-mile run. It was just before 6 a.m. and, at the same moment, another man was on the move: Mohammad Atta. Two hours later, as Mr. Bush drove to an elementary school, hijackers on four planes were murdering the flight crews and turning the airliners east. As the motorcade neared the school at 8:45 a.m., jet engines echoed in Manhattan. Atta plunged the 767 jumbo jet into World Trade Center Tower One. “I thought it was an accident,” says Mr. Bush. “I thought it was a pilot error. I thought that some foolish soul had gotten lost and - and made a terrible mistake.” Mr. Bush was told about the first plane just before sitting down with a class of second graders. He was watching a reading drill when, just after nine, United Flight 175 exploded into the second tower. There was the sudden realization that what had seemed like a terrible mistake was a coordinated attack. Back in the Florida classroom, press secretary Ari Fleischer got the news on his pager. The president’s chief-of-staff, Andy Card stepped in. “A second plane hit the second tower; America is under attack,” Card told the president When he said those words, what did he see in the President’s face? “I saw him coming to recognition of what I had said,” Card recalls. “I think he understood that he was going to have to take command as commander-in-chief, not just as president.” What was going through Bush’s mind when he heard the news? “We’re at war and somebody has dared attack us and we’re going to do something about it,” Mr. Bush recalls. “I realized I was in a unique setting to receive a message that somebody attacked us, and I was looking at these little children and all of the sudden we were at war. I can remember noticing the press pool and the press corps beginning to get the calls and seeing the look on their face. And it became evident that we were, you know, that the world had changed.” Mr. Bush walked into a classroom set up with a secure phone. He called the vice president, pulling the phone cord tight as he spun to see the attack on TV. Then he grabbed a legal pad and quickly wrote his first words to the nation. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America,” he said in the speech. “Today, we’ve had a national tragedy.” It was 9:30 a.m. As he spoke, Mr. Bush didn’t know that two more hijacked jets were streaking toward Washington. Vice Pesident Dick Cheney was in his office at the White House when a Secret Service agent ran in. “He said to me, ‘Sir, we have to leave immediately’ and grabbed, put a hand on my belt, another hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the door of my office,” Cheney recalls. “I’m not sure how they do it, but they sort of levitate you down the hallway, you move very fast.” “There wasn’t a lot of time for chitchat, you know, with the vice president,” says Secret Service Director Brian Stafford, who was in his command center ordering the round-up of top officials and the First Family. He felt that he had only minutes to work with. “We knew there were unidentified planes tracking in our direction,” he says. Cheney was rushed deep under the White House into a bunker called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. It was built for war, and this was it. On her way down, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called Mr. Bush. “It was brief because I was being pushed to get off the phone and get out of the West Wing,” says Rice. “They were hurrying me off the phone with the president and I just said, he said, ‘I’m coming back’ and we said ‘Mr. President that may not be wise.’ I remember stopping briefly to call my family, my aunt and uncle in Alabama and say, ‘I’m fine. You have to tell everybody that I’m fine’ but then settling into trying to deal with the enormity of that moment, and in the first few hours, I think the thing that was on everybody’s mind was how many more planes are coming.” The Capitol was evacuated. And for the first time ever, the Secret Service executed the emergency plan to ensure the presidential line of succession. Agents swept up the 15 officials who stood to become president if the others were killed. They wanted to move Vice President Cheney, fearing he was in danger even in the bunker. But Cheney says when he heard the other officials were safe, he decided to stay at the White House, no matter what. “It’s important to emphasize it's not personal, you don’t think of it in personal terms, you’ve got a professional job to do,” says Cheney. Cheney was joined by transportation secretary Norm Mineta who remembers hearing the FAA counting down the hijacked jets closing in on the capital. Says Mineta: “Someone came in and said ‘Mr. Vice president there’s a plane 50 miles out,’ then he came in and said ‘Its now 10 miles out, we don’t know where it is exactly, but it’s coming in low and fast.’” It was American Flight 77. At 9:38 a.m., it exploded into the Pentagon, the first successful attack on Washington since the War of 1812. As the Pentagon burned, Mr. Bush’s limousine sped toward Air Force One in Florida. At that moment, United Flight 93 - the last hijacked plane - was taking dead aim at Washington. At the White House, the staff was in the West Wing cafeteria, watching on TV. Press Secretary Jennifer Millerwise was in the crowd when the order came to evacuate. “I no sooner walked outside when someone from the Secret Service yelled ‘Women drop your heels and run, drop your heels and run,’ and