A British documentary on the Al-Qaeda aerial 9/11 terrorist attacks nine years ago reveals that Condoleezza Rice hung up the phone on President George W. Bush after he refused to listen to her orders to stay put and not return to Washington.
The British Channel 4 program also reports that so many top officials were huddled in an underground bunker that they almost ran out of oxygen, according to the The London Daily Mirror, which previewed the documentary to be is be aired Monday night.
Rice was National Security Advisor at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York and on the Pentagon. Another plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania before the suicide terrorists could guide it to a target, probably the White House. After the crash, Rice and other officials thought it had been shot down.
Bush insisted on returning from the south, where he was visiting at the time of the attacks. ”You cannot come back here,” she told the president. "The United States of America is under attack; you have to go to safety. We don't know what is going on here.”
When he argued with her, she raised her voice and said, 'You cannot come back here” and hung up the phone. She told Channel 4, “I had never raised my voice to the President before.”
In Washington, so many officials crowded together in a bunker that “the oxygen levels started dropping and the secret service came in telling people they weren't essential and to leave,” she revealed.
Another foul-up was that a government communications system did not operate properly, forcing Bush to use an unsecured line to Washington.