Dear Friends of Clay,

It is said that people die the way they live. Knowing Clay as you do, you will probably not be surprised by the story I want to share with you. In the past week, as he approaches the final deadline of his life, Clay’s life force returned with gusto.

Not that it ever flagged for long. In the past year, he has astonished every doctor and nurse who predicted “It won’t be long now.” Last summer, after three months in a rehab unit in Riverdale, Clay revived from near-drowning in double pneumonia and worked with physical therapists twice a day until he could circle the floor twice on a walker at about the speed he used to reach while sprinting across town for an important lunch date. He was able to come home last September.

In January, pneumonia returned. We were sent to the emergency room by his primary care doctor for yet another CT scan. After waiting 8 hours for the test, the doctors had gone home and he was under imminent threat of being admitted by default. I threw a little hissy fit. The CT was done, but the radiologists had left so no one could read it. A sympathetic resident finally produced some results. They sounded foreign. It was a scan taken 9 months before.

I wheeled Clay out of the ER with the IV needles still in his arms, and we congratulated ourselves on a jailbreak. We had spent more than a year frantically circling around the revolving door of acute care, from gridlocked ER’s to repeated hospital admissions, where, nonetheless, each time one is treated as a tabula rasa, one’s body parts segmented like cheese cubes on an hors d’oeuvres tray with each one assigned to a different specialist and Medicare code, then on to a rehab facility and back around the revolving door again. Until we discovered palliative care. A doctor insisted on making a house call. Honest to God.

It was Dr. Sean Morrison, who leads the Palliative Care team at Mt. Sinai Hospital. He took over Clay’s care last January. The mission of palliative care is to keep a senior out of the hospital and give back some control to people over a stage in life that is uncontrollable. Dr. Morrison sat with Clay and me for an hour, at our home, and we had the first full and frank conversation about Clay’s ideas on how he wanted to play out the end of life. He wanted to remain at home, under only maintenance care by aides, and get out and see and taste the world whenever he could.

He was always up for rolling over to Lincoln Center for a rehearsal at the Philharmonic, or helping to swing himself into the car and heading downtown for a show at the New Museum, or the opening of Byron Dobell’s art show, or out to Bridgehampton to have Thanksgiving with Bina and Walter Bernard. He insisted upon climbing icy outdoor stairs, with help, to be present for our grandson’s first piano recital.

Starting in May, he wasn’t able to go outside most days. It wasn’t easy for him to remain upright in the wheelchair. But when his dearest partner-in-parody, Tom Wolfe, sent over his hilarious 8,000-word preface to the anthology of New York magazine being published this fall by Random House, I read it to him in savory 2,000-word bites that produced wicked laughter and a burst of ebullience.

The next day, Monday, June 17, Dr. Morrison made a home visit. He told Clay that he recommended that the tube feedings be suspended because the nutrition that had nourished him for the past nine years was not being absorbed and was causing him to choke. Clay nodded assent. His body was beginning to shut down.

Clay asked, “How long?”

“It won’t be long. A week to a month.”

Clay did not look surprised. The doctor took me aside in the next room. We spoke in hushed tones. Clay’s voice pierced through the half-open door. He wanted his wishes heard: “Don’t abandon me.”

An urgent inspiration possessed me. “Do you want to do one great thing, darling?” He nodded vigorously. “How about we go out and hear some jazz?” The light flared again in his eyes. Tonight? He shook his head up and down. I said, “Let’s see who’s playing at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola!” The show started in two hours.

He pulled up from his hospital bed and picked out a linen jacket and deep blue shirt and a suede cap. I touched up his face with tinted sunscreen and wheeled him in front of the full-length mirror. “How’s that for handsome?” He looked pleasantly surprised to see a picture of normalcy.

Dizzy’s was the quintessence of New York … seductive cocktail tables set beneath a window wall with a bigger-than-Trump vista across Central Park to the frosted layer-cake condos of Fifth Avenue. The aides and I ordered exotic drinks. Clay took a sip … the first taste in his mouth in years.

Clay sat tall and straight in his wheelchair and for the next hour and a half drank in the music as his sustenance. His attention locked on Mike Melvoin, the jazz pianist whose trio it was, an older man, with undiminished passion. He had been playing piano since he was three years old and was still, past 70, composing for movies and TV. He was another of those indefatigable creatives, like Clay, who produced his first publication at the age of eight, the Greeley Street News, and sold it up and down his block in Webster Groves, Missouri, for the up-market price of a nickel.

Melvoin voiced the philosophy behind his original compositions. “There’s a lot of pessimism and feelings of futility out there … it’s the job of music to dispel those feelings. This is a little song called ‘Life is What You Make It.’” Up-tempo drums kick-started a piece with strong major chords and a restless backbeat. Melvoin leaned in to the keyboard and swayed passionately up and down the octaves with his hands crossing and fingers flying, turning music into the thunder of life. Clay’s fingers drummed on the table … he was a drummer as a boy.

Between two aides, myself, and a cooperative driver, we cantilevered Clay out of the car service and back up to the apartment and into bed shortly before midnight. He was not the least tired. He wanted to talk. He gripped my hands and said clearly, with gusto, “It was a wonderful evening.”

Ms. Dillard dared to hope that the F.B.I. would clarify the timeline in the mystifying story of Sept. 11, 2001.

The briefing in New Jersey two weeks ago, attended by about 130 family members of victims, had been arranged by the F.B.I. Previously unavailable calls from passengers and crew were to be played for families of victims of the four infamous flights that were turned into missiles by terrorists.

Who knew what, and when? And what did the airlines and federal officials do about it? These were the burning questions on the minds of many family members who have begged the commission to help connect the dots. This week, when the 9/11 commission wraps up its public hearings, families had been promised that the final report would be titled "9-11: The Timeline." But at the last minute the commission switched the subject to "9-11: The Plot," focusing on the hijackers' success in foiling every layer of the nation's defenses, up to and including the airlines'.

For Ms. Dillard, the tapes scheduled to be played in Princeton this June morning were especially important: She herself had acted as the American Airlines base manager at Reagan National Airport on the morning of Sept. 11. She had been responsible for three D.C.-area airports, including Dulles. For the last two and a half years, she has been haunted by the fact that American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Dulles Airport that morning, with her blessing.

Her husband was a passenger on that flight.

The cab on the way to the hearing at the Radisson Hotel was quiet. Asked if she was part of a lawsuit being filed by the roughly 115 families against American and United Airlines and an alphabet soup of government agencies, she demurred.

"That's a very sore subject," she said. She hoped, in hearing tapes of conversations between flight crews and authorities on the ground, to find out why, when flight controllers in Boston suspected a hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 as early as 8:13 a.m., neither her company nor the Federal Aviation Administration notified her to warn the crew of American Airlines Flight 77 of the terrorist threat in the skies when the plane took off at 8:20 a.m. By 8:24 a.m., flight controllers were certain that Flight 11 had been overrun.

But neither the tapes and cell-phone recordings Ms. Dillard heard that afternoon, nor the PowerPoint presentation that took the families systematically through all four flights with neat timelines and bland conclusions, helped her to connect the dots. She fled the hearing early, deeply upset.

Those present were told that the material they were hearing is evidence in the government's case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the once-alleged 20th hijacker, and in order not to compromise the case, it mustn't be disclosed. They signed nondisclosure agreements and were not permitted to take notes. Civil attorneys and the media were barred. F.B.I. agents filled the halls of the hotel and took any camera or recording equipment before people were admitted to the ballroom. Those who left the three-and-a-half-hour session to relieve themselves were accompanied into rest rooms by agents.

The families heard a tape that has just now surfaced. Recorded by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., even as the first hijacked airliner, Flight 11, was being taken over, the tape shows the airline's top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m.-25 minutes before the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center's north tower-that a group of men described as Middle Eastern had stabbed two flight attendants, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit in a violent takeover of the gigantic bird.

Despite all the high secrecy surrounding the briefing, a half-dozen different family members were so horrified by voice evidence of the airlines' disregard for the fate of their pilots, crew and passengers that they found ways to reveal some of what they heard on those tapes, and also what they felt. To them, the tapes appeared to show that the first instinct of American and United Airlines, as management learned of the gathering horror aboard their passenger planes on Sept. 11, was to cover up.

The response of American's management on duty, as revealed on the tape produced at the meeting, was recalled by persons in attendance:

"Don't spread this around. Keep it close."

"Keep it quiet."

"Let's keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what's going on?"

"It was disgusting," said the parent of one of the victims, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. "The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place."

That instinct to hold back information, some of the families believe, may have helped to allow the third hijacked plane to crash into the Pentagon and contributed to the doom of a fourth flight, United Flight 93. The United dispatcher was told by his superiors: Don't tell pilots why we want them to land. The F.B.I. and the F.A.A. have also held back or, in one case, destroyed evidence in the government's possession that would tell a very different story of how the nation's guardians failed to prepare or protect Americans from the most devastating of terrorist attacks on the homeland.

"Flight 77 should never have taken off," Ms. Dillard said through clenched teeth.

Voices of the dead on cell

phones aroused gut-wrenching feelings. Passengers who called from both American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 talked about believing the hijackers were piloting the aircraft, and reported wildly erratic flying patterns.

Voices of crew members, calmly disseminating specifics to airline managers on the ground, pointed out how much was known minutes and even an hour and a half before the last of the jumbo jets had met its diabolic finish.

American Airlines officials had to know there was nothing traditional about this hijacking, because two of their flight attendants, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney and Betty Ong, were calmly and bravely transmitting the most illuminating details anyone has yet heard. Ms. Ong's tape was played in a public commission hearing in January, prompting family members to demand that the F.B.I. honor their rights under the Victims Assistance Act to hear any and all calls made from the stricken planes that day. Ms. Sweeney's name was cited only in passing at that earlier hearing. And when the president and chief executive of American Airlines, Gerard Arpey, testified, he never mentioned Ms. Sweeney or the cache of information she had provided American Airlines officials so early in the unfolding disaster.

Since then, Mike Sweeney, her widowed husband, has been troubled by the disconnect between the airline's ignoring of his wife's efforts, and the fact that the F.B.I. awarded her its highest civilian honor. He was first informed about the new tape two weeks previously by the U.S. attorney's office in Virginia. David Novak, an assistant U.S. attorney involved in prosecuting the Moussaoui case, told Mr. Sweeney that the existence of the tape was news to him and offered him a private hearing.

"I was shocked that I'm finding out, almost three years later, there was a tape with information given by my wife that was very crucial to the happenings of 9/11," Mr. Sweeney told me. "Suddenly it miraculously appears and falls into the hands of F.B.I.? Why and how and for what reason was it suppressed? Why did it surface now? Is there information on that tape that is of concern to other law-enforcement agencies?"

The gut-churning question that has kept the widowed father of two young children on edge for so long is this: "When and how was this information about the hijackers used? Were Amy's last moments put to the best use to protect and save others?"

Now he believes the answer is no.

From the beginning, the commission has been plagued with questions of where evidence exists about what happened with the flights on Sept. 11. This tape is a case in point.

"We, the prosecution team and the F.B.I. agents that have been assigned to assist us, were not aware of that tape," Mr. Novak told me. He says he only learned of it two weeks ago while he was briefing 9/11 commissioners on what he knows about the two hijacked American flights. He believes the commission got the tape from the airline.

"Now, does Mike have a reason to have heartburn about this?" he asks rhetorically. "Absolutely-as any other victim would, if they learned of something after two and a half years. We're trying to figure out why we didn't know about this before. Is it American Airlines' fault? I don't know. Is it the way they produced it? I don't know. Is it an F.B.I. fault? I don't know."

Mr. Novak suggested a possible explanation for the airline's personnel to hold the horrific information tightly: "I think they were trying not to get other people unduly alarmed so they could deal with the situation at hand." But he says he is not going to defend or attack airline personnel. "That's not my job. Our job is to try to convict Moussaoui. We view this as a giant murder case."

He confirmed that the Justice Department only revealed to the families what in its judgment were the "relevant" tapes. The F.B.I. is holding back other recordings from some of the flights as evidence in prosecuting its criminal trial. It is the way the F.B.I. has always done business: zealously guarding information to make its case retrospectively, rather than sharing information with other law-enforcement agencies to improve the country's defensive posture proactively. For example, tapes considered "relevant" to the families didn't include the cockpit voice recorder or the flight-data recorder from Flight 93, the final casualty.

On the American Airlines tape played at the meeting, a voice is heard relaying to the airline's headquarters the blow-by-blow account by Ms. Sweeney of mayhem aboard Flight 11. The flight attendant had gone face to face with the hijackers, and reported they had shown her what appeared to be a bomb, with red and yellow wires. The young blond mother of two had secreted herself in the next-to-last passenger row and used an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant, Sara Low, to call the airline's flight-services office at Boston's Logan airport.

"This is Amy Sweeney," she reported. "I'm on Flight 11-this plane has been hijacked." She was disconnected. She called back: "Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully." Within seconds, her befuddled respondent was replaced by a voice she knew.

"Amy, this is Michael Woodward."

The American Airlines flight-service manager had been friends with Ms. Sweeney for a decade and didn't have to waste time verifying that this wasn't a hoax. Ms. Sweeney repeated, "Michael, this plane has been hijacked."

Since there was no tape machine in his office, Woodward began repeating the flight attendant's alarming account to a colleague, Nancy Wyatt, the supervisor of pursers at Logan. On another phone, Ms. Wyatt was simultaneously transmitting Ms. Sweeney's words to the airline's Fort Worth headquarters. It was that relayed account that was played for the families.

"In Fort Worth, two managers in S.O.C. [Systems Operations Control] were sitting beside each other and hearing it," says one former American Airlines employee who heard the tape. "They were both saying, 'Do not pass this along. Let's keep it right here. Keep it among the five of us.'"

The two managers' names were given in testimony to the 9/11 commission by Mr. Arpey, then executive vice president of operations, who described himself as "directly involved in American's emergency-response efforts and other operational decisions made as the terrible events of Sept. 11 unfolded." Joe Burdepelly, one of the S.O.C. managers, told Mr. Arpey at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time that they had a possible hijacking on Flight 11. Mr. Burdepelly also said that the S.O.C. manager on duty, Craig Marquis, was in contact with Ms. Ong. Mr. Arpey related that from Ms. Ong, he and the S.O.C. managers had learned by 8:30 a.m. "that two or three passengers were in the cockpit, and that our pilots were not responding to intercom calls from the flight attendants. After talking with S.O.C.," Mr. Arpey testified, "I then called Don Carty, the president and C.E.O. of American Airlines, at that time," who was not available. Mr. Arpey then drove to the S.O.C. facility, arriving, he says, between 8:35 and 8:40 a.m. Eastern time.

Mr. Arpey testified that by 8:40 a.m. they knew one of the passengers had been stabbed, possibly fatally, although this news was transmitted by Ms. Sweeney at least 15 minutes earlier. "We were also receiving information from the F.A.A. that, instead of heading west on its intended flight path, Flight 11 was headed south. We believed that Flight 11 might be headed for the New York area. Our pilots were not responding to air traffic control or company radio calls, and the aircraft transponder had been turned off."

Mr. Arpey's account revealed that the American Airlines executives had attempted to monitor the progress of Flight 11 via communications with the F.A.A. and their traffic-control officials. "As far as we knew, the rest of our airline was operating normally at this point," he said.

But Flight 11 had missed its first mark at 8:13 a.m., when, shortly after controllers asked the pilot to climb to 35,000 feet, the transponder stopped transmitting the electronic signal that identifies exact location and altitude. Air traffic manager Glenn Michael later said, "We considered it at that time to be a possible hijacking."

At 8:14 a.m., F.A.A. flight controllers in Boston began hearing an extraordinary radio transmission from the cockpit of Flight 11 that should have set off alarm bells. Before their F.A.A. superiors forbade them to talk to anyone, two of the controllers told the Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 11 that the captain of Flight 11, John Ogonowski, was surreptitiously triggering a "push-to-talk" button on the aircraft's yoke most of the way to New York. When controllers picked up the voices of men speaking in Arabic and heavily accented English, they knew something was terribly wrong. More than one F.A.A. controller heard an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes."

Apparently, none of this crucial information was transmitted to other American pilots already airborne-notably Flight 77 out of Dulles, which took off at 8:20 a.m. only to be redirected to its target, the Pentagon-or to other airlines with planes in harm's way: United's Flight 173, which took off at 8:14 a.m. from Boston, or United's Flight 93, whose "wheels-up" was recorded at 8:42 a.m.

"You would have thought American's S.O.C. would have grounded everything," says Ms. Dillard. "They were in the lead spot, they're in Texas-they had control over the whole system. They could have stopped it. Everybody should have been grounded."

Ms. Dillard had to learn about the two planes crashing into the World Trade Center from the screams of waiting passengers in the next-door Admirals Club who were watching TV. "We all rushed back to our offices to wait for 'go-do's' from headquarters," she recalls. But headquarters personnel never contacted Ms. Dillard, the Washington base manager, to inform her that Flight 77 was in trouble. They had lost radio contact with the plane out of Dulles at 8:50 a.m. More than 45 minutes later, her assistant gave Ms. Dillard an even more devastating piece of news.

"There's a plane that hit the Pentagon. Our crew was on it."

"Was that 77?" Ms. Dillard asked.

"I think so," her assistant said.

"Are you sure it was 77?" Ms. Dillard pressed. "'Cause I just took Eddie over to Dulles," Ms. Dillard said numbly, referring to her husband. "Eddie's on that plane."

