Rove's worst nightmare: Outspoken 9/11 widows

"Whether or not my husband's plane was shot down, the most angering part is reading about how the President handled this." ♦ Flight 93 widow Melody Homer

The widows and widowers of September 11th remain the greatest potential threat to the U.S. government's official narrative of the attacks that day -- and also to "war President" Bush's re-election hopes. Reporting in the pages of the (usually frivolous) New York Observer, author Gail Sheehy has paid far more attention to these survivors than the rest of the media. In the current issue, Sheehy files another stellar report on their devastatingly credible critiques of the government's so-called investigation.

Last August, Sheehy reported extensively on the tenacious and hard-hitting testimony of 9/11 widow, mom and lawyer Kristen Breitweiser -- who exposed the fact that despite its denials, the F.B.I. had been tracking "14 individuals who had contact with the hijackers while they were in the United States" well before the attacks. Breitweiser also took Condoleeza Rice and other officials to task, point by point, fact by fact, on their obtuse efforts to gloss over the government's bumbling, abject, and multiple failures to prevent the attacks.

From Sheehy's August report:

"So afraid is the Bush administration of what could be revealed by inquiries into its failures to protect Americans from terrorist attack, it is unabashedly using Kremlin tactics to muzzle members of Congress and thwart the current federal commission investigating the failures of Sept. 11."

Breitweiser's poised and unflinching testimony to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) in September 2002 was so powerful that it literally woke this writer from out of a nap (having fallen asleep with the normally soporific C-SPAN on the tube). If you haven't seen her detailed presentation, click HERE. Right away. (Breitweiser's appearance begins at minute 42.)

In the January 26, 2004 issue, Sheehy again shone a welcome spotlight on the overlooked whisteblowers within the F.B.I., who have sided with Breitweiser and three other 9/11 moms -- who argue, as investigator Kean briefly admitted, that the attacks were preventable.

In her September 2003 review of Showtime's 9/11 "propaganda film," Breitweiser wrote:

It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the president's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 a.m., when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to 'second grade story-hour' while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision.

The sympathy the public feels for these widows is Karl Rove's worst nightmare in an election year, especially one in which Bush appears to be staking everything on his handling of 9/11. Should these women find greater exposure on national televison, Bush's administration could be toast. As Breitweiser told CBS last fall, the widows want to know why various government agencies didn't connect the dots before Sept. 11, such as warnings from FBI offices in Minnesota and Arizona about suspicious student pilots

"If you were to tell me that two years after the murder of my husband that we wouldn't have one question answered, I wouldn't believe it."

Someone please nominate Sheehy for a Pulitzer for this series of feature stories, and give these four moms some medals, already.