Remembering September 11th

Thursday, September 21, 2006

By Miles O'Brien, CNN's American Morning

September 11, 2006

In honor of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a look back at what happened on that day and how it impacted people's lives...

M. O'BRIEN: Ten after eight now.

Within five minutes, the hijackers on American Flight 11 would make their move five years ago. By the time the coordinated attacks were over, four planes would be down, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in flames and official Washington evacuating.

Tim Roemer was a congressman from Indiana that morning. He later became a member of the 9/11 Commission.

He joins us from Washington.

Mr. Roemer, good to have you back with us on the program.

TIM ROEMER, FORMER 9/11 COMMISSIONER: Nice to see you, Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: What are your recollections of that morning?

ROEMER: Well, many things. First of all, just, like so many people, Miles, I remember the crispness of the air in your lungs, the beauty of the sky, the blueness of the sky. And then the surprise. I was actually watching CNN that morning when that first plane went in. I was in my congressional office. We evacuated the office about an hour-and-a- half later. I told my staff to go home.

And the rest of the day seems, Miles, like it's in slow motion, carved into my heart and my brain. I remember the confusion that day, the chaos. My cell phone did not work very well. We tried to get the Intelligence Committee to meet.

I remember stopping by a church on Capitol Hill, St. Joseph Church, and trying to look for some inspiration and hope. I remember stopping by the Pentagon that night, still seeing it in smoke and a desk hanging off one of the sliced open sides and wondering what happened to that person that had been sitting at that desk at the Pentagon.

And then being inspired that night, too, and seeing all the people at the Pentagon pitching in to help out. I knew that there would be hope and promise and the best of America would come forward at the end of that very difficult day.

M. O'BRIEN: At any point during this day were you just, in a very base way, afraid?

ROEMER: There was -- there were many times, Miles, that you were afraid. You were -- you were worried, especially when I was standing in front of the Pentagon that night, seeing one of our fortresses pried open by a missile, an airplane, thinking about the number of people that probably died on the plane and on the ground, thinking about if they could hit our Pentagon, what else could they do? And then turning around and looking into the lights that were still there, seeing the thousands of Americans lined up -- urban rescue people, fire people, people from the Pentagon, all pitching in to help.

And I really felt the sense of, you know, as the country came together in the next few months, this unity and this hope.

And I hope we get that back. I hope we can come together as a people. We have a lot of work to do. We have 12 Ds, five Fs and two incompletes as grades from the 9/11 Commission, a lot of work to go. We see bin Laden and Zawahiri releasing a tape over the weekend. They want new events to attack America. We have a lot of work to go to make this country safer. We're not as safe as we should be and we have a long way to go in terms of healing the scars and paying respect to the people that died that day.

I think that's what this is about today.

M. O'BRIEN: You know, one of the things that you're talking here is a sense of bipartisanship. And that's reflected in the 9/11 Commission report. Everybody would say that's a bipartisan document.

How -- this discussion about how to make us safer, how does it get removed from the partisan world?

Can it be?

ROEMER: I think the American people realize that there are going to be fights, there are going to be disagreements, there are going to be times when the Republican and the Democratic Parties may have different versions of how to go forward.

But the 9/11 Commission book outlined 41 ideas to make our country safer, to say with five Democrats and five Republicans, on foreign policy, on reorganizing government, on brand new ideas, here is what we can do to better protect our country, reorganize our government in new ways against this Jihadist threat.

And only half of these recommendations have been passed five years later. And we see difficulties in Afghanistan, some backsliding, record levels of opium production. We have bin Laden and Zawahiri releasing tapes faster than the rock group U2. We're not winning the war in terms of the political battles of communicating with those people that may line up as future Jihadists.

We can, I think, Miles, have the same kind of unity that we had, even though we may disagree on some of the ways to go forward, we can still have some kind of bipartisanship going forward in Congress in the weeks ahead to pass these remaining reforms. Yet we haven't seen that happen yet.

I think that would be a real honor to the people that died, when we think about the photo albums that will never be completed from these people, the 3,000 people that died. Let's give them tribute. Let's remember those people that stood up on Flight 93 to save our Capitol and lawmakers. Let's have our lawmakers stand up for America today, work in a bipartisan way and get the job done.

M. O'BRIEN: Tim Roemer, thanks for your time.

ROEMER: Thanks, Miles.

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