She looked at the crew list. Her heart sank. "I knew one of the ladies very well," she later remembered, "and she had kids, and the other two who were married, and another one was pregnant. It was horrible."

One of American's top corporate executives directly in the line of authority that day was Jane Allen, then vice president of in-flight services, in charge of the company's 24,000 flight attendants and management and operations at 22 bases. She was Ms. Dillard's top boss. But Ms. Dillard never heard from her until after Flight 77 had plowed into the Pentagon. Reached at United Airlines corporate headquarters in Chicago, where Ms. Allen now works, she was asked to confirm the names of participants in the Sept. 11 phone call and why the decision was made to hold back that information.

"I really don't know what I could possibly add to all the hurt," she said.

But was it too much information, or too little, that was hurtful?

"I really am not interested in helping or participating," Ms. Allen said, putting down the phone.

"This has been the attitude all the way along," Ms. Dillard observed. "Everybody was keeping it hush-hush."

The failure to trumpet vital news

from calls placed from the first hijacked flight throughout the system and into the highest circles of government leaves families wondering whether military jets could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77 in time to keep it from diving into the Pentagon and killing 184 more people. That suicide mission ended in triumph for the terrorists more than 50 minutes after the first American jetliner hit the World Trade Center. Suppose American Airlines had warned all its pilots and crew of what their families were able to see and hear from the media?

The information hold-back may have arisen from lack of experience, or from the inability to register the enormity of the terrorists' destructive plans, or it may have been a visceral desire to protect the airlines from liability. The airlines make much of the fact that the "common strategy" for civil aircraft crews before 9/11 was to react passively to hijackings-"to refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try delaying tactics."

This strategy was based on the assumption that the hijackers would want to be flown safely to an airport of their choice to make their demands.

But that defense of the airlines' actions is belied by the fact that the F.A.A., which was in contact with American Airlines and other traffic-control centers, heard the tip-off from terrorists in Flight 11's cockpit-"We have planes, more planes"-and thus knew before the first crash of a possible multiple hijacking and the use of planes as weapons.

To this writer's knowledge, there has been no public mention of the Flight 11 pilot's narrative since the news report on Sept. 12, 2001. When Peg Ogonowski, the pilot's wife, asked American Airlines to let her listen to that tape, she never heard back.

Mike Low had been quite upbeat

going into the meeting. He had just learned that his 28-year-old daughter Sara, another crew member on Flight 11, had not been incapacitated by the Mace the terrorists sprayed in the front cabin. The F.B.I. had notified him that Sara had given Ms. Sweeney her father's calling card, which allowed the 32-year-old mother of two to pretend to be a passenger and use an AirFone to call Logan Airport and relay the vital information.

"I'm a very old-fashioned and simple small-town person," Mr. Low had told me beforehand. He owns and operates a concrete and asphalt business in Batesville, Ark. "I want to believe our government, even after all the mishaps, is doing everything they possibly can."

Coming out of the hearing, he was a different man.

"I find it alarming that the airline and the F.A.A. would want to hold something as horrific as a hijacking among a few people," he said, "when bells and whistles should have been going off in all categories of responsibility."

Agents had allowed families to talk informally with them after the meeting, and Mr. Low had some very frank questions for an F.A.A. representative.

"The warning from F.A.A. in the summer of 2001 was supposedly given to all the airlines on CD-ROM's," he said. "Where did those warnings go? To flight crews? I have never had any indication that any pilot or flight attendant heard those warnings."

He added that the F.A.A. man had nothing to tell him.

"I'd been with American for 29 years," Ms. Dillard said with embittered pride. "My job was supervision over all the flight attendants who flew out of National, Baltimore or Dulles. In the summer of 2001, we had absolutely no warnings about any threats of hijackings or terrorism, from the airline or from the F.A.A."

Alice Hoglan's face was ashen when she emerged from the meeting. The mother of one of the brave, doomed passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, Mark Bingham, a gay rugby player, Ms. Hoglan now knew even more vividly what her son had kept from her when he had called. Along with Todd Beamer and other brave passengers, he had helped lead a passenger revolt aboard Flight 93, which was heading toward Washington and either Congress or the White House.

"It was excruciating," she said, her lips biting off the few upbeat words she could muster. "I'm just very grateful that the people on Flight 93, the heroes who were able to act, died on their feet and doing the very best they could to preserve lives on the ground."

Ms. Hoglan, who worked 29 years as a flight attendant for United, the airline on which her son was killed, was still flying for United in the summer of 2001. She had come to the hearing neatly dressed in a gray suit, her eyes bright in anticipation of deeper understanding. Afterwards, her wispy silver hair looked like it had been raked through in frustration. Her eyes blazed with reignited anguish and sank back into a mother's face that could only be described as ravaged. She is among the 115 families who rejected the financial buyout by the federal Victims' Compensation Fund in order to preserve her right to sue the airlines and government agencies who failed to warn or protect Americans from the third terrorist bombing on our homeland.

"I've been learning a lot," said Ms. Hoglan. "During the summer of 2001, there were 12 directives sent by the F.A.A.-which are now supposedly classified-notifying the airlines of specific threats that terrorists were planning to hijack their aircrafts. The airlines apparently buried that information and didn't tell us."

A Freedom of Information Act request has confirmed that the F.A.A. sent a dozen warnings to the airlines between May and September of 2001. Those 35 pages of alerts are being exempted from public disclosure by a federal statute that covers "information that would be detrimental to the security of transportation if disclosed." Most rational people would say that the non-disclosure of the alerts was what was detrimental to the security of transportation on Sept. 11.

"The F.B.I. gathered the evidence, gave it to the F.A.A., the F.A.A. gave it to the airlines, and the airlines didn't tell us," Ms. Hoglan said. "I was a working flight attendant with United that summer, in 2001, and I never heard a thing. I'm suing United Airlines, and I'm very keen on the role of the flight attendants in Sept. 11."

The same lament was sounded by Ms. Ogonowski, who was also a senior working flight attendant in the summer of 2001, for American Airlines. She had crewed many times on the 767 that her husband piloted on the morning of Sept. 11. "I'm an insider. There was no warning to be more vigilant. We were sitting ducks. My husband was such a big, commanding man, six feet tall. He didn't have a shot in hell. These people come in behind him, he's sitting low, forward, strapped in-the same with his co-pilot. No warning. If they'd been alerted to possibilities … but people were complacent."

Ms. Ogonowski was legally required to exempt American Airlines from her lawsuit in order to accept workmen's compensation from the company for her husband's death on the job. "But I never felt American was at fault," she said. "Our own C.I.A. and F.B.I. failed us. They should have been able to be more prepared, and warned us."

Some of the families of victims aboard Flight 93 were painfully reminded of the cockpit tape the F.B.I. allowed them to hear one year ago. That was the "Let's roll" flight, for which Beamer and the other passengers have been celebrated for their quick thinking and courageous confrontation with the terrorists.

"There was a lot of yelling by passengers, like you'd hear in a huddle," one family member told me, requesting anonymity for fear of being thrown out of the suit against the airlines. "It sounded like, 'In the cockpit, in the cockpit-if we don't get in there, we'll die!' Then we heard crashing dishes. Then screaming among the terrorists, frightened screams, as if to say, 'You got me! You're killing me!'"

Some of the relatives are keen to find out why, at the peak of this struggle, the tape suddenly stops recording voices and all that is heard in the last 60 seconds or so is engine noise. Had the tape been tampered with? When I put their question to Mr. Novak, the lead prosecutor on Flight 93, he said curtly, "I'm not going to comment on that, and neither should have they. They violated that nondisclosure agreement by telling you the contents of that cockpit voice recorder."

Why didn't United at least warn the pilots of Flight 93 to bar the cockpit door, some of the families wanted to know?

Ed Ballinger, the flight dispatcher for United Airlines that morning, was the last human being to talk to the cockpit of Flight 93. He had 16 flights taking off early that morning from the East Cost to the West Coast. When United's Flight 175 began acting erratically and failed to respond to his warnings, he began banging out the same enigmatic message to all his planes: "Beware of cockpit intrusion."

Flight 93, the last of the hijacked planes, called him back and said "Hi, Ed. Confirmed."

Mr. Ballinger said he didn't wait for his superiors or for Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's decision to ground all flights. He sent out a Stop-Fly alert to all crews. But United dispatchers were instructed by their superiors not to tell the pilots why they were being instructed to land, he claims.

"One of the things that upset me was that they knew, 45 minutes before [Flight 93 crashed], that American Airlines had a problem. I put the story together myself [from news accounts]," Mr. Ballinger said. "Perhaps if I had the information sooner, I might have gotten the message to [Flight] 93 to bar the door."

This week, when the 9/11 com-

mission holds its 12th and final hearings on Wednesday and Thursday, it will drill down on the excuses offered by the nation's air defense network, NORAD, to explain why it failed utterly to order a protective cap of fighter jets over the nation's capitol as soon as the world knew that the nation was under attack. Families will be listening carefully when the commission questions the head of NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector, General Ralph E. Eberhart. NORAD had as long as 50 minutes to order fighter jets to intercept Flight 93 in its path toward Washington, D.C. But NORAD's official timeline claims that F.A.A. notification to NORAD on Flight 93 is "not available." The public will hear further questioning of military officials all the way up to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, who wasn't notified until after the attack on the Pentagon.

So many unconnected dots, contradictions and implausible coincidences. Like the fact that NORAD was running an imaginary terrorist-attack drill called "Vigilant Guardian" on the same morning as the real-world attacks. At 8:40 a.m., when a sergeant at NORAD's center in Rome, N.Y., notified his northeastern commander, Col. Robert Marr, of a possible hijacked airliner-American Flight 11-the colonel wondered aloud if it was part of the exercise. This same confusion was played out at the lower levels of the NORAD network.

What's more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation's air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD's military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn't on the record as having given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn't even go to the White House situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to see that the country's military headquarters was in flames.

Mr. Rumsfeld claimed at a previous commission hearing that protection against attack inside the homeland was not his responsibility. It was, he said, "a law-enforcement issue."

Why, in that case, did he take onto himself the responsibility of approving NORAD's deployment of fighter planes?

The families of the vanished bodies and unsettled souls of 9/11 are still waiting to have the dots connected. Until that happens, many continue to feel perforations in their hearts that even time will not heal.

The same evening, mashing spinach in her kitchen in East Brunswick, N.J., for a family Seder on the first night of Passover, Lorie Van Auken can hardly have looked like one of the driving forces behind these developments as she cradled a telephone in the crook of her neck and spoke with this writer, firing off a list of angry questions that she wants to ask Ms. Rice.

Ms. Van Auken is one of the "four moms," from New Jersey, alll 9/11 widows, whose loud outcry compelled the Bush administration to form the commission in the first place. As the four have taken the national stage, their worlds have been turned upside-down again. The personal loss that motivates them-the loss of their husbands-has led them down this path, to find out the truth about what their country failed to do for them on Sept. 11, and what the White House continues to do to cover it up. But as they sit across nondescript coffee tables from Chris Matthews on Hardball or protest the President's exploitation of Ground Zero images on the Today show, they have found themselves targets as well: accused of being toadies for the Kerry campaign by Bush campaign aides (even though two of the moms voted for Mr. Bush); of being delusional and naïve by Mr. Matthews, like the women who launched America's failed effort to locate their loved ones in the long cold graveyards of Vietnam.

In the weeks after Sept. 11, the four moms came together, slowly and organically, as each found herself looking for answers that nobody seemed willing to provide. Was investigating and defeating Al Qaeda's network of terrorists a priority for George W. Bush's administration? Googling Ms. Rice's record early on, the 9/11 widows noted that she made no mention of terrorism, much less Al Qaeda, in June 2001, when she addressed the Council on Foreign Relations on the foreign-policy priorities of the Bush administration.

Since then, the moms read with indignation the 900-page final report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry on 9/11, which preceded the current 9/11 commission. In that final report, amidst the great stretches of blank pages from which the White House had redacted material deemed privileged or security-sensitive, the moms found that the following "all-source" intelligence review had been given to top officials on June 28, 2001-the same month that Ms. Rice listed the administration's priorities:

"Based on reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties …. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for a vulnerability."

For them, the question for Condoleezza Rice is not a new one formed in the waning tenure of the commission amid the explosive testimony of former White House counterterrorism ace Richard Clarke. They were questions formed in the fog of grief, and they have only become clearer.

It was this report, in part, that alerted the four moms to the falsehood of the White House claim-made early on in the post-9/11 political environment, and now a continuing refrain from White House officials-that before that fateful day, nobody could have imagined that hijackers would use airplanes as missiles.

That claim persists despite another of the moms' particular efforts. Kristen Breitweiser has given the most trenchant television interviews in the group and is known among them, affectionately-in a personal language that recalls something out of a John Le Carré novel-as "the hammer." It was Ms. Breitweiser who shot down that claim in her stunning testimony before the Congressional panel as its opening witness in September 2002-long before anyone but Internet bloggers and conspiracy theorists seemed to be paying close attention to the administration's claims. Ms. Breitweiser cited more than half a dozen terrorist plots that envisioned slamming commercial planes into landmarks in American cities, or the Eiffel Tower, or blowing up the Los Angeles International Airport-a "Millennium plot" that was foiled by President Bill Clinton's insistence on banging heads together in the daily meetings of all top officials responsible for domestic and foreign security.

This was supposed to be a rare week off from their grueling round trips to Washington in Ms. Breitweiser's S.U.V. to attend hearings or meet with the commissioners.

"Condi Rice threw a wrench into everything," said Ms. Van Auken.

She and her group remember the year, 2002, when Ms. Rice wouldn't agree even to answer written questions from the Congressional panel (her deputy, Stephen Hadley, responded for her). When the White House reversed its two-year standoff against the moms' pleadings to hear from the President's foreign-policy tutor in public, their Holy Week plans went to hell.

"My most pressing need is to make sure the Easter Bunny makes a visit to our house this Sunday," said Ms. Breitweiser, the mother of a 5-year-old. "And to take down my outdoor Christmas decorations."

"That," admonished fellow widow Patty Casazza, "is why I told you not to put them up."

But it gets harder and harder to continue to put life on hold for a slow-moving commission, especially as the four moms' expectations that the commissioners will ask the really tough questions deteriorates.

Commissioner Jamie Gorelick says that Ms. Rice can be questioned on anything she told the panel in her private audience, provided it isn't classified. But the four moms' questions are often more challenging than that.

The latest question on Ms. Van Auken's mind picks up on Ms. Rice's defensive position, articulated earlier in the hearings, that her national-security team was alert only to "traditional" hijackings, in which an airplane is redirected or its passengers held hostage as part of a negotiation.

"Even if that's so, they did nothing to thwart traditional hijacks either," Ms. Van Auken noted.

She ticked off a timeline she knows by heart: By 8:14 a.m. on Sept. 11, F.A.A. flight controllers knew that American Flight 11 was missing. Its transponder was turned off, and they couldn't get a response from the pilot. By 8:22 a.m., fighter jets should have been sent up to trail Flight 11. They could have caught up with it in 10 minutes, or even by 8:40 a.m. Then an F-16 could have rocked its wings and, if it couldn't force the hijacked jet to turn around before it hit the World Trade Center, a fighter plane would have been instructed to crash into it.

She goes on: By 8:43, the F.A.A. had notified NORAD that there was another hijacked jet in the sky (United Flight 175). The other fighter jet could have gone after that plane. Certainly by the time the Pentagon was a target, they could have shot down Flight 77. And, by then, the pilots did have a shoot-down order.

"I'd like to ask Condi Rice: 'If you all say we couldn't have done anything to prevent 9/11, why weren't we able to mitigate the damage?'" said Ms. Van Auken.

It's The Mmes. Smith Go to Washington : Instead of Jimmy Stewart shouting himself hoarse in the well of the Senate, these young suburban widows have banded together to coax and cajole, outwit and outlast their national leaders, until officials face up to their mistakes and forge enough systemic changes to prevent the next terrorist attack-or at least put together a strategy to minimize the death and trauma.

For my book Middletown, America , I followed their journey from the first months of anguish and disbelief, through incoherent anger, to the point in the spring of 2002 when they found a mission to channel their anger and look toward the future with hope.

Lorie Van Auken is the mom who still takes flack for asking her friends, two years ago: "O.K., there's the House and the Senate-which one has the most members?" Now, she speaks authoritatively about wing-rocking and plane transponders.

Her first brush with political activism came in April 2002, when she attended a widows' support group in Princeton, N.J., where a veteran survivor of terrorist murder injected a testosterone-fueled fighting spirit. Bob Monetti, president of Families of Pan Am 103, challenged them: "You can't sit back and let the government treat you like shit."

Ms. Van Auken drove home with another freshly made 9/11 widow, Mindy Kleinberg.

"It was early for us to be introduced to the big picture," said Ms. Kleinberg of that meeting exactly two years ago.

"It was like Eve biting the apple," said Ms. Van Auken.

They called up Patty Casazza, who was in something of a pharmaceutical haze. The events of Sept. 11 had brought back her childhood trauma-her abandonment with her mother and four siblings in a St. Louis hotel by her father. From there she had wiped away the tears, hoisted herself out of poverty and married John Casazza, a Wall Street trader. Now, she was the widowed mother of an 11-year-old boy who still can not speak of the tragedy.

"We have to have a rally in Washington," Ms. Van Auken said to Ms. Casazza.