suddenly the gates that never open except for authorized vehicles just opened and the whole White House just flooded out,” she recalls. In Florida, as Mr. Bush boarded Air Force One, he was overheard telling a Secret Service agent “Be sure to get the First Lady and my daughters protected.” At 9:57 a.m., Air Force One thundered down the runway, blasting smoke and dust in a full -hrust take off. Communications Director Dan Bartlett was on board. “It was like a rocket,” he remembers. “For a good ten minutes, the plane was going almost straight up.” At the same moment, 56 minutes after it was hit, World Trade Center Tower Two began to falter, then cascade in an incomprehensible avalanche of steel, concrete and human lives. “Someone said to me, ‘Look at that’ I remember that, ‘Look at that’ and I looked up and I saw and I just remember a cloud of dust and smoke and the horror of that moment,” recalls Rice of the TV newscast. She also felt something in her gut: “That we’ve lost a lot of Americans and that eventually we would get these people. I felt the anger. Of course I felt the anger.” Down in the bunker, Cheney was trying to figure out how many hijacked planes there were. Officials feared there could be as many as 11. As the planes track toward Washington, a discussion begins about whether to shoot them down. “I discussed it with the president,” Cheney recalls. “‘Are we prepared to order our aircraft to shoot down these airliners that have been hijacked?’ He said yes.” “It was my advice. It was his decision,” says Cheney. “That’s a sobering moment to order your own combat aircraft to shoot down your own civilian aircraft,” says Bush. “But it was an easy decision to make given the – given the fact that we had learned that a commercial aircraft was being used as a weapon. I say easy decision, it was, I didn’t hesitate, let me put it that way. I knew what had to be done.” The passengers on United Flight 93 also knew what had to be done. They fought for control and sacrificed themselves in a Pennsylvania meadow. The flight was 15 minutes from Washington. “Clearly, the terrorists were trying to take out as many symbols of government as they could: the Pentagon, perhaps the Capitol, perhaps the White House. These people saved us not only physically but they saved us psychologically and symbolically in a very important way, too,” says Rice. Meanwhile, Tower One was weakening. It had stood for an hour and 43 minutes. At 10:29 a.m., it buckled in a mirror image of the collapse of its twin. The image that went round the world reached the First Lady in a secure location somewhere in Washington. “I was horrified,” she says. “I thought, ‘Dear God, protect as many citizens as you can.’ It was a nightmare.” By 10:30 a.m., America’s largest city was devastated, its military headquarters were burning. Air force One turned west along the Gulf Coast. “I can remember sitting right here in this office thinking about the consequences of what had taken place and realizing it was the defining moment in the history of the United States,” says President Bush. “I didn’t need any legal briefs, I didn’t need any consultations, I knew we were at war.” Mr. Bush says the first hours were frustrating. He watched the horrifying pictures, but the TV signal was breaking up. His calls to Cheney were cutting out. Mr. Bush says he pounded his desk shouting, “This is inexcusable; get me the vice president.” “I was trying to clear the fog of war, and there is a fog of war, says the president. "Information was just flying from all directions.” Chief of staff Card brought in the reports. There was word Camp David had been hit. A jet was thought to be targeting Mr. Bush’s ranch. “I remember hearing that the State Department might have been hit, or that the White House had a fire in it. So we were hearing lots of different information,” says Card. They also feared that Air Force One itself was a target. Cheney told the president there was a credible threat against the plane. Using the code name for Air Force One, Mr. Bush told an aide, “Angel is next.” The threat was passed to presidential pilot Colonel Mark Tillman. “It was serious before that but now it is -no longer is it a time to get the president home,” Tillman says. “We actually have to consider everything we say, everything we do could be intercepted, and we have to make sure that no one knows what our position is.” Tillman asked for an armed guard at his cockpit door while Secret Service agents double-checked the identity of everyone on board. The crew reviewed the emergency evacuation plan. Then came a warning from air traffic control – a suspect airliner was dead ahead. “Coming out of Sarasota there was one call that said there was an airliner off our nose that they did not have contact with,” Tillman remembers. Tillman took evasive action, pulling his plane high above normal traffic. They were on course for Washington, but by now no one thought that was a good idea, except the president. “I wanted to come back to Washington, but the circumstances were such that it was just impossible for the Secret Service or the national security team to clear the way for Air Force One to come back,” says Bush. So Air Force One set course for an underground command center in Nebraska. Back in Washington, the president’s closest advisor, Karen Hughes, heard about the threat to the plane and placed a call to Mr. Bush. “And the military operator came back to me and in a voice that, to me, sounded very shaken said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry, we can’t reach Air Force One.’” Hughes recalls. Hughes was out of the White House during the attacks. When she came back, it was a place she didn’t recognize. “There were either military, or maybe Secret Service, dressed all in black, holding machine guns as, as we drove up. And I never expected to see something like that in, in our nation's capital,” says Hughes. When she walked into the White House, no one was inside. “I knew it was a day that you didn't want to surprise anybody, and so I yelled, ‘Hello?’ and two, again, kind of SWAT team members came running, running through the, the hall with, again, guns drawn, and then took me to, to the location where I met the vice president.” On Air Force One, Col. Tillman had a problem. He needed to hide the most visible plane in the world, a 747 longer than the White House itself. He didn’t want to use his radio, because the hijackers could be listening to air traffic control. So he called air traffic control on the telephone. “We actually didn't tell them our destination or what directions we were heading,” says Tillman. “We, we basically just talked to 'em and said, 'OK, fine, we have no clearance at this time, we are just going to fly across the United States.'” Controllers passed Air Force One from one sector to another, warning each other to keep the route secret. “OK, where’s he going?” one tower radioed to another. “Just watch him,” a second tower responded. “Don’t question him where’s he's going. Just work him and watch him, there’s no flight plan in and we’re not going to put anything in. Ok, sir?” Air Force One ordered a fighter escort, and air traffic control radioed back: “Air Force One, got two F-16s at about your 10 o’clock position.” “The staff, and the president and us, were filed out along the outside hallway of his presidential cabin there and looking out the windows,” says Bartlett. “And the president gives them a signal of salute, and the pilot kind of tips his wing, and fades off and backs into formation.” The men in the F-16s were Shane Brotherton and Randy Roberts, from the Texas Air National Guard. Their mission was so secret their commander wouldn’t tell them where they were going. “He just said, 'You’ll know when you see it,' and that was my first clue, I didn’t have any idea what we were going up until that point,” says Brotherton. He knew when he saw it. “We, we were trying to keep an 80-mile bubble, bubble around Air Force One, and we'd investigate anything that was within 80 miles,” says Roberts. Bush says he was not worried about the safety of the people on this aircraft, or for his own safety: “I looked out the airplane and saw two F-16s on each wing. It was going to have to be a pretty good pilot to get us.” We now know that the threat to Air Force One was part of the fog of war, a false alarm. But it had a powerful effect at the time. Some wondered, with the president out of sight, was he still running the government? He hadn’t appeared after the attack on Washington. Mr. Bush was clearly worried about it. At one point he was overheard saying, “The American people want to know where their dang president is.” The staff considered an address to the nation by phone but instead Mr. Bush ordered Air Force One to land somewhere within 30 minutes so he could appear on TV. At 11:45 a.m., they landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. “The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless,” Bush said to the nation from Barksdale. At Barksdale, the Secret Service believed the situation in Washington was still unsafe. So the plane continued on to Nebraska, to the command center where Mr. Bush would be secure and have all the communications gear he needed to run the government. Aboard Air Force One, Mr. Bush had a job for press secretary Fleischer. “The president asked me to make sure that I took down everything that was said. I think he wanted to make certain that a record existed,” says Fleischer Fleischer’s notes capture Mr. Bush’s language, plain and unguarded. To the vice president he said: “We’re at war, Dick, we’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” Another time, Mr. Bush said, “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.” The President adds, “I can remember telling the Secretary of Defense, I said, ‘We’re going to find out who did this and then Mr. Secretary, you and Dick Myers,’ who we just named as chairman of the joint chiefs, ‘are going to go get them.’” By 3 p.m., Air Force One touched down at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Mr. Bush and his team were herded into a small brick hut that gave no hint of what they would find below. At the bottom of the stairs was the U.S. Strategic Command Underground Command Center. It was built to transmit a president’s order to go to nuclear war. But when Mr. Bush walked in, the battle staff was watching the skies over the United States. Many airplanes had still not landed. After a short briefing, Mr. Bush and Card were taken to a teleconference center which connected them to the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA. Mr. Bush had a question for his CIA Director George Tenent. According to Rice, Bush asked Tenent who had done this. Rice recalls that Tenent answered: “Sir, I believe its al Qaeda. We’re doing the assessment