"Oh, God," Ms. Casazza groaned. "That's huge, and it's gonna be painful."

Ms. Kleinberg goaded her in a girlish voice: "I promise, Patty, this is the last thing we'll ask you to do."

Patty laughed. "You lie a lot," she said.

Ms. Van Auken rushed off an e-mail to Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow from Middletown, who shot back two words: "Let's rally!"

And so, six months after the women's husbands had been murdered and their families shattered, the four found each other.

Mindy Kleinberg and her three children were still roaming their house at night, unable to sleep. They would try one bed after another, until the 4-year-old would finally pass out, while her 7- and 11-year-olds were still fitful. When Mindy spotted a monstrosity of a bed-a display prop in a furniture store-she bought it out of the window. She and her three children could sleep in it together.

Ms. Kleinberg and Ms. Van Auken commiserated nightly about the mute rage of their young sons. Lorie's son, 14, had been in a science classroom on Sept. 11. "They neglected to turn off the TV, so he watched his father die on TV at school." The boy could not forgive himself. He had heard his father getting ready for work that morning, but had been too sleepy to go downstairs and say goodbye to him.

Mindy was also worried about her 4-year-old. One day he had a meltdown in a store, crying and sobbing and repeating, "Everybody's died except me!"

These lonely suburban moms have banded together as an intentional family. They fit their research and their trips to D.C. in between meetings at a doctor's office to support the one who is having a breast biopsy, or keeping a phone vigil with another mom whose child is making suicidal noises, or taking their collective seven fatherless children away on a holiday weekend-as long as they don't have to fly or take a train.

Since last winter, when I began writing about the four moms for The Observer , I have marveled at the clarity and perspicacity of the questions they keep raising. Lacking subpoena power or a staff of 60 investigators, they are still leagues ahead of the commissioners.

"We always come back to the same guideline," said Ms. Van Auken, "Just do the right thing-not the political thing, not the P.R. thing, not the TV-soundbite thing-just keep asking for truth for the families and the public."

But it is exactly this genuineness, this quest which is all personal and all political at once, that has recently drawn the national spotlight to them.

When Richard Clarke opened his testimony before the 9/11 commission, he said: "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And your government failed you. I failed you."

Some of the four moms dissolved in tears. These were the words they had been aching to hear any member of their government utter. The wall around Ms. Van Auken's well of sadness, cemented over by activism, crumbled. She sobbed uncontrollably.

Somewhere in the wall-to-wall running commentary on the 24-hour news networks about how much credibility those tears lent Mr. Clarke and his testimony, Ms. Van Auken, her friends and other family members rose and spontaneously walked out to protest the failure of Condi Rice to appear.

"We haven't had any of our questions answered, and the country still isn't safe," Ms. Van Auken said.

And that vacuum, now, as much as the grief, fuels their continuing passion.

Just last week, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security revealed that they are hearing from their intelligence sources that terrorists are planning new terror attacks in New York City. "We've heard over and over that they want to use suitcase nukes," said Ms. Van Auken. "We've been saying for ages, 'Why don't they check more of our containers coming into U.S. ports? Why don't they dry up the money lines for terrorists?' It's only after Madrid that they're talking about trains. It sounds to me like we're stalled."

Ms. Breitweiser isn't so rattled anymore when the government issues yet another warning that future terrorist attacks are likely.

"If they put out an alert that there could be backpack bombs on trains, and you see a backpack on the floor with wires coming out of it, you won't ignore it," she said. "My husband was in building two of the Trade Center. If he had only known we were under terrorist threat, he wouldn't have thought it was an accident, and he might have run out of the building."

These four moms from New Jersey are the World Trade Center widows whose tireless advocacy produced the broad investigation into the failures around the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that now has top officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations duking it out in conflicting testimonies at this week's high-drama hearings in the Hart Office Building before the 9/11 commission.

After two and a half years of seeking truth and accountability, they had high hopes for this week's hearings, which are focused on policy failures. Instead, packed into the car at 4 a.m. in what has become a ritual for them, their hearts were heavy.

The Four Moms had submitted dozens of questions they have been burning to ask at these hearings. Mr. Rumsfeld is a particular thorn in their sides.

"He needs to answer to his actions on Sept. 11," said Ms. Kleinberg. "When was he aware that we were under attack? What did he do about it?"

When the widows had a conference call last week with the commission staff, they asked that Secretary Rumsfeld be questioned about his response on the day of Sept. 11. They were told that this was not a line of questioning the staff planned to pursue.

They were not especially impressed with his testimony. In Mr. Rumsfeld's opening statement, he said he knew of no intelligence in the months leading up to Sept. 11 indicating that terrorists intended to hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center.

It was his worst moment at the mike. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste ran through a list of at least a dozen cases of foiled plots using commercial airliners to attack key targets in the U.S. and elsewhere. Mr. Ben-Veniste cited the "Bojinka" plot in 1995, which envisioned blowing up Western commercial planes in Asia; that plot was foiled by the government and must have been on the mind of C.I.A. director George Tenet, who was having weekly lunches with Mr. Rumsfeld through 2001. In 1998, an Al Qaeda–connected group talked about flying a commercial plane into the World Trade Center.

"So when we had this threatened strike that something huge was going to happen, why didn't D.O.D. alert people on the ground of a potential jihadist hijacking? Why didn't it ever get to an actionable level?" the commissioner asked.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he only remembered hearing threats of a private aircraft being used. "The decision to fly a commercial aircraft was not known to me."

Mr. Ben-Veniste came back at him: "We knew from the Millennium plot [to blow up Los Angeles International Airport] that Al Qaeda was trying to bomb an American airport," he said. The Clinton administration foiled that plot and thought every day about foiling terrorism, he said. "But as we get into 2001, it was like everyone was looking at the white truck from the sniper attacks and not looking in the right direction. Nobody did a thing about it."

Mr. Rumsfeld backed off with the lame excuse, "I should say I didn't know."

He said that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was "hosting a meeting for some of the members of Congress."

"Ironically, in the course of the conversation, I stressed how important it was for our country to be adequately prepared for the unexpected," he said.

It is still incredible to the moms that their Secretary of Defense continued to sit in his private dining room at the Pentagon while their husbands were being incinerated in the towers of the World Trade Center. They know this from an account posted on Sept. 11 on the Web site of Christopher Cox, a Republican Congressman from Orange County who is chairman of the House Policy Committee.

"Ironically," Mr. Cox wrote, "just moments before the Department of Defense was hit by a suicide hijacker, Secretary Rumsfeld was describing to me why … Congress has got to give the President the tools he needs to move forward with a defense of America against ballistic missiles."

At that point, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the Secret Service, the F.A.A., NORAD (our North American air-defense system), American Airlines and United Airlines, among others, knew that at least three planes had been violently hijacked, their transponders turned off, and that thousands of American citizens had been annihilated in the World Trade Center by Middle Eastern terrorists, some of whom had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. Yet the nation's defense chief didn't think it significant enough to interrupt his political pitch to a key Republican in Congress to reactivate the Star Wars initiative of the Bush I years.

"I've been around the block a few times," Mr. Rumsfeld told the Congressman, according to his own account. "There will be another event." Mr. Rumsfeld repeated it for emphasis, Mr. Cox wrote: "There will be another event."

"Within minutes of that utterance, Rumsfeld's words proved tragically prophetic," Mr. Cox wrote.

"Someone handed me a note that a plane had hit one of the W.T.C. towers," Mr. Rumsfeld testified on March 23. "Later, I was in my office with a C.I.A. briefer when I was told a second plane had hit the other tower."

The note didn't seem to prompt any action on his part.

"Shortly thereafter, at 9:38 a.m., the Pentagon shook with an explosion of a then-unknown origin," he said.

He had to go to the window of his office to see that the Pentagon had been attacked? Now the moms were getting agitated.

"I went outside to determine what had happened," he testified. "I was not there long, apparently, because I was told I was back in the Pentagon, with the crisis action team, by shortly before or after 10 a.m.

"Upon my return from the crash site, and before going to the Executive Support Center," he continued, "I had one or more calls in my office, one of which I believe was the President."

Then commission member Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general and general counsel for the Department of Defense in the Clinton administration, had her turn with Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Where were you and your aircraft when a missile was heading to the Pentagon? Surely that is your responsibility, to protect our facilities, our headquarters-the Pentagon. Is there anything we did to protect that?"

Mr. Rumsfeld said it was a law-enforcement issue.

"When I arrived at the command center, an order had been given-the command had been given instructions that their pilots could shoot down any commercial airlines filled with our people if the plane seemed to be acting in a threatening manner," he said.

Ms. Gorelick tried to get Mr. Rumsfeld to say whether the NORAD pilots themselves knew they had authority to shoot down a plane.

"I do not know what they thought," he answered. "I was immediately concerned that they knew what they could do and that we changed the rules of engagement."

One of the hardest things for the families to hear was how every witness defended how he had done everything possible to combat the threat of terrorism. No one said, "We fell short."

Secretary of State Colin Powell complained that the Bush administration was given no military plan by the Clinton administration for routing Al Qaeda. He then described how Condoleezza Rice undertook a complete reorganization of the failed responses of the Clinton years-not too much more than a series of meetings that took up the next eight months.

"Then 9/11 hit, and we had to put together another plan altogether," said Mr. Powell.

He also claimed that "we did not know the perpetrators were already in our country and getting ready to commit the crimes we saw on 9/11."

Some of the widows groaned. In fact, the Moms had learned, the F.B.I. had 14 open investigations on supporters of the 9/11 hijackers who were in the U.S. before 9/11.

And after the Clinton administration foiled the Millennium plot to blow up LAX, the C.I.A. knew that two Al Qaeda operatives had a sleeper cell in San Diego. F.B.I. field officers tried to move the information up the line, with no success.

What's more, most of the 9/11 hijackers re-entered the U.S. between April and June of 2001 with blatantly suspicious visa applications, which the Four Moms had already obtained and shown to the commission. The State Department had 166,000 people on its terrorist watch list in 2001, but only 12 names had been passed along to the F.A.A. for inclusion on its "no-fly list." Mr. Powell had to admit as much, though he said that State Department consular officers had been given no information to help them identify terrorist suspects among the visa applicants.

One of the key questions that the Moms expected to be put to Mr. Powell was why over 100 members of the Saudi royal family and many members of the bin Laden clan were airlifted out of the U.S. in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks-without being interviewed by law enforcement-while no other Americans, including members of the victims' families, could take a plane anywhere in the U.S. The State Department had obviously given its approval. But no commissioner apparently dared to touch the sacrosanct Saudi friends of the Bush family.

When Republican commissioner James Thompson asked Mr. Powell: "Prior to Sept. 11, would it have been possible to say to the Pakistanis and Saudis, 'You're either with us or against us?'", Mr. Powell simply ignored the issue of the Saudi exemption and punted on Pakistan.

Fox in the Chicken House

To the Moms, the problems with the 9/11 commission were always apparent. But the disappointing testimony from Mr. Rumsfeld was especially difficult to bear. The Moms had tried to get their most pressing questions to the commission to be asked of Mr. Rumsfeld, but their efforts had foundered at the hands of Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director.

Indeed, it was only with the recent publication of Richard Clarke's memoir of his counterterrorism days in the White House, Against All Enemies , that the Moms found out that Mr. Zelikow-who was supposed to present their questions to Mr. Rumsfeld-was actually one of the select few in the new Bush administration who had been warned, nine months before 9/11, that Osama bin Laden was the No. 1 security threat to the country. They are now calling for Mr. Zelikow's resignation.

Ms. Gorelick sees their point.

"This is a legitimate concern," Ms. Gorelick said in an interview, "and I am not convinced we knew everything we needed to know when we made the decision to hire him."

But despite her obvious discomfort at the conflicts of interest apparently not fully disclosed by Mr. Zelikow in his deposition by the commission's attorney, Ms. Gorelick believes that the time is too short to replace the staff director.

"We're just going to have to be very cognizant of the role that he played and address it in the writing of our report," she said.

That doesn't satisfy the Four Moms. They point out that it is Mr. Zelikow who decides which among the many people offering information will be interviewed. Efforts by the families to get the commission to hear from a raft of administration and intelligence-agency whistleblowers have been largely ignored at his behest. And it is Mr. Zelikow who oversees what investigative material the commissioners will be briefed on, and who decides the topics for the hearings. Mr. Zelikow's statement at the January hearing sounded to the Moms like a whitewash waiting to happen:

"This was everybody's fault and nobody's fault."

The Moms don't buy it.

"Why did it take Condi Rice nine months to develop a counterterrorism policy for Al Qaeda, while it took only two weeks to develop a policy for regime change in Iraq?" Ms. Kleinberg asked rhetorically.

Dr. Rice has given one closed-door interview and has been asked to return for another, but the commissioners have declined to use their subpoena power to compel her public testimony. And now, they say, it is probably too late.

"That strategy may not turn out well for the Bush administration," Ms. Gorelick said.

Bob Kerrey, the commissioner who replaced Max Cleland, expressed the same view in a separate interview: "The risk they run in not telling what they were doing during that period of time is that other narratives will prevail."

The Four Moms have enjoyed some victories along the way. The first was when the White House finally gave up trying to block an independent investigation; the commission was created in December 2002. The Moms shot down to Washington-stopping in traffic to change out of their Capri pants and into proper pantsuits-to meet with the new commissioners, who thanked them for providing the wealth of information they'd been gathering since losing their husbands on Sept. 11. Ms. Gorelick expressed amazement at the research the women had done, and vowed it would be their "road map."

"We were their biggest advocates," said the husky-voiced Ms. Kleinberg. "They asked us to get them more funding, and we did. It could have been a great relationship, but it hasn't been."

Mr. Zelikow's idea of how to conduct the investigation, the Moms said, is to hold everything close to the vest.

"They don't tell us or the public anything, and they won't until they publish their final report," said Ms. Casazza. "At which point, they'll be out of business."

Ms. Kleinberg chimed in: "Why not publish interim reports, instead of letting us sit around for two years bleeding for answers?"

"We have lower and lower expectations," said Ms. Van Auken, whose teenage daughter often accompanies her to hearings; her son still can't talk about seeing his father's building incinerated.

The irony is that two of the Four Moms voted for George Bush in 2000, while another is a registered independent; only one is a Democrat. But until they felt the teeth of the Bush attack dogs, they were either apolitical or determinedly nonpartisan. Now their tone is different.

"The Bush people keep saying that Clinton was not doing enough [to combat the Al Qaeda threat]," said Ms. Kleinberg. "But 'nothing' is less than 'not enough,' and nothing is what the Bush administration did."

An unnamed spokesman for the Bush campaign was quoted as saying of Sept. 11, "We own it." That comment particularly disturbed the Four Moms.

"They can have it," said Ms. Van Auken. "Can I have my husband back now? "

"If they want to own 9/11, they also have to own 9/10 and 9/12," said Ms. Kleinberg. "Their argument is that this was a defining moment in our history. It's not the moment of tragedy that defines you, but what you do afterwards."

If the final report of this 9/11 commission does indeed turn out to be a whitewash, the Four Moms from New Jersey have a backup plan. Provided there is a change of leadership, they will petition the new President to create an independent 9/11 commission. As if one never existed before.

To Julie Sirrs, it's a case of too little, too late. A former military analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ms. Sirrs was the first intelligence officer to report on the significance of Osama bin Laden moving his terrorist operation from the Sudan into Afghanistan. She wasn't listened to five years ago, and though she'd like to speak before the Congressional 9/11 commission, it is unlikely that she will be listened to now. Her story is a tableau of tangled politics and internal wrangling that got in the way of vital intelligence-gathering leading up to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

To find Mr. bin Laden now, Ms. Sirrs said, "would be a huge symbolic victory for the U.S.

"But the fact he has been able to elude us for so long would allow any followers to spin his story as a martyr," she said. "Those roles have shifted to other people, so Al Qaeda could still go on very well without bin Laden."

Five years ago, Ms. Sirrs warned of an equally diabolical jihadi terrorist leader who also remains at large-Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Egyptian doctor, the chief military-operations planner for the Al Qaeda network, has become the movement's mouthpiece while Osama is on the run. His most recent taped message, broadcast on Al-Jazeera last week and said to be authentic by the C.I.A., warned: "Bush, strengthen your defenses and your security measures, for the Islamic nation which sent you the legion of New York and Washington brigades has determined to send you legion after legion seeking death and paradise."

Dr. al-Zawahiri and Mr. bin Laden have been partners in the terrorist business since 1993, when Mr. bin Laden merged Al Qaeda with Dr. al-Zawahiri's Egyptian jihadi movement. The two met when Mr. bin Laden was treated for low blood pressure by the Egyptian doctor, who was six years older and, as founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, already a full-fledged fanatic credited with the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat.

Dr. al-Zawahiri and Mr. bin Laden announced the launch of their "campaign of terror" in November of 1997.

It was one month earlier that Julie Sirrs, her long auburn hair concealed under a burka, made her first investigative trip to Afghanistan. But at that time, she was an odd duck within the American intelligence establishment. She had become intrigued by Afghanistan while in high school in Virginia Beach and devoured every book on that war-torn land in her public library-"all 12 of them," she said, laughing. By the time she graduated from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in 1992, the Soviets had been driven out of Afghanistan by the mujahedeen .

On her own and with tutors, Ms. Sirrs studied the languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Persian and Pashto. In September 1995, she was hired by the D.I.A. as a military analyst.

"I hire a lot of people," said J. Saunders, Ms. Sirrs' former superior, "but I regarded her as one of our highest-potential employees."

In 1996, when she found out that Mr. bin Laden had left the Sudan and gone into Afghanistan, Ms. Sirrs thought she saw her chance to get an assignment to the country that had intrigued her for almost a decade. But the only official visit available for a U.S. government operative was a day trip from Pakistan.

So, on her annual leave in October 1997, she dressed as an Afghan woman and slipped over the border from Pakistan. Traveling with relatives of her Pashto tutor, who were going to visit their family in Taliban-controlled territory, she was able to stay for a week outside of Kabul.

On the morning she boarded a bus to depart Kabul, as the sun broke the horizon, she heard the passengers gasp. Struggling to see through the mesh covering her face, she saw three men outside the bus, dangling from ropes with blackened faces. The Taliban had accused them of being spies for the resistance.

Over the next year, two American embassies in East Africa were the targets of sophisticated terrorist bombings that killed 259 people and wounded 5,000.

"We knew Al Qaeda was behind the attacks," said Ms. Sirrs.

C.I.A. director George Tenet sent a notice to his staff that fighting Al Qaeda was now the agency's top priority, but little attention was paid. President Bill Clinton, mired in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, ordered missile strikes on three of Mr. bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, but the attacks missed the Al Qaeda leader himself, and the effort was widely dismissed as a wag-the-dog distraction tactic.

After that failure, Ms. Sirrs saw that the C.I.A. wasn't sending operatives into Afghanistan.

"That seemed ludicrous," she said. "If I had been able to go in, as a woman, why couldn't covert agents?"

She was itching to go back, and by then she had her own contacts. The Afghan representative to the United Nations told her that if she could make it to Uzbekistan, the Northern Alliance would help to get her into the territory they controlled. She saved up her vacation days, notified the D.I.A. security office of her plans, and received permission to go on her own.

The only obstacle, as she saw it, was her husband. Owen Sirrs also worked for the D.I.A., and though he feared for her safety, she resolved to take off, alone, on an Uzbek Airways flight in October 1998. She felt the nausea of fear while driving through the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, which was just recovering from a civil war. The only way to get into Afghanistan was on a leftover Soviet MI-17 helicopter, literally held together with duct tape. She was the only passenger. She watched while the pilot sat astride the engine, pumping in fuel as he nonchalantly smoked a cigarette.

"But by then, I'd come too far to turn back," she said.

After the copter cleared the jagged peaks of northern Afghanistan and settled down in the Panjshir Valley, she was relieved to be told that she would be able to meet with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary military commander of the Northern Alliance. Massoud and his ragtag coalition of Afghan fighters were at war with the Taliban.

"The Northern Alliance was a significant force that was engaged on the ground against Al Qaeda–sponsored fighters", Mrs. Sirrs learned. "But it was discounted by the U.S. policy-making establishment. "The Taliban's brutal regime was being kept in power significantly by bin Laden's money, plus the narcotics trade, while the resistance was surviving on a shoestring. With even a little aid to the Afghan resistance, we could have pushed the Taliban out of power. But there was great reluctance by the State Department and the C.I.A. to undertake that."

Unocal, a California-based company, had been courting the Taliban to build a massive pipeline system across Afghanistan that would connect the vast oil and natural-gas reserves of Turkmenistan to ports in Pakistan. The American energy giant partnered with a Saudi company, Delta Oil Co. Ltd., and promised the Taliban that it could expect up to $100 million in transit fees from the proposed $4.5 billion project.

"Massoud told me he had proof that Unocal had provided money that helped the Taliban take Kabul," Ms. Sirrs said. Among Afghans, this was popularly believed. It didn't take much imagination: State Department officials openly promoted the pipeline, and Unocal brazenly hired former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as consultant. He would later be President Bush's first choice to head the supposedly independent 9/11 comission.

Massoud, she also learned, had survived several assassinations attempted by Mr. bin Laden's fighters.

All fired up after two weeks in the country, Ms. Sirrs couldn't wait to get back to her job to share her new maps, photographs and interviews, and to give briefings on Afghanistan. But when she arrived at Reagan National Airport, an agent from the security office of the D.I.A. demanded that she hand over all of her films and tapes. When she tried to go into her office the next day, a Saturday, to type up her notes, she was barred from the building and had her badge confiscated.

"She had gotten the proper clearances to go, and she came back with valuable information," said a senior colleague who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, "but her trip had caused a serious row involving several government agencies. The undersecretary of state and the C.I.A. had been exchanging high-level messages. They were so intent on getting rid of her, the last thing they wanted to pay attention to was any information she had. Everybody was quick to turn on her."

She was accused of espionage by the F.B.I. and called in for a five-hour polygraph test. Simultaneously, her husband, also a D.I.A. professional, was given his own lie-detector test. Both passed. Ms. Sirrs showed the F.B.I. the written permission given to her by the D.I.A. for personal travel to Afghanistan and demonstrated that she was only too willing to cooperate. The F.B.I. wrapped up its investigation, and Ms. Sirrs hoped that any misunderstanding had been cleared up.

But the nightmare didn't go away.

"To be treated like I had done something wrong when I thought I was just doing my job was pretty shocking," she recalls in a voice by now drained of emotion. "The D.I.A. gave me a list of charges, including going against the wishes of my husband. The charges tried to make me look like Mata Hari, having a crush on the Afghan resistance fighters-it was extremely insulting. They were playing like the Taliban."

Ms. Sirrs said she believed that her information was discounted because it was damaging to the Taliban.

"The State Department didn't want to have anything to do with Afghan resistance, or even, politically, to reveal that there was any viable option to the Taliban," she said.

At the operational level of the C.I.A., there were agents who argued that they needed operatives down around the campfire with Massoud's men. But higher-level officials, both at the C.I.A. and the State Department, were vehemently opposed.

The senior colleague verified that the State Department was furious that Ms. Sirrs had showed up as a private citizen with her own entrée to Massoud and the resistance forces.

"The State Department called the director of D.I.A., repeatedly, demanding her 'execution,'" the colleague said, echoing the agency parlance for firing.

A month after her return, Julie Sirrs' security clearance was revoked.

Even after hiring a lawyer and struggling for a year to regain her security status within the agency, Ms. Sirrs remained out in the cold. She left the D.I.A. in the fall of 1999.

Even after she left the agency, Julie Sirrs continued to follow the Afghan resistance movement. She made two more trips to the country, in 1999 and shortly after the terrorist bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000.

Still, the C.I.A. wasn't interviewing the Northern Alliance's Al Qaeda prisoners.

Ms. Sirrs tried to drive home the idea that not only was Mr. bin Laden building a terrorist network in Afghanistan, but also that Dr. al-Zawahiri was there, along with Saudi militants and other groups. "All of these people we really needed to be worried about were right there in Afghanistan, being given safe haven by the Taliban," she said.

Ms. Sirrs is only faintly encouraged by the efforts of the independent commission looking into the failures that led up to 9/11.

"I don't get the sense they're really interested in getting to the heart of the policy problems," she said.

Like many other early-warners and whistleblowers, Ms. Sirrs would like to testify before the commission. She has sent her biography and written reports to the commission's investigators. She has never heard back.

In the commission's next public hearing, on March 23 and 24, among the key witnesses will be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The commission already knows that the Bush administration began to negotiate with the Taliban shortly after taking power in January 2001. The Taliban even hired a niece of former C.I.A. director Richard Helms, Laila Helms, as its public-relations face in Washington. The last meeting between the U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in Afghanistan five weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Three days before Al Qaeda's spectacular attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, two men claiming to be journalists came to interview Massoud. The camera they pointed at the Northern Alliance leader was actually a bomb, which blew a hole in Massoud's chest. Two hours later, the C.I.A. identified the assassins as Al Qaeda members.

According to Gerald Posner's book, Why America Slept , a proposal from the Bush cabinet to engage with the Northern Alliance hadn't reached the President's desk by Sept. 11.

When one talks to Julie Sirrs today, the yelps of her second baby are bound to be heard in the background.

"I've downshifted in my career to have time to raise a family at home," said Ms. Sirrs. It's the same story again and again with women who tried to warn about the growing terrorist threat of Islamic extremism, but ran up against closed eyes and ears within officialdom. They have downshifted or "retired," some to their alternate jobs as mothers and nurturers.

Ms. Sirrs herself was supposed to be in the Pentagon on Sept. 11, invited by her former colleagues to help analyze the Afghan resistance after Massoud's assassination. Her new daughter was 9 months old.

"The minute I knew it was a terrorist attack, I knew it was bin Laden," she remembered. "Everything I had been trying to stop had happened. Bin Laden had killed Massoud, and now our country was under attack. I was so used to going to Afghanistan and facing dangers there. To suddenly see the smoke rising from the Pentagon, a mile from our condo …. " Her voice trailed off.

"In all honesty, when Sept. 11 happened, I was disillusioned. I was trying to get the U.S. government more involved to counteract the threat, and it didn't work."

Even after 9/11, a State Department official said it was "premature" to "[hatch] plots with the Northern Alliance."

She thought: "If thousands of dead Americans aren't going to get them to consider helping the Afghan resistance, nothing I could have said before Sept. 11 would have helped, either. All my efforts-the trips I took, the stress on my marriage, my husband being dragged through an investigation, losing my own career-I thought it was worthwhile for this cause."

Now, she is convinced, any bold reforms in America's relationship with Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, won't happen unless there is another catastrophic attack-the very kind of attack she had sacrificed so much in her efforts to prevent.

"I don't like the morbidity of waiting around for that kind of thing," she said. "I live in Arlington."

Twenty-three minutes into her blow-by-blow account, Ong's voice abruptly ceased. "What's going on, Betty?" asked her ground contact, Nydia Gonzalez. "Betty, talk to me. I think we might have lost her."

Emotional catharsis, yes. There was scarcely a dry eye in the Senate hearing room where 10 commissioners are probing the myriad failures of our nation's defenses and response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But answers? Not many. The most shocking evidence remains hidden in plain sight.

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims' families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict.

"My wife's call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day," said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men-by name-even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board.

"How do you know it's a bomb?" asked her phone contact.

"Because the hijackers showed me a bomb," Sweeney said, describing its yellow and red wires.

Sweeney's first call from the plane was at 7:11 a.m. on Sept. 11-the only call in which she displayed emotional upset. Flight 11 was delayed, and she seized the few moments to call home in hopes of talking to her 5-year-old daughter, Anna, to say how sorry she was not to be there to put her on the bus to kindergarten. Ms. Sweeney's son Jack had been born several months premature, and she had taken the maximum time off over the previous summer to be with her children. "But she had to go back that fall, to hold the Boston-to-L.A. trip," explained her husband.

American's Flight 11 took off from Logan Airport in Boston at 7:59 a.m. By 8:14 a.m., the F.A.A. controller following that flight from a facility in Nashua, N.H., already knew it was missing; its transponder had been turned off, and the controller couldn't get a response from the pilots. The air-traffic controller contacted the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which at 8:14 also left Boston's Logan bound for California, and asked for his help in locating Flight 11.

Sweeney slid into a passenger seat in the next-to-last row of coach and used an Airfone to call American Airlines Flight Service at Boston's Logan airport. "This is Amy Sweeney," she reported. "I'm on Flight 11-this plane has been hijacked." She was disconnected. She called back: "Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully." Within seconds, her befuddled respondent was replaced by a voice she knew.

"Amy, this is Michael Woodward." The American Airlines flight service manager had been friends with Sweeney for a decade, so he didn't have to waste any time verifying that this wasn't a hoax. "Michael, this plane has been hijacked," Ms. Sweeney repeated. Calmly, she gave him the seat locations of three of the hijackers: 9D, 9G and 10B. She said they were all of Middle Eastern descent, and one spoke English very well.

Mr. Woodward ordered a colleague to punch up those seat locations on the computer. At least 20 minutes before the plane crashed, the airline had the names, addresses, phone numbers and credit cards of three of the five hijackers. They knew that 9G was Abdulaziz al-Omari, 10B was Satam al-Suqami, and 9D was Mohamed Atta-the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists.

"The nightmare began before the first plane crashed," said Mike Sweeney, "because once my wife gave the seat numbers of the hijackers and Michael Woodward pulled up the passenger information, Mohamed Atta's name was out there. They had to know what they were up against."

Mr. Woodward was simultaneously passing on Sweeney's information to American's headquarters in Dallas–Fort Worth. There was no taping facility in his office, because the most acute emergency normally fielded by a flight service manager would be a call from a crew member faced with 12 passengers in first class and only eight meals. So Mr. Woodward was furiously taking notes.

Amy Sweeney's account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was occurring. She told Mr. Woodward she didn't believe the pilots were flying the plane any longer. She couldn't contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat. In professional lingo, she said: "Our No. 1 has been stabbed," referring to a violent attack on the plane's purser, "also No. 5," another flight attendant. She also reported that the passenger in 9B had had his throat slit by the hijacker sitting behind him and appeared to be dead. Betty Ong relayed this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company's Dallas headquarters.

The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that this was anything but a standard hijacking. "I don't recall any flight crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my career," said Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with American for 28 years.

Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney also reported that the hijackers had used mace or pepper spray and that passengers in business class were unable to breathe. Another dazzling clue to the hijackers' having a unique and violent intent came in Betty Ong's earliest report: "The cockpit is not answering their phone. We can't get into the cockpit. We don't know who's up there."

A male colleague of Ms. Gonzalez then comes on the line and makes the infuriating observation: "Well, if they were shrewd, they'd keep the door closed. Would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?"

To which Ong replied: "I think the guys are up there."

Ms. Sweeney told her ground contact that the plane had radically changed direction; it was flying erratically and was in rapid descent. Mr. Woodward asked her to look out the window-what did she see?

"I see water. I see buildings. We're flying low, we're flying way too low," Sweeney replied, according to the notes taken by Mr. Woodward. Sweeney then took a deep breath and gasped, "Oh, my God."

At 8:46 a.m., Mr. Woodward lost contact with Amy Sweeney-the moment of metamorphosis, when her plane became a missile guided into the tower holding thousands of unsuspecting civilians. "So sometime between 8:30 and 8:46, American must have known that the hijacking was connected to Al Qaeda," said Mike Sweeney. That would be 16 to 32 minutes before the second plane perforated the south tower.

Would American Airlines officials monitoring the Sweeney and Woodward dialogue have known right away that Mohamed Atta was connected to Al Qaeda?

"The answer is probably yes," said 9/11 commission member Bob Kerrey, "but it seems to me that the weakness here, in running up to pre-9/11, is an unwillingness to believe that the United States of America could be attacked. Then you're not putting defensive mechanisms in place. You're not trying to screen out people with connections to Islamic extremist groups."

Peg Ogonowski, the widow of Flight 11's captain, John Ogonowski, knew both Betty and Amy very well. "They had to know they were dealing with zealots," she said. "The words 'Middle Eastern hijackers' would put a chill in any flight-crew member's heart. They were unpredictable; you couldn't reason with them."

Ms. Ogonowski knew this from her nearly three decades of experience as a flight attendant for American. She and her husband had dreamt of the time in the not-so-distant future when their teenage children would be old enough that the couple could work the same flight to Europe and enjoy layovers in London and Paris together. She had been scheduled to fly Flight 11 on Sept. 13. After Sept. 11, she imagined herself in Sweeney's shoes: "When Amy picked up the phone-she was mother of two very young children-she had to know that, at that point, she might be being observed by another hijacker sitting in a passenger seat who would put a bullet through her head. What she did was incredibly brave."

How, then, could the commission have missed-or ignored-crucial facts that this very first of the first responders communicated to officials on that fateful day?

"It seems amazing to me that they didn't know," said Mrs. Ogonowski. "The state of Massachusetts has an award in Amy Sweeney's name for civilian bravery." The first recipients were John Ogonowski and Betty Ong. A full-court ceremony was held on Sept. 11, 2002, in Faneuil Hall in Boston, with Senators Kennedy and Kerrey and the state's whole political establishment in attendance.

Even the F.B.I. has recognized Amy Sweeney by bestowing on her its highest civilian honor, the Director's Award for Exceptional Public Service. "Mrs. Sweeney is immeasurably deserving of recognition for her heroic, unselfish and professional manner in which she lived the last moments of her life," according to the F.B.I.

What her husband wants to know is this: "When and how was this information about the hijackers used? Were Amy's last moments put to the best use to protect and save others?"

"We know what she said from notes, and the government has them," said Mary Schiavo, the formidable former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, whose nickname among aviation officials was "Scary Mary." Ms. Schiavo sat in on the commission's hearing on aviation security on 9/11 and was disgusted by what it left out. "In any other situation, it would be unthinkable to withhold investigative material from an independent commission," she told this writer. "There are usually grave consequences. But the commission is clearly not talking to everybody or not telling us everything."

This is hardly the only evidence hiding in plain sight.

The captain of American's Flight 11 stayed at the controls much of the diverted way from Boston to New York, sending surreptitious radio transmissions to authorities on the ground. Captain John Ogonowski was a strong and burly man with the instincts of a fighter pilot who had survived Vietnam. He gave extraordinary access to the drama inside his cockpit by triggering a "push-to-talk button" on the aircraft's yoke (or wheel). "The button was being pushed intermittently most of the way to New York," an F.A.A. air-traffic controller told The Christian Science Monitor the day after the catastrophe. "He wanted us to know something was wrong. When he pushed the button and the terrorist spoke, we knew there was this voice that was threatening the pilot, and it was clearly threatening."