but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like al Qaeda.” The evidence would build. FBI Director Robert Mueller says that an essential clue came from one of the hijacked planes before it crashed. A flight attendant on American Flight 11, Amy Sweeney, had the presence of mind to call her office as the plane was hijacked and give them the seat numbers of the hijackers. “That was the first piece of hard evidence. We could then go to the manifest, find out who was sitting in those seats and immediately conduct an investigation of those individuals, as opposed to taking all the passengers on the plane and going through a process of elimination,” says Mueller. In Nebraska, the White House staff was preparing for an address to the nation from the Air Force bunker, but by then the president had had enough. He decided to come back. “At one point, he said he didn’t want any tinhorn terrorist keeping him out of Washington,” Fleischer says. “That verbatim.” On board, he was already thinking of issuing an ultimatum to the world: “I had time to think and a couple of thoughts emerged. One was that you're guilty if you harbor a terrorist, because I knew these terrorists like al-Qaeda liked to prey on weak government and weak people. The other thought that came was the opportunity to fashion a vast coalition of countries that would either be with us or with the terrorists.” As Air Force One sped east, the last casualty of the attack on America collapsed, one of the nation’s worst days wore into evening. At the World Trade Center, 2,801 were killed; at the Pentagon, 184; and in Pennsylvania 40. Altogether, there were 3,025 dead. “Anybody who would attack America the way they did, anybody who would take innocent life the way they did, anybody who's so devious, is evil,” Bush said recently. Mr. Bush would soon see that evil face to face. After arriving in Washington, he boarded his helicopter and flew past the Pentagon on the way to the White House. Was there a time when he was afraid that there might not be a White House to return to? “I don’t remember thinking about whether or not the White House would have been obliterated," he recalls. "I think I might have thought they took their best shot, and now it was time for us to take our best shot.” Mr. Bush arrived back at the White House nine hours after the attacks. His next step was an address to the nation. Karen Hughes and her staff were already working on the speech. “He decided that the primary tone he wanted to strike that night was reassurance,” remembers Hughes. “We had to show resolve, we had to reassure people, we had to let them know that we would be OK.” Just off the Oval Office, Mr. Bush added the words that would become known as the Bush Doctrine - no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them. The staff wanted to add a declaration of war but Mr. Bush didn’t think the American people wanted to hear it that night and he was emphatic about that. He prepared to say it from the same desk where Franklin Roosevelt first heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Now Bush was commander in chief. Eighty million Americans were watching. “Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts,” he said from the Oval Office that night. The Oval Office speech came at the end of the bloodiest day in American history since the Civil War. Before he walked to the White House residence for the night, Mr. Bush dictated these words for the White House daily log: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. We think it's Osama bin Laden.” (CBS) When Sept. 12 dawned, President Bush was demanding a war plan. No one in the White House or the Pentagon could be sure of what the president would do. In office for just eight months, he’d never been tested as commander-in-chief. “I never asked them what they thought,” President Bush said of the Pentagon brass, “because I didn’t really – because I knew what I was gonna do. I knew exactly what had to be done, Scott. And that was to set a strategy to seek justice. Find out who did it, hunt them down and bring them to justice.” In the cabinet room, the president made clear what was next: “The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror, they were acts of war,” he said. To the war cabinet, al Qaeda was no surprise. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice says the administration had been at work on a plan to strike bin Laden’s organization well before Sept. 11. “The president said, ‘You know I’m tired of swatting at flies, I need a strategy to eliminate these guys,’” Rice recalls. In one of the worst intelligence failures ever, the CIA and FBI didn’t pick up clues that an attack in the United States was imminent. Without a sense of urgency, the White House strategy the president had asked for came too late. Chief of Staff Andrew Card recalls that the plan Mr. Bush had asked for was “literally headed to the president’s desk, I think, on the eleventh, tenth or eleventh, of September.” On Sept. 12, the war cabinet was debating the full range of options - who to hit and how to hit them. There were some at the Pentagon who worried in the early hours that Mr. Bush would order up an immediate cruise missile strike, of the kind that had not deterred bin Laden in the past. “Well, there’s a lot of nervous Nellies at the Pentagon, anyway,” Mr. Bush tells Pelley. “A lot of people like to chatter, you know, more than they should. But no, I appreciate that very much. Secretary of Defense (Donald) Rumsfeld early on discussed the idea of making sure we had what we called ‘boots on the ground.’ That if you’re gonna go to war, then you’ve gotta go to war with all your assets.” The president says he wanted to “fight and win a guerilla war with conventional means.” It was an innovative but risky idea being proposed by CIA Director George Tenent. Tenent wanted to combine American technology and intelligence with the brute force of Afghan fighters hostile to the Taliban government. Secretary of State Colin Powell, noting that the CIA had already developed a long relationship with the Afghan resistance, called it an unconventional solution to an unconventional problem. “As I like to describe it to my friends,” Powell says, “we had on the ground a Fourth World army riding horses and living in tents with some CIA and special forces with them and we had a First World air force, the best in the world. How do you connect it all?” The president gave them 48 hours to figure it out. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush went to the battlefield himself. Just the day before, he had called the Pentagon the “mightiest building in the world.” Now one-fifth of it was in ruins. The wreckage of American Flight 77 was being examined by Navy investigators. And before Mr. Bush left, he made a point of speaking personally with the team recovering the remains of the first casualties of war on his watch. The next day, Sept. 13, there was another warning of attack that the public never heard about. Threats had been were coming in constantly but this one sounded credible: a large truck bomb headed to the White House. The Secret Service wanted the president back in the bunker. “He wasn’t real receptive to that, to that recommendation,” remembers Brian Stafford, director of the Secret Service. “And he ordered a hamburger and said he was going to stay in the White House that evening and that’s what he did.” The next day, would be one of the longest and the most difficult for the president. On Friday, Sept. 14, Mr. Bush started the day with a cabinet meeting, but he wept when he walked in and was surprised by applause. “He sat down, slightly overcome, for a moment but he recaptured it,” says Powell who remembers being worried that the president might have trouble getting through his speech at the national memorial service later that morning. “And I just scribbled a little note to him,” Powell recalls, “and I said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve learned over the years when you are going to give a very emotional speech, watch out for certain words that will cause you to start to tear up.’ He looked at me and he smiled and then at the next break in the conversation he said, ‘The Secretary of State told me not to break down at the memorial service,’ and that broke the tension and everybody started laughing and I felt embarrassed.” First Lady Laura Bush was involved in planning the memorial service and she says she wanted it to be both dignified and comforting. “I wanted the Psalms and everything to be read to be comforting, because I think we were a country, that needed, everyone of us, needed comforting.” It also stirred the mourners’ resolve, as Rice remember. “As we stood to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she says, “you could feel the entire congregation and I could certainly feel myself stiffen, the kind of spine, and this deep sadness was being replaced by resolve. “We all felt that we still had mourning to do for our countrymen who had been lost but that we also had a new purpose in not just avenging what had happened to them but making certain that the world was eventually going to be safe from this kind of attack ever again.” Next came a visit to ground zero. The president was not prepared for what he encountered there. “You couldn’t brief me, you couldn’t brief anybody on ground zero until you saw it," Mr. Bush says. “It was like – it was ghostly. Like you’re having a bad dream and you’re walking through the dream.” The president found the scene very powerful, particularly when the men and women at ground zero began to chant, “USA! USA!.” “There was a lot of bloodlust,” the president recalls. “People were, you know, pointing their big old hands at me saying, ‘Don’t you ever forget this, Mr. President. Don’t let us down.’ The scene was very powerful. Very powerful.” When Mr. Bush tried to speak, the crowd kept shouting, “We can’t hear you.” The president responded, “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Mr. Bush had been in New York just a few weeks before; he’d posed with the firemen who always stood by whenever the president’s helicopter landed there. Now, five of the men who stood with the president in the picture were dead – lost at ground zero. When the president arrived Sept. 14, Manhattan was papered with the faces of the lost. Families, unable to believe that so many had vanished in an instant, held onto the hope that their loved ones were just missing. It was a place where a child comforted a grieving mother. At a meeting the public never saw, the president spoke with several hundred of these families in a convention hall. “People said to me, ‘He’ll come out. Don’t worry, Mr. president, we’ll see him soon. I know my loved one, he will - he’ll find a place to survive underneath the rubble and we’ll get him out.’ I, on the other hand had been briefed about the realities, and my job was to hug and cry, but I remember the whole time thinking, ‘This is incredibly sad because the loved ones won’t come out.’” One little boy handed the president a picture of his father in his firefighter uniform and as he signed it, Mr. Bush remembers, he told the boy, “Your daddy won’t believe that I was here, so you show him that autograph.” It was an effort “to provide a little hope,” the president recalls. “I still get emotional thinking about it because we’re dealing with people who loved their dads or loved their mom, or loved their…wives who loved their husbands. It was a tough time, you know, it was a tough time for all of us because we were a very emotional, and I was emotional at times. I felt, I felt the same now as I did then, which is sad. And I still feel sad for those who grieve for their families, but through my tears, I see opportunity.” The president was supposed to be with the families for about 30 minutes; he stayed for two and a half hours. It was there he met Arlene Howard. The body of her son, George, was among the first to be found at ground zero. “I called the police department,” Howard remembers, “ and they said he hadn’t called in for roll call and to call back in an hour and I said, ‘No, I don’t need to call back.’ If he hadn’t called in, I knew where he was.” George Howard had rescued children trapped in an elevator back in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. He had been off duty that day, and he was off duty on Sept. 11, but couldn’t stay away. The police department gave his badge to his mother and she gave it to the president. “He (the president) he leaned over to talk to me,” Howard recalls. “And he extends his sympathy to me and that’s when I asked him I’d like to present George’s shield to him in honor of all the men and women who were killed over there.” By the end of that day, Mr. Bush flew to Camp David visibly drained. “He was physically exhausted, he was mentally exhausted, he was emotionally exhausted, he was spiritually exhausted,” recalls Card.. The next day – Saturday, Sept. 15 - Mr. Bush met members of his war cabinet at the presidential retreat for a last decisive meeting. “My message is for everybody who wears the uniform – get ready. The United States will do what it takes,” Mr. Bush told them. As Powell remembers it, “He was encouraging us to think boldly. He was listening to all ideas; he was not constrained to any one idea; he wanted to hear his advisors talk and argue and debate with each other.” President Bush was pleased with the progress that had been made. “On the other hand,” he says, “I wanted to clarify plans and I went around the room and I asked everybody what they thought ought to happen.” When he left that meeting on Saturday night, he still had not told the cabinet what he was planning. “I wanted to just think it through,” Mr. Bush remembers. “Any time you commit troops to harm’s way, a president must make sure that he fully understands all the consequences and ramifications. And I wanted to just spend some time on it alone. And did.” What were his reservations? Mr. Bush says, “Could we win? I didn’t want to be putting our troops in there unless I was certain we could win. And I was certain we could win.” Nine days after the attacks on America, before a joint session of Congress the president committed the nation to the war on terror. “Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it happened,” Mr. Bush told the Congress and the nation. “We’ll remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire or a story of rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever. And I will carry this. It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end.” A year has passed since then, but the president says his job is still to remind Americans of what happened and of the war that is still being waged, a war he reminds himself of every day in the Oval Office, literally keeping score, one terrorist at a time. In his desk, the president says, “I have a classified document that might have some pictures on there, just to keep reminding me about who’s out there, where they might be” And as the terrorists are captures or killed? “I might make a little check there, yeah,” Mr. Bush admits. But there is no check by the name that must be on the top of that list – Osama bin Laden. (CBS) A lot has happened in the year since Sept. 11. One year ago, the president was new on the job, with little experience in foreign policy. He had wanted to pull the military back from foreign entanglements. Now, on his orders, U.S. forces are engaged around the globe in a war he did not expect, in a world completely changed. In the Oval Office last week, CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley asked the president about Iraq, about whether Americans are safe at home and about Osama bin Laden. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scott Pelley: You must be frustrated, maybe angry. After a year, we still don’t have Osama Bin Laden? President Bush: How do you know that? I don’t know whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive. I don’t know that. He’s not leading a lot of parades. And he’s not nearly the hero that a lot of people thought he was. This is much bigger than one person anyway. This is — we’re slowly but surely dismantling and disrupting the al Qaeda network that, that hates America. And we will stay on task until we complete the task. I always knew this was a different kind of war, Scott. See, in the old days, you measure the size and the strength of the enemy by counting his tanks or his airplanes and his ships. This is an international manhunt. We’re after these people one at the time. They’re killers. Period. Pelley: But have you won the war before you find Osama bin Laden dead or alive? Mr. Bush: If he were dead, there’s somebody else to replace him. And we would find that person. But slowly but surely, we will dismantle the al Qaeda network. And those who sponsor them and those who harbor them. And at the same time, hopefully lay the seeds for, the conditions necessary so that people don’t feel like they’ve got to conduct terror to achieve objectives. Pelley: Do you look back on the Afghan campaign with any doubts? Certainly, we’ve overthrown the Taliban government. Certainly, al Qaeda has been scattered. But some of the Taliban leaders appear to have gotten away. And there have been many civilian casualties as well. Mr. Bush: Uh huh. Well, you know, I am sad that civilians lost their life. But I understand war. We did everything we can to — everything we could to protect people. When civilians did die, it was because of a mistake. Certainly not because of intention. We liberated a country for which I’m extremely proud. No, — I don’t second guess things. It’s — things never go perfect in a time of war. Pelley: Are you committed to ending the rule of Saddam Hussein? Mr. Bush: I’m committed to regime change. Pelley: There are those who have been vocal in their advice against war in Iraq. Some of our allies in the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia, Turkey for example. Even your father’s former national security advisor, Mr. Scowcroft has written about it in the paper. What is it in your estimation that they don’t understand about the Iraq question that you do appreciate? Mr. Bush: The policy of the government is regime change, Scott, hasn’t changed. I get all kinds of advice. I’m listening to the advice. I appreciate the consultations. And we’ll consult with a lot of people but our policy hasn’t changed. Pelley: On Air Force One you described the terrorists as evil. Mr. Bush: Yeah. Pelley: I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, but at the same time, many in the Arab world are angry at the United States for political reasons because of our policy in Israel or our troops in the oil region of the Middle East. Is there any change in foreign policy that you’re considering that might reduce Arab anger against the United States. Mr. Bush: Hmm. Well, I’m working for peace in the Middle East. I’m the first president that ever went to the United Nations and publicly declared the need to have a Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in peace. I’ve made it clear that in order for there to be peace the Palestinians have gotta to get some leadership that renounces terror and believes in peaces and quits using the Palestinian people as pawns. I've also made it clear to the other Arab nations in the region that they’ve got responsibilities. If you want peace they gotta work toward it. We’re more than willing to work for it, but they have to work for it as well. But all this business isn’t going to happen as long as a few are willing to blow up the hopes of many. So we all gotta work to fight off terror. Pelley: Arafat has to go? Mr. Bush: Either, he’s, he’s been a complete failure as far as I am concerned. Utter disappointment. Pelley: There has been some concern over the year about civil liberties. Mr. Bush: Yeah… Pelley: In fact, an appeals court recently was harsh about your administration’s decision to close certain deportation hearings. They said, quote, “A government operating in secrecy stands in opposition to the Constitution.” Where do you draw the line sir? Mr. Bush: I draw the line at the Constitution. We will protect America. But we will do so on, within the guidelines of the Constitution, confines of the Constitution, spirit of the Constitution. Pelley: Is there anything that the Justice Department has brought to you as an idea that you’ve thought, “No, that’s too far. I don’t wanna go…" Mr. Bush: Nah, not that that I remember. And I am pleased with the Justice Department. I think that Attorney General’s doing a fine job, by the way...and to the extent that our courts are willing to make sure that they review decisions we make, I think that’s fine. I mean, that’s good. It’s healthy. It’s part of America. Pelley: Franklin Roosevelt said that America should stand in defense of four freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Do we have that today Mr. President? Freedom from fear? Mr. Bush: I think more than we did, in retrospect. The fact that we are on alert, the fact that we understand the new circumstances makes us more free from fear than on that fateful day of September the 11th. We’ve got more work to do. Pelley: And Americans should not live their lives in fear? Mr. Bush: I don’t think so. No. I think Americans oughta know their government’s doing everything possible to help. And obviously if we get information that relates directly a particular attack we’ll deal with it. And if we get noise that deals with a general attack, we’ll alert people. There are a lot of good folks working hard to disrupt and deny and run down leads. And the American people need to go about their lives. It seems like they are.