According to a timeline later adjusted by the F.A.A., Flight 11's transponder was turned off at 8:20 a.m., only 21 minutes after takeoff. (Even before that, by probably a minute or so, Amy Sweeney began her report to American's operations center at Logan.) The plane turned south toward New York, and more than one F.A.A. controller heard a transmission with an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background, saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes." During these transmissions, the pilot's voice and the heavily accented voice of a hijacker were clearly audible, according to two controllers. All of it was recorded by a F.A.A. traffic-control center in Nashua, N.H. According to the reporter, Mark Clayton, the federal law-enforcement officers arrived at the F.A.A. facility shortly after the World Trade Center attack and took the tape.

To this writer's knowledge, there has been no public mention of the pilot's narrative since the news report on Sept. 12, 2001. Families of the flight crew have only heard about it, but when Peg Ogonowski asked American Airlines to let her hear it, she never heard back. Their F.A.A. superiors forbade the controllers to talk to anyone else.

Has the F.B.I. turned this critical tape over to the commission?

At the commission's January panel on aviation security, two rows of gray suits filled the back of the hearing room. They were not inspectors general of any of the government agencies called to testify. In fact, said Mary Schiavo, there is no entity within the administration pushing any consequences. The gray suits were all attorneys for the airlines, hovering around while the big bosses from American and United gave their utterly unrevealing testimonies.

Robert Bonner, the head of Customs and Border Protection, finally shot back at the panel with a startling boast.

"We ran passenger manifests through the system used by Customs-two were hits on our watch list of August 2001," Mr. Bonner testified. "And by looking at the Arab names and their seat locations, ticket purchases and other passenger information, it didn't take a lot to do a rudimentary link analysis. Customs officers were able to ID 19 probable hijackers within 45 minutes."

He meant 45 minutes after four planes had been hijacked and turned into missiles. "I saw the sheet by 11 a.m.," he said, adding proudly, "And that analysis did indeed correctly identify the terrorists."

How has American Airlines responded? According to the widower Mike Sweeney, "Ever since Sept. 11, AMR [the parent company of American Airlines] just wants to forget this whole thing happened. They wouldn't allow me to talk to Michael Woodward, and five months or so: they let him go." The Families Steering Committee urged the commission to interview Michael Woodward about the Sweeney information, as did Ms. Ong's brother, Harry Ong. A couple of days before the hearing on aviation security, a staffer did call Mr. Woodward and ask a few questions. But the explosive narrative offered by Amy Sweeney in her last 23 minutes of life was not included in the 9/11 commission's hearing on aviation security.

The timeline that is most disturbing belongs to the last of the four suicide missions-United Airlines Flight 93, later presumed destined for the U.S. Capitol, if not the White House. Huge discrepancies persist in basic facts, such as when it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside near Shanksville. The official impact time according to NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, is 10:03 a.m. Later, U.S. Army seismograph data gave the impact time as 10:06:05. The F.A.A. gives a crash time of 10:07 a.m. And The New York Times , drawing on flight controllers in more than one F.A.A. facility, put the time at 10:10 a.m.

Up to a seven-minute discrepancy? In terms of an air disaster, seven minutes is close to an eternity. The way our nation has historically treated any airline tragedy is to pair up recordings from the cockpit and air-traffic control and parse the timeline down to the hundredths of a second. But as Mary Schiavo points out, "We don't have an NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigation here, and they ordinarily dissect the timeline to the thousandth of a second."

Even more curious: The F.A.A. states that it established an open phone line with NORAD to discuss both American Airlines Flight 77 (headed for the Pentagon) and United's Flight 93. If true, NORAD had as many as 50 minutes to order fighter jets to intercept Flight 93 in its path toward Washington, D.C. But NORAD's official timeline claims that F.A.A. notification to NORAD on United Airlines Flight 93 is "not available." Why isn't it available?

Asked when NORAD gave an order for fighter planes to scramble in response to United's Flight 93, the air-defense agency notes only that F-16's were already airborne from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to intercept American's Flight 77. The latter jet heaved into the Pentagon at either 9:40 a.m. (according to the F.A.A.) or at 9:38 a.m. (according to NORAD). Although the F-16's weren't in the skies over Washington until 9:49, the question is: Did they continue flying north in an attempt to deter the last of the four hijacked jets? The distance was only 129 miles.

The independent commission is in a position to demand such answers, and many more. Have any weapons been recovered from any of the four downed planes? If not, why should the panel assume they were "less-than-four-inch knives," the description repeatedly used in the commission's hearing on aviation security? Remember the airlines' first reports, that the whole job was pulled off with box cutters? In fact, investigators for the commission found that box cutters were reported on only one plane. In any case, box cutters were considered straight razors and were always illegal. Thus the airlines switched their story and produced a snap-open knife of less than four inches at the hearing. This weapon falls conveniently within the aviation-security guidelines pre-9/11.

But bombs? Mace or pepper spray? Gas masks? The F.B.I. dropped the clue that the hijackers had "masks" in a meeting with the Four Moms from New Jersey, the 9/11 widows who rallied for this independent commission.

The Moms want to know if investigators have looked into how the pilots were actually disabled. To think that eight pilots-four of whom were formerly in the military, some with combat experience in Vietnam, and all of whom were in superb physical shape-could have been subdued without a fight or so much as a sound stretches the imagination. Even giving the terrorists credit for a militarily disciplined act of war, it is rare for everything to go right in four separate battles.

Shouldn't the families and the American people know whether or not our government took action to prevent the second attack planned for the command-and-control center in Washington?

Melody Homer is another young widow of a 9/11 pilot. Her husband, LeRoy Homer, a muscular former Air Force pilot, was the first officer of United's Flight 93. The story put out by United-of heroic passengers invading the cockpit and struggling with the terrorists-is not believable to Melody Homer or to Sandy Dahl, widow of the plane's captain, Jason Dahl. Mrs. Dahl was a working flight attendant with United and knew the configuration of that 757 like the back of her hand.

"We can't imagine that passengers were able to get a cart out of its locked berth and push it down the single aisle and jam it into the cockpit with four strong, violent men behind the door," said Ms. Homer. She believes that the victims' family members who broke a confidentiality agreement and gave their interpretation of sounds they'd heard on the cockpit tape misinterpreted the shattering of china. "When a plane goes erratic, china falls."

Now, the most disturbing disconnect of all: The F.A.A. and NORAD had at least 42 minutes to decide what to do about Flight 93. What really happened?

At 9:30 a.m., six minutes after receiving orders from NORAD, three F-16's were airborne, according to NORAD's timeline. At first, the planes were directed toward New York and probably reached 600 miles per hour within two minutes, said Maj. Gen. Mike J. Haugen, adjutant general of the North Dakota National Guard. Once it was apparent that the New York suicide missions were accomplished, the Virginia-based fighters were given a new flight target: Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The pilots heard an ominous squawk over the plane's transponder, a code that indicates almost an emergency wartime footing. General Haugen says the F-16's were asked to confirm that the Pentagon was on fire. The lead flier looked down and verified the worst.

Then the pilots received the most surreal order of the morning, from a voice identifying itself as a representative of the Secret Service. According to General Haugen, the voice said: "I want you to protect the White House at all costs."

During that time, Vice President Richard Cheney called President George W. Bush to urge him to give the order that any other commercial airliners controlled by hijackers be shot down. In Bob Woodward's book, Bush at War , the time of Mr. Cheney's call was placed before 10 a.m. The Vice President explained to the President that a hijacked airliner was a weapon; even if the airliner was full of civilians, Mr. Cheney insisted, giving American fighter pilots the authority to fire on it was "the only practical answer."

The President responded, according to Mr. Woodward, "You bet."

Defense officials told CNN on Sept. 16, 2001, that Mr. Bush had not given authorization to the Defense Department to shoot down a passenger airliner "until after the Pentagon had been struck."

So what happened in the period between just before 10:00 a.m. and 10:03 (or 10:06, or 10:07)-when, at some point, the United jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania? Did the President act on Mr. Cheney's advice and order the last and potentially most devastating of airborne missiles brought down before it reached the Capitol? Did Mr. Cheney act on the President's O.K.? Did a U.S. fighter shoot down Flight 93? And why all the secrecy surrounding that last flight?

Melody Homer, the wife of Flight 93's first officer, was at home in Marlton, N.J., the morning of Sept. 11 with their 10-month-old child. Within minutes of seeing the second plane turn into a fireball, Ms. Homer called the Flight Operations Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, which keeps track of all New York–based pilots. She was told that her husband's flight was fine.

"Whether or not my husband's plane was shot down," the widowed Mrs. Homer said, "the most angering part is reading about how the President handled this."

Mr. Bush was notified 14 minutes after the first attack, at 9 a.m., when he arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He went into a private room and spoke by phone with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room. Mrs. Homer's soft voice curdles when she describes his reaction: "I can't get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: 'That's some bad pilot.' Why did people on the street assume right away it was a terrorist hijacking, but our President didn't know? Why did it take so long to ground all civilian aircraft? In the time between when my husband's plane took off [at 8:41 a.m.] and when the second plane hit in New York [9:02 a.m.], they could have turned back to airfield."

In fact, the pilots of Flight 93 are seldom mentioned in news reports-only the 40 passengers. And Mrs. Homer says that hurts. "My husband fought for his country in the Persian Gulf War, and he would have seen his role that day as the same thing-fighting for his country. It's my belief, based on what I've been told by people affiliated with the Air Force, that at least one of the pilots was very instrumental in the outcome of that flight. I do believe the hijackers may have taken it down. But stalling the impetus of the plane so it didn't make it to the Capitol or the White House-that was one of the pilots."

Melody LeRoy later learned from a member of the Air Force who worked with her husband that "a couple of weeks before the incident, they were all sitting around and talking about the intelligence that was filtering through the military that something big was going to happen. For all of this to get ignored," she said as she swallowed a sob, "it's difficult to excuse that."

John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy and one of the most active interrogators among the commissioners, was told of some of the issues raised in this article. "These are exactly the right questions," he said. "We have to put all these details together and then figure out what went wrong. Who didn't do their job? Not just what was wrong with the existing system, but human beings."

After 14 months of watching while commissioners politely negotiated with a White House that has used every known ruse and invented some new ones to evade, withhold and play peekaboo with the commissioners, the Four Moms and their Families Steering Committee feel frustrated almost to the boiling point.

Who is going to take a long, hard look at the policy failures and the failures of leadership? This seems to be where some members of the 9/11 commission are heading. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, winding up after the two-day hearings in January, said she was "amazed and shocked at how every agency defines its responsibility by leaving out the hard part." She blasted the F.A.A. for ducking any responsibility for the prevention of terrorism. "We saw the same attitude in the F.B.I. and C.I.A.-not to use common sense to evaluate a mission and say what works and what doesn't."

Finally, Ms. Gorelick addressed a pointed question to James Loy, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the vast, Brobdingnagian bureaucracy which now lashes together 22 federal agencies that didn't talk to one another before the terrorist attacks.

"Who is responsible for driving the strategy to defeat Al Qaeda and holding people accountable for carrying it out?" Ms. Gorelick demanded.

"The President is the guy," said Mr. Loy. "And the person next to the President, who is the national security advisor."

The widows are furious that Dr. Rice was allowed to be interviewed in private and has not agreed-nor been subpoenaed-to give her testimony, under oath, before the American people.

When 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean gave his sobering assessment last December that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented, the Bush White House saw the bipartisan panel spinning out of its control. In the President's damage-control interview with NBC's Tim Russert last weekend, Mr. Bush was clearly still unwilling to submit to questioning by the 9/11 commission. "Perhaps, perhaps," was his negotiating stance.

Asked why he was appointing yet another commission-this one to quell the uproar over why we attacked Iraq to save ourselves from Saddam's mythical W.M.D.-the President said, "This is a strategic look, kind of a big-picture look about the intelligence-gathering capacities of the United States of America …. Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence-gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks."

Congress has already given him a big-picture look-in a scathing 900-page report by the joint House and Senate inquiry into the intelligence failures pre-9/11. But the Bush administration doesn't look at what it doesn't want to see.

"It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed," fumes Senator Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003. The Bush White House has ignored all but one or two of the joint inquiry's 19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of the inquiry's final report to be censored (redacted), claiming national security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission-whose mandate was to build on the work of the congressional panel-cannot read the evidence.

Senator Graham snorted, "It's absurd."

In a Feb. 3 interview the newly minted commission member Bob Kerrey, the former Senator from Nebraska, now the president of the New School University, said that Ms. Rice's interview will not be held under oath, and the results of the interview are not to be made public.

But as the Bush administration fights to limit the scope and time allotted to the independent commission investigating a broad array of failures leading up to and during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Kerrey is emerging as a strong antagonist to their efforts to contain the political damage.

Mr. Kerrey, the commission's unlikely new spitfire, told The Observer he would lobby the comission to request sworn, public testimony from Bush's embittered national security advisor.

"I'm very much interested in following up on the statement Condoleezza Rice made at her famous press conference in '02, that 'I don't think anybody could have predicted … that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,'" Mr. Kerrey said. "I don't believe that."

The commissioners are divided on whether or not to press the point-and to use a subpoena if she refuses.

"We're not there yet," said former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, the committee's chairman.

But with the independent 9/11 commission spinning out of the White House's control, the fight by Republicans against the panel's request for an extension of its deadline may hurt the Bush administration more than it will help it, according to Mr. Kerrey.

"Given the administration's current behavior, which is an unwillingness to allow witnesses to come forward and a reluctance to allow documents to be seen, other narratives will prevail, and the final report is apt to be a more negative story for them," he said.

Mr. Kerrey also revealed to this writer that the scope of the 9/11 commission will take in "about half of what the President was doing in the pre-9/11 situation in Iraq. He alleged that there were Al Qaeda and terrorist connections, and that's very much part of what we're examining."

Mr. Kerrey is dismayed by the President's decision this week to create another commission to examine the intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war. It's a mission that overlaps with investigations the 9/11 panel is already doing, he claims.

"When the Bush administration began in January of '01, their transition team rearranged the Clinton national-security agenda. The question is: Did they continue the anti-terrorism effort? Where did they put Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden on their list of national-security threats?"

The formation of a new comittee to investigate U.S. intelligence on Iraq is a neat divide-and-conquer ploy for the Bush administration: it will barely have begun its work by Election Day.

The 9/11 commission didn't even get fully staffed or adequately funded for its first six months-and still has several hundred more interviews to do to complete its investigation-the consensus of the commissioners is that they need at least another two months to complete a thorough investigation.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has insisted that the commission "live within the current deadline," which is the end of May. But significant numbers of Senate Republicans, Mr. Kerrey believes, "have figured out that the best delay for them is a six-month delay, to get our report beyond the election."

What's good for the goose, of course, may be good for the gander. The Family Steering Committee is adamant about wanting a six-month extension-the very length that Senate Republicans, according to Mr. Kerrey, are pushing for behind the scenes.

"We were patient and waited 12 months to get the hard-hitting, investigative hearings they promised us after the New Year," said Kristen Breitweiser, one of the widowed Four Moms from New Jersey previously profiled by this writer as the dominant force behind the very creation of the 9/11 commission. Ms. Breitweiser said they were promised a public hearing on all 12 topics in the commission's mandate.

"They've already scrapped one public hearing in January and two sets in February," she said. (A spokesman for the commission confirmed the decision to hold fewer public hearings.) "If the commission has to issue more subpoenas to get access to the people and documents they need, we don't want time to run out while lawyers argue," Ms. Breitweiser added.

When George Bush replaced Henry Kissinger, his first choice as chairman of the 9/11 commission, with New Jersey's former Republican governor, the White House may have thought that the mild-mannered, aristocratic Mr. Kean would be a pushover. He is not. The White House may be relying on its five Republican appointees to the commission to ease over the rough patches for the President. But having been dissed, crawfished, starved for funds and now denied access even to the notes made by four commission members chosen to see a key Presidential briefing-the one at which Mr. Bush learned, five weeks before 9/11, that Osama bin Laden and his terrorists were an imminent threat-at least some of the commissioners feel insulted. They must all know that someday they will be questioned, perhaps by their grandchildren, about conspiracy theories certain to spring forth from the murk of facts selectively plucked by agencies and officials under the umbrella of a nervous Bush White House.

Among the 10 white faces arrayed on a raised dais in a Senate hearing room last week, only one belonged to a woman: Jamie Gorelick. A former deputy attorney general of the United States under President Clinton, Ms. Gorelick's dimpled smile, casual turtlenecks and cocoa-warm voice obscure the steel core of a corporate litigator. Ms. Gorelick was grilling Claudio Manno, the security chief of the F.A.A., who was charged with regulating America's air carriers.

"Our briefings have told us that in the spring-summer of 2001, the hair of the intelligence community was on fire," Ms. Gorelick said. "A high-high state of alert existed. Did you take any enhanced security measures?"

No, came the answer from Mr. Manno, testifying for the F.A.A.. When a passenger going through security during this high state of alert set off the magnetometer, were inspectors directed to open the carry-on bag for inspection? No, came the answer. That explains why the passenger-screening program was a failure, despite having flagged five of the hijackers when they or their hand luggage set off the magnetometers.

The F.A.A.'s only requirement for security screeners at that time was to look at any knife or other object and, if it looked "menacing," designate it as a weapon. It was the "common-sense" test. So the security screeners ran the five men through a second, less sensitive computerized magnetometer and hand-wanded them-but they never opened their carry-ons. Thus the hijackers on three of the four planes all managed to smuggle on bombs (whether real or fake) and compressed chemical sprays. Both items, obviously, were illegal.

Commissioners became exasperated as one official after another pleaded ignorance of any "specific or credible" threats of terrorism in this country.

"We know from classified brief-ings that our government was tracking Middle Eastern terrorist suspects since the year 2000 and the millennium plot to blow up LAX was foiled," Ms. Gorelick reminded them. That catastrophe had been averted by a female Customs agent, Deanna Dean, one of the many women warriors who rose to the occasion and risked their jobs, if not their lives, in the cause of fighting a war on terrorism before the American government declared it.

Next, Ms. Gorelick drilled down through the gelatinous responses of Jane Garvey, the former F.A.A. administrator who headed the agency during both the highly tense run-up to the millennium and in September 2001.

"Again, did you take any increased measures to respond to the high-high state of alert in the spring-summer of 2001?"

"I don't recall any," Ms. Garvey said. "I'd have to go back and look."

Ms. Garvey had already stalled the commission, which had to subpoena documents from the F.A.A. At this hearing, the commission learned that the F.A.A. itself had sent out a CD-ROM in July 2001 to some 700 airline executives and airports, even putting it in the Federal Registry :

"Members of foreign terrorist groups … and radical fundamentalist elements from many nations are present in the US, recruiting others for terrorist activities and training them to use explosives and airplanes. This increased threat to civil aviation abroad and within the United States exists and needs to be countered and prevented."

The head of the F.A.A. said she had not seen that information until after 9/11.

Meanwhile, a wintry Mr. Kerrey-now silver-haired but still surly-lipped-brought new fire and outrage to the commission's first hard-hitting hearings last week.

"One of the presumptions that keeps surfacing is that an attack on our homeland was incredible," Mr. Kerrey said at one point during the hearings. "Yet there was a pattern beginning with the World Trade Center bombing in '93, followed by a much more sophisticated attack on Americans in our embassies in Africa in August '98 and the terrorist attack on the Cole in October 2000, which we knew was Al Qaeda. The possibility of a terrorist strike on our soil was obvious. Do they have to send you a memo?! You people ought to be coming to the microphone and saying, 'We failed miserably, and it cost us like hell.' What is this: 'We couldn't have imagined … '? These people defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, for Godsakes!"

Mr. Kerrey, though new to the issues, has shown a keen interest in the same vital but minutely detailed questions that have bothered the families of 9/11 victims for over two years now-questions that are still unanswered.

It remains to be seen, so early in his tenure, whether Mr. Kerrey will be capable of mastering the thousands of pages of documents and monitoring the selection of interviews that are so important to the commission's success.

Part of the problem, family members say, is that the witnesses that come before the commission appear to be cherrypicked to provide testimony that paints a rosier picture of the Bush administration's intelligence operations before Sept. 11.

"When the commissioners insist they're doing a thorough, independent investigation, but their staff turns away valuable whistle-blowers like Sibel Edmonds [profiled in a Jan. 26 Observer story], claiming time problems, we worry about the picture the commissioners are getting," said Ms. Kleinberg.

Nevertheless, as the commission gets angrier, it's becoming a serious thorn in the side of the administration-especially in an election year hypercharged with security and intelligence concerns.

While things heat up, it is difficult for the Four Moms to take much comfort.

An essential part of the healing process after a trauma of this proportion is getting at the truth, however unpleasant. As the Four Moms watched the January hearings on C-Span, they saw proof of the power of a public airing of the evidence. They want more of the same. "For things to work in government, it's kind of like religion-you have to go on blind faith," Ms. Kleinberg said. "We don't have that anymore. They have to understand that part of their job is to restore the faith in government. They sometimes forget they work for the people. Well, we're the people."

Last Friday, the four women from New Jersey who have faced down the F.B.I. on its failures in preventing the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that claimed their husbands' lives were personally invited to the bureau's Hoover Building offices in Washington, D.C., for a second visit. Their host was none other than F.B.I. director Robert Mueller.

Cordial and fully engaged, Mr. Mueller introduced the newly appointed head of the Bureau's Penttbom investigation ( Pent for Pentagon, Pen for Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the four planes that the government was forewarned could be used as weapons-even bombs-but ignored).

The new Penttbom team leader, Joan-Marie Turchiano, politely suggested the widows present their questions.

"O.K." said Kristin Breitweiser, the group's hammerhead, "have you solved the crime yet?"

The Penttbom leader said they had been investigating the 19 hijackers and had run down every connection. Ms. Breitweiser recalls her next words indelibly: "As far as our investigations are concerned, we can say the hijackers had no contacts in the United States."

But the scathing 800-page report on intelligence failures produced by a joint congressional investigation had already revealed that the F.B.I. had open investigations on four of the 14 individuals who allegedly had some kind of contact with the hijackers while they were in the U.S.

The Four Moms from New Jersey, or "the girls" as they refer to themselves, waste little time on niceties these days. They were the firecrackers behind the creation of the 9/11 commission, which after a year of meager progress, is finally ready to call key administration officials to testify in public hearings on some of the most important questions we have before us as a nation.

But White House delays and circumventions have hampered the effort, and the four moms see the commission flagging in its use of subpoena power to call in key Clinton and Bush administration officials for their testimony. Personal connections between commission members-like executive director Philip Zelikow and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice-undermine the commission's purported independence. As the commission's work draws close to its May dissolution, it appears the main question they were tasked to answer will remain unanswered: Did our guardians of national security have enough information to prevent 9/11? Why did all of our officials who swore an oath of office to lead, protect, and serve, fail to do so on the morning of 9/11?

Last Monday Ms. Breitweiser, along with three other members of the Family Steering Committee, met with commissioner John Lehman about the need for an extension of the Commission's May deadline-after House Speaker Dennis Hastert had already declared such an extension dead in the water. Exiting the meeting, the family members were hopeful that he would join the majority of commissioners-all five Democrats, chairman Thomas Kean and one other Republican, Slade Gorton-in supporting a postponement. More recently, as Democratic presidential candidates burnish their credentials in intelligence and national security issues against Bush's 2004 campaign, the extension of that deadline is becoming a heated issue.

While fighting a mostly losing battle for a transparent investigation, the Moms are winning on another score: Whistleblowers from agencies culpable in the failures of 9/11-long silent-are being attracted to their mission.

Sibel Edmonds read an article published in these pages last August about the 9/11 widows' bold confrontation with Director Mr. Mueller in a private meeting last summer, and recognized kindred spirits.

"This was the first time I'd heard anybody ask such direct questions to Mr. Mueller," said Ms. Edmonds, a Turkish-American woman who answered the desperate call of the F.B.I. in September, 2001 for translators of Middle Eastern languages. Hired as contract employee a week after 9/11, without a personal interview, Ms. Edmonds was given top-secret security clearance to translate wiretaps ordered by field offices in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities by agents who were working around the clock to pick up the trail of Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters in the U.S. and abroad. Working in the F.B.I.'s Washington field office, she listened to hundreds of hours of intercepts and translated reams of e-mails and documents that flooded into the bureau. In a series of intimate interviews, she told her story to this writer.

When she arrived, her enormous respect for the F.B.I. was initially confirmed.

"The field agents are wonderful, but they were terribly exasperated with the D.C. office," she said.

While the news was full of reports of heaps of untranslated material languishing inside the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism unit, Ms. Edmonds has claimed that translators were told to let them pile up. She said she remembers a supervisor's instructions "to just say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations" so that the department could use the pileup as evidence to demand more money from the Senate. Another colleague she recalls saying bitterly, "This is our time to show those assholes we are in charge."

F.B.I. translators are the front line for information gathered by foreign-language wiretaps, tips, documents, e-mails, and other intercepted threats to security. Based on what they translate and the dots they connect, F.B.I. field agents act against targets of investigation-or fail to act-in a timely manner. As an agent later told the Judiciary Committee which oversees the F.B.I., "When you hear a suspect say 'The flower will bloom next week,' you can't wait two weeks to get it translated."

During her six months of work for the Bureau, Ms. Edmonds said she grew increasingly horrified by the lack of internal security she saw inside the very agency tasked with protecting our national security.

In papers filed with the F.B.I.'s internal investigative office, the Department of Justice, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and most recently with the 9/11 Commission, she has reported serious ongoing failures in the language division of the F.B.I. Washington Field Office. They include security lapses in hiring and monitoring of translators, investigations that have been compromised by incorrect or misleading translations sent to field agents; and thousands of pages of translations falsely labeled "not pertinent" by Middle Eastern linguists who were either not qualified in the target language or English, or, worse, protecting targets of investigation.

Nothing happened. Undaunted, Ms. Edmonds took her concerns to upper management. Soon afterward she was fired. The only cause given was "for the convenience of the government." The F.B.I. has not refuted any of Ms. Edmonds' allegations, yet they have accounted for none of them.

On the morning Ms. Edmonds was terminated, she said, she was escorted from the building by an agent she remembered saying: "We will be watching you and listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney who is not approved by the F.B.I., or if you take this issue outside the F.B.I. to the Senate, the next time I see you, it will be in jail." Two other agents were present.

"I know about my constitutional rights, but do you know how many translators would be intimidated?"

Shortly after her dismissal, F.B.I. agents turned up at the door of the Ms. Edmonds' townhouse to seize her home computer. She was then called in to be polygraphed-a test which, she found out later, she passed. A few months after her dismissal, accompanied by her lawyer on a sunny morning in May 2002, Ms. Edmonds took her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As her high heels glanced off the marble steps of Congress she sensed two men ascending right behind her. Turning, she recognized the agent walk, the Ray-Bans, the outline of a weapon, and the deadest giveaway of all-a cell phone pointed straight at her, transmitting. "They weren't secretive about it, they wanted me to know they're there," she said. After being shadowed in plain sight many more times, she said with dark humor, "I call them my escorts."

After her meeting, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican vice-chair of the Judiciary Committee to whom Ms. Edmonds appealed, had his investigators check her out. Then they, along with staffers for Senator Patrick Leahy, called for a joint briefing in the summer of 2002. The F.B.I. sent a unit chief from the language division and an internal security official.

In a lengthy, unclassified session that one participant describes as bizarre, the windows fogged up as the session finished; it was that tense, "None of the F.B.I. officials' answers washed, and they could tell we didn't believe them." He chuckles remembering one of the Congressional investigators saying, "You basically admitted almost all that Sibel alleged, yet you say there's no problem here. What's wrong with this picture?"

The Bureau briefers shrugged, put on their coats, and left. There was no way the F.B.I. was going to admit to another spy scandal only months after being scorched by the Webster Report on one of the most dangerous double agents in F.B.I. history, Robert Hanssen.

"I think the F.B.I. is ignoring a very major internal security breach," said Grassley, "and a potential espionage breach."

Unlike those whistleblowers whose cause is redress of personal grievances, Ms. Edmonds impressed Grassley as passionately patriotic.

"The basic problem is, heads don't roll," Sen. Grassley said. "The culture of the F.B.I. is to worry about their own public relations. If you're going to change that culture, somebody's got to get fired." He is not optimistic, however, that Congress will act aggressively. "Nobody wants to take on the F.B.I."

The translator had filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on March 7, 2002. She was told then that an investigation would be undertaken and she could expect a report by the fall of 2002. Twenty-one months later, she is still waiting. She also filed a First Amendment case against the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. And a Freedom of Information case against the F.B.I. for release of documents pertaining to her work for the Bureau, to confirm her allegations. The F.B.I. refused her FOIA request. Their stated reason was the pending investigation by Justice, which, her sources in the Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after the November election.

When Ms. Edmonds wouldn't go away or keep still, F.B.I. Director Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to assert the State Secrets Privilege in the case of Ms. Edmonds versus Department of Justice. Mr. Ashcroft obliged.

The State Secrets Privilege is the neutron bomb of legal tactics. In the rare cases where the government invokes it to withhold evidence or to block discovery in the name of national security, it can effectively terminate the case. According to a 1982 Appeals Court ruling. "Once the court is satisfied that the information poses a reasonable danger to secrets of state, even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege ._"

In interviews conducted over recent weeks with a senior F.B.I. agent who worked closely with Ms. Edmonds, former F.B.I. counterterrorism agents, and with current and former members of Congress involved in national security issues, a picture emerged of the dark undercurrents that run beneath our best counterterrorism efforts, and the punishments meted out to those who dare to expose it.

Does Ms. Edmonds pose a danger to secrets of state? Or do the secrets buried in the nerve center of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism squad pose a danger to Americans living under the politics of dread?

Edmonds was seen as a jewel when the F.B.I. found her only a week after September 11, 2001. With reports of stacks of untranslated "chatter" from Middle Eastern suspects and their supporters, the embarrassed Bureau couldn't wait to hire this Turkish-American graduate student who speaks four languages, not only Turkish, Farsi (the Iranian language) and Azerbaijani, but perfect American-English. The graduate student was carrying five courses in preparation for her Master's degree and was in mourning for her father's recent death. "But I felt like I was being called to duty."

Inside the F.B.I.'s Washington field office roughly 200 translators sit hip to hip in one large room that is a linguistic cacophony of chatter from 185 different countries. The few Arabic translators may be flanked by a Farsi speaker on one side, an Urdu speaker on the other, and a translator of Chinese chatter behind them.

In a security briefing she was told that any documents marked "Top Secret" had to be locked up when employees went to lunch. Laptops had to be kept in a safe. Any contacts with foreign people, even social, had to be reported. She also signed a document promising to report any suspicious activities of other translators. She was impressed with the stringency of F.B.I. rules.

The Translation Department is treated by the F.B.I. as highly sensitive. Yet her badge allowed her and other translators to enter and exit the building without passing through security, and within the sanctum itself they could pass freely from floor to floor and to any agent's office. Ms. Edmonds saw several different individuals leave the building with documents or audio tapes in their gym bags. When she called security to report it, nothing was done.

She was one of three Turkish translators working on real time wiretaps, e-mails, and documents related to 9/11 investigations. One of her colleagues was an unassuming immigrant whose first employment on entering the U.S. was as a busboy. Ms. Edmonds was dismayed to learn that he had been hired despite failing to pass the English equivalency exam. When he was chosen to go to Guantánamo Bay, to translate interrogations with the half-dozen Turkish detainees in America's war on terror, she remembers with both compassion and disgust hearing her colleague wail, "I can't do this!"

But it was her other colleague who gave her the greatest cause for concern-and her reports to her superiors as well as an alphabet soup of government commissions and agencies remain unanswered.

Melek Can Dickerson was a very friendly Turkish woman, married to a major in the U.S. Air Force. She liked to be called informally "Jan."

The account that follows, which comes from extended interviews with Ms. Edmonds, was related in testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee.

"I began to be suspicious as early as November, 2001" said Ms. Edmonds. "In conversation Jan mentioned these suspects and said 'I can't believe they're monitoring these people.'"

"How would you know?" Ms. Edmonds remembers saying. She said Dickerson told her she had worked for them in a Turkish organization; she talked about how she shopped for them at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Alexandria.

Ms. Edmonds has told the Judiciary Committee that soon after, Ms. Dickerson tried to establish social ties with her, suggesting they meet in Alexandria and introduce their husbands to each other.

When Sibel invited the visitors in for tea, she said, Major Dickerson began asking Matthew Edmonds if the couple had many friends from Turkey here in the U.S. Mr. Edmonds said he didn't speak Turkish, so they didn't associate with many Turkish people. The Air Force officer then began talking up a Turkish organization in Washington that he described, according to the Edmondses, as "a great place to make connections and it could be very profitable."

Sibel was sickened. This organization was the very one she and Jan Dickerson were monitoring in a 9/11 investigation. Since Sibel had adhered to the rule that an F.B.I. employee does not discuss bureau matters with one's mate, her husband innocently continued the conversation. Ms. Dickerson and her husband offered to introduce the Edmondses to people connected to the Turkish embassy in Washington who belonged to this organization.

"These two people were the top targets of our investigation!" Ms. Edmonds said of the people the Dickersons proposed to introduce them to.

"My husband keeps thinking he's talking about promoting business deals," Ms. Edmonds later said of the encounter. "He has no idea the man is talking about criminal activities with some semi-legitimate front."

These are classic "pitch activities" to get somebody to spy for you, according to a Judiciary Committee staffer who investigated Ms. Edmonds' claims.

"You'd think the F.B.I. would be jumping out of their seats about all these red flags," the staffer said.

The targets of that F.B.I. investigation left the country abruptly in 2002. Later, Ms. Edmonds discovered that Ms. Dickerson had managed to get hold of translations meant for Ms. Edmonds, forge her signature, and render the communications useless.

"These were documents directly related to a 9/11 investigation and suspects, and they had been sent to field agents in at least two cities." By accident, Ms. Edmonds discovered the breach-up to 400 pages of translations marked "not pertinent"-and insisted that those classified translations be sent back so she could retranslate them

"We discovered some amazing stuff," she remembered.

The first half-dozen translations were transcripts from an F.B.I. wiretap targeting a Turkish intelligence officer working out of the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. A staff-member of the Judiciary committee later confirmed to this writer that the intelligence officer was the target of the wiretap Ms. Dickerson had mistranslated, signing Ms. Edmonds' name to the printouts. Ms. Edmonds said she found them to reveal that the officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon-but that information would not have reached field agents unless Ms. Edmonds had retranslated them. She only got through about 100 more pages before she was fired.

"I didn't go out and blow the whistle," Ms. Edmonds said. She said she first reported these breaches both verbally and in writing to a supervisor, who assured her that the F.B.I. had done a background check on Ms. Dickerson, and the matter was put to an end.

Her further inquiries to counterintelligence agents raised a small alarm. Ms. Edmonds was told that Ms. Dickerson hadn't disclosed any links to the Turkish organization in her employment application. But nothing happened. Ms. Edmonds, despairing to another superior in the counterintelligence squad, remembers the agent saying: "I'll bet you've never worked in government before. We do things differently. We don't name names, and we usually sweep the dirt under the carpet."

She said another special agent warned: "If you insist on this investigation, I'll make sure in no time it will turn around and become an investigation about you."

The F.B.I., contacted with these allegations, would not comment; Ms. Dickerson could not be reached for comment, but has previously dismissed Ms. Edmonds' story as "preposterous." The F.B.I. has also previously said that it did not believe that Ms. Dickerson acted maliciously, though members of the Judiciary committee have expressed dissatisfaction with the F.B.I.'s investigation.

Going by the book was not without personal sacrifice for Ms. Edmonds. She remembered her erstwhile tea companion, Ms. Dickerson, threatening: "Why would you make such a fuss over translations? You're not even planning to stay here. Why would you put your life and your family's lives in danger?"

Ms. Edmonds said that after she reported this threat to Dale Watson, then executive assistant director of the F.B.I., she learned from friends in Turkey that plainclothes agents went to her sister's apartment in Istanbul with an interrogation warrant.

Ms. Edmonds had already brought her sister and mother to Washington in anticipation of such reprisals by Turkish intelligence. But her younger sister, a totally apolitical airline employee, hasn't spoken to her since.

After two years of futile efforts as an F.B.I. whistleblower, Ms. Edmonds

figured the widows were her last resort. The former translator had information relevant to the commission that nobody else seemed to want to hear. Shortly after the Christmas holidays, in the leer of a nationwide orange alert based on a "sustained level of intelligence chatter," she contacted Mindy Kleinberg, the only mom whose telephone number is listed. Kleinberg rallied her cohorts, Kristen Breitweiser and Patty Casazza (their fourth member, Lori Van Aucken, was taking a brief "sabbatical"). The three moms jumped in an S.U.V. and gunned it down the Garden State to meet up with Ms. Edmonds halfway to D.C. at an anonymous roadside hotel. She gave them the outlines of her story, and asked "the girls" if they could get her an audience with the 9/11 commission. Her letter and follow-up calls to Tom Kean, the chairman, had gone unanswered for a year. The moms were so disturbed by all the security lapses she described, they slipped back into the sleepless agitation that was so familiar from the months after watching on TV while their husbands were turned to ash by terrorists in the World Trade Center attack. But they eagerly agreed to help.

Last week, Ms. Edmonds met with a New York attorney, Eric Seiff, a veteran of both the New York District Attorney's office and the State Department. He finds her case extraordinary.

"We're familiar with people in big bureaucracies putting job security over doing the right thing, but not at this dramatic level-putting job security above national security," said Seiff. He is appalled at the invocation of State Secrets Privilege "It's the Attorney General saying to the judiciary, 'Not only don't we answer to Ms. Edmonds, we don't answer to you."

The last resort, Ms. Edmonds concluded, was the federal 9/11 commission. Maybe they would live up to their mandate to do a truly independent investigation of the security lapses that allowed our country to be invaded by terrorists supported by foreign powers, who have yet to be exposed or held accountable.

She sent a full report to one of the Democratic commission members. When this writer asked him about the commission's interest in the issues raised by Ms. Edmonds' report, he said: "It sounds like it's too deep in the weeds for us to consider, we're looking at broader issues."

It has not deterred her. And neither snow nor sleet nor mini child disasters could deter the moms from keeping their dates in Washington last Friday to do battle for Ms. Edmonds. When the 9/11 commission seemed close-minded, they met with Judiciary Committee staffers, echoing Sibel's pleadings that Senator Grassley hold his own hearings. Senator Grassley had told this writer that his hands were tied, because, "Senator Hatch is now chairman of the Oversight Committee." The staffers said they had written to both Mueller and Ashcroft several times, asking them to come in and talk about Ms. Edmonds' allegations. No reply. Sibel was surprised to hear them admit, 'Senator Hatch has been an obstacle on everything we've tried to do.'

Then a brainstorm. What if the Senate Intelligence Committee held a joint hearing with the Judiciary Committee? Breitweiser enthused, "Great, we've already talked to Senators Roberts and Rockefeller [co-chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee]. We were told by Senator Roberts that the translation issue remains 'a serious problem.' They said they would like to hold hearings in February of this year."

The moms' final meeting was their hour-and-a-half private session at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Ms. Edmonds was not welcome there. But Director Mueller, said Breitweiser, seemed genuinely interested in what the moms had to say. Asked about the Ms. Edmonds case, Mueller said he had handed it over to the Inspector General's office. Pressed, he said, "I can't investigate myself." Yes, but, the Moms nudged, had he looked into problems in the translation department? Mueller appeared to brush off the matter as anything but important.

"Then, I don't understand why you asked that State Secrets Privilege be asserted here?" Kleinberg piped up. "If her case was that important, why isn't it important enough to deserve a report?"

For the first time, the director did not look cordial. So Breitweiser switched back to an earlier subject - his cooperation with a Senate hearing on the translation issue. "So, Director Mueller, I just want to get you on the record," said Breitweiser. "If the Senate asks you to testify, we have your word you'll go?"

The square-jawed chief spook smiled at the girls' grasp of strategy. "You have my word," they all remember his saying, "if Senator Hatch invites me to testify, absolutely I will be there."

Now all they have to do is move the immovables. But they've done it before. And there is one motto shared by the Four Moms from New Jersey and the translator from Turkey: We're not going away.

I started my explorations of Middletown as a student of anthropologist Margaret Mead; I had learned that when a highly significant event opens a fissure in the normal patterns of life, a writer must drop everything and go to the edge, where she will see the culture turned inside out.

To that outsider, it was the idealized American suburb. But the first thing I learned about the place was: There is no middle in Middletown. It was a large, sprawling, fragmented township divided into 12 separate enclaves. There were police and firefighters, wealthy traders and their stay-at-home wives, C.E.O.'s, and celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. The bigger the house and the broader the lawn, the less likely the occupants would know their neighbors or imagine they would ever need to rely on community. It was a microcosm of suburban America.

My first calls were on the people charged with the care and protection of the townfolk. John Pollinger, the police chief of Middletown, a big, strong alpha male who appeared to always be in control; the center-parted hair, the Ray-Ban shades, the crisp uniform framing his 6-foot-5 stature. After he described the mutiny of some of his men who insisted upon going to Ground Zero, day after day, leaving the town depleted of its first line of defense, his eyes swelled and he came close to tears.

Next I called on the religious leaders, they were among the most shaken. Although their sanctuaries were filled, beyond capacity in the weeks following Sept. 11, there was nothing in their playbooks to explain this new face of evil and the whereabouts of God on that terrible day. A Presbyterian minister, John Monroe, told me "we were dead men walking." One priest was so overwhelmed at the task of comforting the 24 families in his parish who lost loved ones, he virtually hid out during the first week following the tragedy.

I then moved onto the mental-health professionals. Maureen Fitzsimmons, the program director at Catholic Charities was one of the first shepherds to welcome the widows and widowers into new "family" support groups where they didn't have to explain or defend their unruly emotions.

One day, Maureen let me know she thought there was one widow who was interested in talking to me. I had to bite my lip when Mary Murphy opened the door, five months pregnant. I don't know how either one of us got through that first interview, but what I went through with Mary and the other widows could not be considered a traditional journalist interview. I was the absorber, the mirror, we communed. After the session was over, somehow, we both felt better.

From there, one bereaved family member passed me on to another. For the next few months, the people of Middletown just wanted to spill. But by Christmas, just about everyone retreated. They felt vulnerable and saw everyone as an invader.

The hotel where I holed up, the Oyster Point, was far above the usual standard for a journalist. It sits directly over the Navesink River at the junction of Middletown and Red Bank, a river dotted with pleasure boats and swans. I could look down from my window and watch the water wrinkle with the wind shifts and enjoy the tender pink and gold sunsets. The staff couldn't have been more nurturing. Jennifer and Nicole at the reception desk were more than willing to drive me to an appointment when a cab didn't show up. The hostess made sure my interviews were comfortably private, often conducted in the "living room" before a fireplace. The night bartender knew exactly when to bring warm milk before I retired.

Still, I would flip on the TV as soon as I got to my room and hear about anthrax discoveries in the nearby post office, or our bombing of Afghanistan. Or another warning to be "vigilant." By the time I called to say good night to my husband, Clay Felker, who was across the country in California, I'd be bouncing off the walls.

My husband and I thought of ourselves as a hardy bicoastal couple, able to commute between Manhattan and Berkeley at will. On Sept. 11 we had been separated, since Clay had already started his semester teaching at the Graduate School of Journalism University of California, Berkeley. Being an experienced editor, Clay understood and supported my decision to live among my subjects. But the usual journalistic detachment did not apply in any aspect of doing this research.

By the time I had finished a day of interviewing distraught widows and parents, or siblings and guilt-ridden survivors, I would drag myself back to my hotel, so tired I could barely contemplate the effort of having dinner.

The night of Dec. 10 I slept fitfully. One moment I felt my husband's voice tickling my ear, words of love whispered from across the land through the telephone, as I tried to hunker down after absorbing the tearful stories of the widows. Suddenly, I was left with the nasty buzz of disconnection. Too depleted to redial. Shut my eyes to the day, begging sleep.

Next thing I was watching my husband running. Fire melting his clothes, peeling off his skin. Watching helplessly as he runs to the windows and I call to him, "Don't jump!", but he doesn't hear me, and he dives out the window into the boiling fog of jet fuel. It holds him for a split second, rocking him like the warmth of a thermal rocks the parachutist. I'm screaming-"Wait for me!"-but he's already in free fall. I see my husband being "vaporized"-that was the word used by the medical examiner who I had interviewed earlier that week, an image that had stuck in my mind of heat so intense it was turning steel girders into soup, and melting my husband into nothingness.

Awakening, it took some moments of sobbing and sweating before I came to the consciousness that this wasn't my husband. It was their husbands I was dreaming about-the widows of Middletown-that was how deeply their stories had penetrated into my unconscious. I turned on the TV news.

Today marks the third month since the terrorist attacks on New York.

My equilibrium was rescued by my daughter Maura, who is a psychotherapist. She said, "Mom, you're showing all the same symptoms as the people you're writing about." She was right: locking my keys in the car, sleeping fitfully, obsessively reading about and rehashing the details of 9/11, seeing a low-flying plane and imagining that I saw it invade a building. Maura had a solution: "Mom, even professionals have to have a supervisor to discuss their difficult cases and unload." My husband found a wise psychologist in Berkeley, and we made a date to speak for an hour at the same time, once a week.

"Of course, your daughter is right," she said. "You're holding all these stories. You don't want to be a container that gets so packed it explodes. You want to let all the angst and anger flow through you." She warned me that in the anger phase, anybody who gets in the way becomes a target. She advised that I proceed very slowly.

I developed a ritual to combat the isolation of hotel living. I would light a scented candle, put on a tape of Ella, sink into a bath of Dead Sea salts, and leave this world for half an hour. But there is nothing more protective than pulling close to your own loved ones, reaching out in any way you can squeeze into your day-leaving a nutty voice mail, sending a silly gift-ways that don't depend on the participation of the other. But of course, real live hugs are best.

In February I sat down for lunch with the widow Karen Cangialosi. In earlier visits with Karen, she was always at pains to look after everyone else. This day, she looked me in the eye and said, "I want to ask you a few questions. She fired off a series of concerns that any who is a subject of a personal account should ask of the person recording their story. "Karen, do you realize what a huge step you're taking?" I said. "You're meeting me peer to peer. You're setting boundaries." I told her I wanted to give her questions a lot of thought and write my answers as a Statement of Purpose.

Writing the letter to all those I wished to follow, I acknowledged that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many of the people had trusted me with confidences, but now, after the sixth-month anniversary, everything is harder. Its was natural that they were more wary. Then I addressed each of Karen's questions.

-Why are you writing this book?

This book will be about surviving loss. It will take people through the journey of healing and give others insight into what it takes, not only to survive, but to reconstruct one's life after the worst has happened.

-How do I know that your book will help the widows rather than hurt us?

Most of us find ourselves by finding the story or narrative in terms of which our own life makes sense. The story of how a stunned and wounded Middletown survived 9/11 is a great American story. It could help you as you move to the next stage in your life, even as it helps other Americans understand how to live in our new post-9/11 world.

-We're feeling very vulnerable and fearful that we're going to be exploited.

You've gone from living in a safe, private suburb to becoming known as "the widows." And some of you have become public figures. Your new position is the natural outgrowth of being at the center of a national tragedy.

-Why should I expose myself to being interviewed? It leaves me open to being misquoted and misinterpreted.

When I get to the point of writing the first draft of this book, I will go over with each of you the quotes from you that I would like to use. Still, you may be concerned that without qualification, your words may be misinterpreted. I'm happy to work with you too assure accuracy and context.

-Yes, but can't your editor change it?

No. A book is a work of art in which a writer's words are the instrument of her art. My editor at Random House, Robert Loomis, is accustomed to offering suggestions but never changing anything without my approval. He is the winner of many National Book Awards and we have worked together very closely on my last three books.

-Why do you think you're qualified?

I'm not a licensed psychologist, but I've spent 30 years researching and writing about the passages of adult life.

--What will I get out of talking to you?

When you talk to me, you talk to someone who can frame your experiences within a broader context. I am an empathetic listener. Listening may not sound very powerful or healing, but we gain insight into our feelings and problems as we talk.

-How do I know you won't exploit us or sensationalize our sufferings?

My intent is not to sensationalize, but to tell the real story of grief and pain and the struggle to recovery. Daily journalists-even at respected publications-do not have the time to work as I do. A book-length work requires hundreds of interviews in order to get at a deep understanding of the situation. This is a process. It doesn't begin and end with one conversation. Some of our interviews may be painful, others not. But at the end of the process, we will produce a meaningful map of the inner and outer journey through this torturous terrain.

-How much time and effort will this take?

It's extremely difficult to predict. I need to interview those who agree to be part of this project roughly once a month. The path you are walking will eventually lead to the light, and I hope to be there to record it. I am asking for your trust and cooperation.

All 50 of the people whose journey I wanted to follow agreed to participate.

On the first anniversary, I went to my editor, Robert Loomis, and told him I had little progress to report. If I was going to have a book that took the journey of traumatic grieving to the point of hopefulness, I would need to follow the people of Middletown for at least 18 months.

I knew this from having traveled to Oklahoma City to interview the survivors, families and mental-health professionals who had grappled for seven years with the aftermath of the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Most people don't turn a corner before the first 18 months.

Loomis is a writer's editor. He understood. Without hesitation, the deadline was extended.

But even at the 17-month mark, I still didn't know if there would be any light at the end of the tunnel for trauma, but, as if on cue, at the 18 month, a few people started taking the first steps.

Some took giant steps, like "The Four Moms from New Jersey," who went to Washington, D.C., and took on Congress and the White House to demand an independent national commission to investigate the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For others, simply carrying on the rituals of a family vacation was triumphant.

"Steve and I had promised to take the boys skiing over spring vacation, and I don't want their lives to be deprived because they lost their father," she said. Setting her apprehensions aside, she drove to Vermont through snow and ice with her two little sons reading the map and calling out navigational signs. It gave her a sense of raw physical power. They had no sooner checked in to the ski lodge than Karen attempted to make a fire-a chore that had traditionally belonged to her husband. The family was just settling down with hot chocolates when the screech of a smoke alarm broke through. The boys had never heard this sound before, and given their state of hypervigilance, they looked scared. Karen asked them to step outside. She opened the windows and climbed up and removed the battery in the alarm. With newly practiced aplomb, she invited the boys back inside. For Karen, this was concrete evidence that she could pull off both the mothering and fathering roles for her sons.

For another Middletown widow, one of the most anxious, the act of boarding an airplane bound for the Caribbean with her support group, 20 months after losing her mate, was a leap of faith.

At the end of 18 months, again I asked my editors for the indulgence. I needed one more month to create the "Phoenix Rising Summit." This meeting between the guardians of Middletown and Oklahoma City was designed as a way to expand the boundaries of community through the shared experience of Oklahoma City and Middletown.

About 20 of us met at the OKC National Memorial last May for two days. The OKC caregivers showed us that healing comes from the support of the community. They also warned that the second anniversary is the cruelest. Even family members grow weary and many Americans begin to parrot the bromides of popular culture-"Time to move on," "Time to put it behind us," "Find closure"-I knew enough by now to understand that there is no closure after a traumatic loss of this magnitude. One can learn to live with it, incorporate it into a commitment to new life, but no one can keep up that resilience alone.

Two weeks before this anniversary, we held the Phoenix Rising Summit II, this time in Middletown. Family members and children of 9/11 victims came together with their local police, clergy and mental health counselors to learn what they can expect in the next few years as they continue the long walk back from traumatic grief. Who better to give them the unvarnished truth than guardians from Oklahoma City, who have already spent eight years identifying the cumulative effects of trauma and working successfully to heal their community?

The day culminated with a crossing by ferry to Wall Street, an interfaith service at St. Paul's Chapel, and finally, a private tour of Ground Zero. Widows and widowers from Middletown, some of whom had never been to that dreaded place, had the opportunity to tell the stories of how their loved ones lived-rather than how they died-to their companions from Oklahoma. Many were shocked to see that sacred space turned into a busy construction site.

Our guide from the Port Authority stuck to describing the condition of the slurry walls that contained the seven-story pit where the Twin Towers once stood. He recounted for the visitors how urgent a priority it had been to support and treat those walls, once the towers were no longer there to hold them up, before the river flooded in on the pit. He described how engineers came up with a creative solution: They drilled hundred-foot holes in the slurry wall and filled them with epoxy and steel pins.

The guide's account was interrupted by a sober voice from the heartland, that of Richard Wintory, former senior assistant prosecutor from Oklahoma City.

"We don't have to guess at what's going to happen to your folks who have been through this trauma and who have ignored the fallout," he said. "If there's not a strategy as detailed and creative as drilling holes in the slurry wall and filling them with epoxy and steel pins to keep the river out of the pit, if you don't use that same tenacity and skill to keep your people from letting the river flood in your lives, you're going to have more people die as a result of 9/11."

Wintory spoke from the experience of working with the families of the 168 people killed on April 19, 1995, when a domestic terrorist blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The invisible psychological wounds persist to this day, most severely among those who were the last to come forward for help: the rescue and recovery workers.

"What y'all are experiencing is not different from what our rescue and recovery workers faced," said Wintory, who has seen many of them disabled by the cumulative effects of stress and trauma. "This is a problem that is only going to get worse as time goes by," he emphasized. "Cops have a harder time acknowledging that it's O.K. to have a problem with what they experienced. It took our guys two to three years to come forward. When that stuff gets bottled up, it's going to kill more Port Authority police officers," he warned. "It's going to wound and kill loved ones of Port Authority officers who will become victims of domestic violence. It's going to turn children into folks who have serious problems dealing with their lives. The ironworkers and other union people who worked down here with y'all are also going to be affected by this."

Wintory's warnings were underscored by Jack Poe, the police chaplain of Oklahoma County, who is still running workshops to rehabilitate the shattered law-enforcement personnel who worked on the Oklahoma City rescue and recovery. "You talk about any kind of addictive behavior, and we've seen it," he said. "Addiction to gambling, womanizing, drugs, alcohol, spending themselves into debt, domestic abuse. If we learned any lesson it's that it takes a while for the men to integrate this experience. The longer they're on the disaster site, the longer it's going to take. You can't expect a lot of this to surface for your people until three to five years."

A chilling time frame.

Following the families of Middletown over the better part of two years was a tumultuous passage-through disbelief, passivity, panic attacks, sheer survival, rising anger, deep grieving and realignment of faith, to the shock of resilience, the secret romances, the discovery of independence, the relapses on the first anniversary, the return of a capacity to love and be loved, and, finally, the commitment to construct a new life. I cannot imagine any greater reassurance of the powers of the human spirit, buttressed by faith, to heal itself.

People ask me what can we do on 9/11? The simplest act of recognition that we are now living in a New Normal would be to walk across the lawn to someone you don't know and say, "You've lived here a long time, and I've lived here a long time, and we don't know each other. I'd like to get to know you, so that if a day comes when we need each other, we will have already made the connection-the foundations for our community will already be there."

After the formal meeting, senior agents in the room faced a grilling by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow whose cohorts are three other widowed moms from New Jersey.

"I don't understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn't you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"

"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn't have investigated them all and found these few guys."

"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

"We got lucky," was the reply.

Kristen then asked the agent how the F.B.I. had known exactly which A.T.M. in Portland, Me., would yield a videotape of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the attacks. The agent got some facts confused, then changed his story. When Kristen wouldn't be pacified by evasive answers, the senior agent parried, "What are you getting at?"

"I think you had open investigations before Sept. 11 on some of the people responsible for the terrorist attacks," she said.

"We did not," the agent said unequivocally.

A month later, on the morning of July 24, before the scathing Congressional report on intelligence failures was released, Kristen and the three other moms from New Jersey with whom she'd been in league sat impassively at a briefing by staff director Eleanor Hill: In fact, they learned, the F.B.I. had open investigations on 14 individuals who had contact with the hijackers while they were in the United States. The flush of pride in their own research passed quickly. This was just another confirmation that the federal government continued to obscure the facts about its handling of suspected terrorists leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

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. But there is at least one force that the administration cannot scare off or shut up. They call themselves "Just Four Moms from New Jersey," or simply "the girls."

Kristen and the three other housewives who also lost their husbands in the attack on the World Trade Center started out knowing virtually nothing about how their government worked. For the last 20 months they have clipped and Googled, rallied and lobbied, charmed and intimidated top officials all the way to the White House. In the process, they have made themselves arguably the most effective force in dancing around the obstacle course by which the administration continues to block a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the country's defenses on Sept. 11 and what we should be doing about it. They have no political clout, no money, no powerful husbands-no husbands at all since Sept. 11-and they are up against a White House, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, a National Security Advisor and an F.B.I. director who have worked out an ingenious bait-and-switch game to thwart their efforts and those of any investigative body.

The Mom Cell

The four moms-Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken-use tactics more like those of a leaderless cell. They have learned how to deposit their assorted seven children with select grandmothers before dawn and rocket down the Garden State Parkway to Washington. They have become experts at changing out of pedal-pushers and into proper pantsuits while their S.U.V. is stopped in traffic, so they can hit the Capitol rotunda running. They have talked strategy with Senator John McCain and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. They once caught Congressman Porter Goss hiding behind his office door to avoid them. And they maintain an open line of communication with the White House.

But after the razzle-dazzle of their every trip to D.C., the four moms dissolve on the hot seats of Kristen's S.U.V., balance take-out food containers on their laps and grow quiet. Each then retreats into a private chamber of longing for the men whose lifeless images they wear on tags around their necks. After their first big rally, Patty's soft voice floated a wish that might have been in the minds of all four moms:

"O.K., we did the rally, now can our husbands come home?"

Last September, Kristen was singled out by the families of 9/11 to testify in the first televised public hearing before the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) in Washington. She drew high praise from the leadership, made up of members from both the House and Senate. But the JICI, as the moms called it, was mandated to go out of business at the end of 2003, and their questions for the intelligence agencies were consistently blocked: The Justice Department has forbidden intelligence officials to be interviewed without "minders" among their bosses being present, a tactic clearly meant to intimidate witnesses. When the White House and the intelligence agencies held up the Congressional report month after month by demanding that much of it remain classified, the moms' rallying cry became "Free the JICI!"

They believed the only hope for getting at the truth would be with an independent federal commission with a mandate to build on the findings of the Congressional inquiry and broaden it to include testimony from all the other relevant agencies. Their fight finally overcame the directive by Vice President Dick Cheney to Congressman Goss to "keep negotiating" and, in January 2003, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States-known as the 9/11 Commission-met for the first time. It is not only for their peace of mind that the four moms continue to fight to reveal the truth, but because they firmly believe that, nearly two years after the attacks, the country is no safer now than it was on Sept. 11.

"O.K., there's the House and the Senate-which one has the most members?"

Lorie laughed at herself. It was April 2002, seven months after she had lost her husband, Kenneth. "I must have slept through that civics class." Her friend Mindy couldn't help her; Mindy hadn't read The New York Times since she stopped commuting to Manhattan, where she'd worked as a C.P.A. until her husband, Alan, took over the family support. Both women's husbands had worked as securities traders for Cantor Fitzgerald until they were incinerated in the World Trade Center.

Mindy and Lorie had thought themselves exempt from politics, by virtue of the constant emergency of motherhood. Before Sept. 11, Mindy could have been described as a stand-in for Samantha on Sex and the City . But these days she felt more like one of the Golden Girls . Lorie, who was 46 and beautiful when her husband, Kenneth van Auken, was murdered, has acquired a fierceness in her demeanor. The two mothers were driving home to East Brunswick after attending a support group for widows of 9/11. They had been fired up by a veteran survivor of a previous terrorist attack against Americans, Bob Monetti, president of Families of Pan Am 103/Lockerbie. "You can't sit back and let the government treat you like shit," he had challenged them. That very night they called up Patty Casazza, another Cantor Fitzgerald widow, in Colt's Neck. "We have to have a rally in Washington."

Patty, a sensitive woman who was struggling to find the right balance of prescriptions to fight off anxiety attacks, groaned, "Oh God, this is huge, and it's going to be painful." Patty said she would only go along if Kristen was up for it.

Kristen Breitweiser was only 30 years old when her husband, Ron, a vice president at Fiduciary Trust, called her one morning to say he was fine, not to worry. He had seen a huge fireball out his window, but it wasn't his building. She tuned into the Today show just in time to see the South Tower explode right where she knew he was sitting-on the 94th floor. For months thereafter, finding it impossible to sleep, Kristen went back to the nightly ritual of her married life: She took out her husband's toothbrush and slowly, lovingly squeezed the toothpaste onto it. Then she would sit down on the toilet and wait for him to come home.

The Investigation

Kristen was somewhat better-informed than the others. The tall, blond former surfer girl had graduated from Seton Hall law school, practiced all of three days, hated it and elected to be a full-time mom. Her first line of defense against despair at the shattering of her life dreams was to revert to thinking like a lawyer.

Lorie was the network's designated researcher, since she had in her basement what looked like a NASA command module; her husband had been an amateur designer. Kristen had told her to focus on the timeline: Who knew what, when did they know it, and what did they do about it?

Once Lorie began surfing the Web, she couldn't stop. She found a video of President Bush's reaction on the morning of Sept. 11. According to the official timeline provided by his press secretary, the President arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., at 9 a.m. and was told in the hallway of the school that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. This was 14 minutes after the first attack. The President went into a private room and spoke by phone with his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room. "That's some bad pilot," the President said. Bush then proceeded to a classroom, where he drew up a little stool to listen to second graders read. At 9:04 a.m., his chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered in his ear that a second plane had struck the towers. "We are under attack," Mr. Card informed the President.

"Bush's sunny countenance went grim," said the White House account. "After Card's whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second graders read and soon was smiling again. He joked that they read so well, they must be sixth graders."

Lorie checked the Web site of the Federal Aviation Authority. The F.A.A. and the Secret Service, which had an open phone connection, both knew at 8:20 a.m. that two planes had been hijacked in the New York area and had their transponders turned off. How could they have thought it was an accident when the first plane slammed into the first tower 26 minutes later? How could the President have dismissed this as merely an accident by a "bad pilot"? And how, after he had been specifically told by his chief of staff that "We are under attack," could the Commander in Chief continue sitting with second graders and make a joke? Lorie ran the video over and over.

"I couldn't stop watching the President sitting there, listening to second graders, while my husband was burning in a building," she said.

Mindy pieced together the actions of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He had been in his Washington office engaged in his "usual intelligence briefing." After being informed of the two attacks on the World Trade Center, he proceeded with his briefing until the third hijacked plane struck the Pentagon. Mindy relayed the information to Kristen:

"Can you believe this? Two planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York City did not rise to the level of Rumsfeld's leaving his office and going to the war room to check out just what the hell went wrong." Mindy sounded scared. "This is my President. This is my Secretary of Defense. You mean to tell me Rumsfeld had to get up from his desk and look out his window at the burning Pentagon before he knew anything was wrong? How can that be?"

"It can't be," said Kristen ominously. Their network being a continuous loop, Kristen immediately passed on the news to Lorie, who became even more agitated.

Lorie checked out the North American Aerospace Defense Command, whose specific mission includes a response to any form of an air attack on America. It was created to provide a defense of critical command-and-control targets. At 8:40 a.m. on 9/11, the F.A.A. notified NORAD that Flight No. 11 had been hijacked. Three minutes later, the F.A.A. notified NORAD that Flight No. 175 was also hijacked. By 9:02 a.m., both planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, but there had been no action by NORAD. Both agencies also knew there were two other hijacked planes in the air that had been violently diverted from their flight pattern. All other air traffic had been ordered grounded. NORAD operates out of Andrews Air Force Base, which is within sight of the Pentagon. Why didn't NORAD scramble planes in time to intercept the two other hijacked jetliners headed for command-and-control centers in Washington? Lorie wanted to know. Where was the leadership?

"I can't look at these timelines anymore," Lorie confessed to Kristen. "When you pull it apart, it just doesn't reconcile with the official storyline." She hunched down in her husband's swivel chair and began to tremble, thinking, There's no way this could be. Somebody is not telling us the whole story.

The Commission

The 9/11 Commission wouldn't have happened without the four moms. At the end of its first open hearing, held last spring at the U.S. Customs House close to the construction pit of Ground Zero, former Democratic Congressman Tim Roemer said as much and praised them and other activist 9/11 families.

"At a time when many Americans don't even take the opportunity to cast a ballot, you folks went out and made the legislative system work," he said.

Jamie Gorelick, former Deputy Attorney General of the United States, said at the same hearing, "I'm enormously impressed that laypeople with no powers of subpoena, with no access to insider information of any sort, could put together a very powerful set of questions and set of facts that are a road map for this commission. It is really quite striking. Now, what's your secret?"

Mindy, who had given a blistering testimony at that day's hearing, tossed her long corkscrew curls and replied in a voice more Tallulah than termagant, "Eighteen months of doing nothing but grieving and connecting the dots."

Eleanor Hill, the universally respected staff director of the JICI investigation, shares the moms' point of view.

"One of our biggest concerns is our finding that there were people in this country assisting these hijackers," she said later in an interview with this writer. "Since the F.B.I. was in fact investigating all these people as part of their counterterroism effort, and they knew some of them had ties to Al Qaeda, then how good was their investigation if they didn't come across the hijackers?"

President Bush, who was notified in the President's daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, that "a group of [Osama] bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives," insisted after the Congressional report was made public: "My administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks."

Kristen, Mindy, Patty and Lorie are not impressed.

"We were told that, prior to 9/11, the F.B.I. was only responsible for going in after the fact to solve a crime and prepare a criminal case," Kristen said. "Here we are, 22 months after the fact, the F.B.I. has received some 500,000 leads, they have thousands of people in custody, they're seeking the death penalty for one terrorist, [Zacarias] Moussaoui, but they still haven't solved the crime and they don't have any of the other people who supported the hijackers." Ms. Hill echoes their frustration. "Is this support network for Al Qaeda still in the United States? Are they still operating, planning the next attack?"

Civil Defense

The hopes of the four moms that the current 9/11 Commission could broaden the inquiry beyond the intelligence agencies are beginning to fade. As they see it, the administration is using a streamlined version of the tactics they successfully employed to stall and suppress much of the startling information in the JICI report. The gaping hole of 28 pages concerning the Saudi royal family's financial support for the terrorists of 9/11 was only the tip of the 900-page iceberg.

"We can't get any information about the Port Authority's evacuation procedures or the response of the City of New York," complains Kristen. "We're always told we can't get answers or documents because the F.B.I. is holding them back as part of an ongoing investigation. But when Director Mueller invited us back for a follow-up meeting-on the very morning before that damning report was released-we were told the F.B.I. isn't pursuing any investigations based on the information we are blocked from getting. The only thing they are looking at is the hijackers. And they're all dead."

It's more than a clever Catch-22. Members of the 9/11 Commission are being denied access even to some of the testimony given to the JICI-on which at least two of its members sat!

This is a stonewalling job of far greater importance than Watergate. This concerns the refusal of the country's leadership to be held accountable for the failure to execute its most fundamental responsibility: to protect its citizens against foreign attack.

Critical information about two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lay dormant within the intelligence community for as long as 18 months, at the very time when plans for the Sept. 11 attacks were being hatched. The JICI confirmed that these same two hijackers had numerous contacts with a longtime F.B.I. counterterrorism informant in California. As the four moms pointed out a year ago, their names were in the San Diego phone book.

What's more, the F.B.I.'s Minneapolis field office had in custody in August 2001 one Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national who had enrolled in flight training in Minnesota and who F.B.I. agents suspected was involved in a hijacking plot. But nobody at the F.B.I. apparently connected the Moussaoui investigation with intelligence information on the immediacy of the threat level in the spring and summer of 2001, or the illegal entry of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi into the United States.

How have these lapses been corrected 24 months later? The F.B.I. is seeking the death penalty for Mr. Moussaoui, and uses the need to protect their case against him as the rationale for refusing to share any of the information they have obtained from him. In fact, when Director Mueller tried to use the same excuse to duck out of testifying before the Joint Committee, the federal judge in the Moussaoui trial dismissed his argument, and he and his agents were compelled to testify.

"At some point, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis," says Kristen. "Which is more important-one fried terrorist, or the safety of the nation?" Patty was even more blunt in their second meeting with the F.B.I. brass. "I don't give a rat's ass about Moussaoui," she said. "Why don't you throw him into Guantánamo and squeeze him for all he's worth, and get on with finding his cohorts?"

The four moms are demanding that the independent commission hold a completely transparent investigation, with open hearings and cross-examination. What it looks like they'll get is an incomplete and sanitized report, if it's released in time for the commission's deadline next May. Or perhaps another fight over declassification of the most potent revelations, which will serve to hold up the report until after the 2004 Presidential election. Some believe that this is the administration's end game.

Kristen sees the handwriting on the wall: "If we have an executive branch that holds sole discretion over what information is released to the public and what is hidden, the public will never get the full story of why there was an utter failure to protect them that day, and who should be held accountable."