FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, THE WHITE HOUSE STONEWALLED THE MILD-MANNERED CHAIRMAN OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION. BIG MISTAKE.

Would you pretend for a minute that I’m the president?”

Tom Kean didn’t laugh. He recognized the voice of Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff. Card said the president needed to replace Henry Kissinger, the chairman of the 9/11 commission who was resigning, just days after being appointed, amid conflict-of-interest allegations. “Would you do it?” Card asked.

“Yup.”

With that one word, the web of denial and deception that surrounded the colossal failure of the nation’s leadership to defend America against a terrorist attack began to come apart.

For if Bush had expected Kean-the former Republican governor of New Jersey and, like Bush, the scion of an East Coast patrician family-to provide cover for the White House, he was in for a surprise. “Some people mistake his good manners for weakness,” says Al Felzenberg, the commission’s spokesman, who has known Kean for more than 30 years. Kean proved to be everything that Kissinger wasn’t: committed to openness, determined to pry out the administration’s secrets, and, most of all, willing to learn, from the weight of the evidence, that the White House version of 9/11-that “everyone was at fault, so no one was at fault”-was patently false. Under Kean’s leadership, the commission excavated enough truths to flood bookstores and computer browsers with a scorching 500-page report that lays bare the shocking lack of preparedness on the part of America’s leaders to protect the nation against foreign attack. “They stood up to the administration when the Bush folks were about to submarine them,” says Senator Bob Graham, who chaired an earlier congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Kean has a simple explanation for why he took his mission to heart: He’s from New Jersey. The state lost 691 residents on 9/11, one-quarter of all the victims in the World Trade Center. Several of Kean’s friends were killed; his tennis partner of 20 years was on United Flight 93, the plane that would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol had the passengers not wrestled the hijackers to the ground. As Kean would learn in the course of the hearings, it was an act of courage and common sense not displayed by anyone in the nation’s leadership that day.

Three weeks after 9/11, Tom Kean had risen to the pulpit at a memorial mass at the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “I remember looking out and seeing women holding infants who’d been born after their husbands were killed in the towers, and others who were pregnant,” he recalls. “It was so emotionally overwhelming, I almost couldn’t speak.”

Within a week of agreeing to chair the commission, he met with representatives of the families, including the four widowed “Jersey Girls” who had pushed relentlessly for an independent investigation, and who had personally grilled Kissinger about his refusal to disclose his list of foreign clients. They had one urgent plea, Kean says: “It’s got to be transparent. Don’t just go and hide in a dark room. You’ve got to share everything with the American people. I said, ‘We will.’”

He was true to his word. In 12 public hearings over a period of 15 months, the country’s political leaders and intelligence chiefs were called to account and bureaucrats fumbled for excuses. And the whole spectacle was televised-even as the administration tried everything in its power to kill off, tie up, delay, and ignore the commission’s search for the facts.

At the conclusion of the hearings, in late June, Kean agreed to a lengthy interview on the triumphs and regrets of his chairmanship. He had grown accustomed to seeing me at the hearings, which I had covered for Pacifica Radio. To talk, Kean had to step out of a Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility, a secret vault in the Capitol building, where he was poring over classified documents in preparation for the final report. He had spent much of the last year taking six-hour round-trips by train from his home near New Jersey’s horse country to sit in these inner sanctums, where neither tape recorders nor cell phones may be used, and where even the notes he took had to be left behind in a safe. His long, lean frame seemed to bear a weight that hadn’t been there when the commission’s work began. His gap-toothed smile had grown a little more wan. He was appalled at the poisonous partisanship of Washington: “It’s worse than it’s ever been, he says,” putting the best face on a process even he admits was frustrating, “There’s a lot wrong with the country. But while I was sitting in the Oval Office”-during the single interview Bush finally agreed to do, but only off the record and only with DickCheney at his side-”I thought to myself: Where else in the world could private citizens, half of them not in the same party, grill the president?”

What Kean-who seems congenitally unable to be confrontational-didn’t say is that he had to shame the president into sitting for even that brief session. For months, Bush had shown disrespect, if not outright contempt, for the investigation, refusing to turn over documents that included crucial briefings given to him on the Al Qaeda threat in the summer of 2001. When Kean and two other commissioners were finally allowed a glimpse of selected briefings, they were not permitted to copy or transcribe them, only to take notes that were reviewed by the White House.

Being treated like a pesky underling clearly did not sit well with Kean, but he kept his frustration to himself. When Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, and the president refused to testify, he didn’t subpoena them; instead, he repeated week after week that “I’m hopeful they’ll make the right decision.” And when Rice finally did appear, commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste maneuvered her into giving up the title of the seminal CIA briefing written for the president on August 6, 2001, five weeks before the attacks: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S.” That settled the question of whether the president had been warned; as public pressure increased, the administration was forced to release the entire document.

Yet Kean’s diplomatic nature cut both ways. He agreed to water down some staff reports critical of the White House and backed away from following up on the question of foreign financing of the hijackers. Senator Graham was worried that the final report would gloss over the crucial issue of a radical Islamic network-inside the United States and funded by Saudi Arabia. “I believe that support network is still in place and preparing to facilitate the next attack,” he told me, noting that the redacted pages in his committee’s report contained evidence of foreign financing for 2 of the 19 hijackers. “My contention is that significant support was being given to all 19,” he said, “but the FBI was not interested in answering that question for our inquiry.”

And the Kean commission’s staff statement blandly concluded, “We found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al Qaeda.” (Kean is a member of the board of Amerada Hess, an oil company that does business in Saudi Arabia.)

“I think [Kean] understood that he had a limited amount of political currency to spend and spent it wisely,” says Jamie Gorelick, one of the commission’s five Democratic members and a formidable question- er. But, she notes, “when we really needed to say, ‘We have to have this information and have it now,’ he would come through for us.”

On the surface, Kean and Bush have much in common. Both come from privileged backgrounds; Kean’s father and Bush’s grandfather served together in Congress. Kean is a genuine East Coast aristocrat whose ancestry tracks back to one of New Jersey’s first families-”or second, or third,” he says with a chuckle. Both he and Bush battled dyslexia and were dismal students, but privilege got them into Ivy League colleges, where they did well enough. Kean graduated from Princeton and studied to be a teacher at Columbia Teacher’s College. By the time the White House called, he had been out of politics for almost 15 years. He had turned down offers of Cabinet positions from presidents of both parties-George H.W. Bush and Clinton-and had resisted calls by the GOP to run for the Senate after his two terms as governor in the 1980s. For more than a decade, he had been tucked away in the hills of north Jersey as president of a small liberal arts college, Drew University, content to teach history, serve on tame presidential commissions on youth and women, and play lots of tennis.

For much of the commission’s first year, Kean kept a low profile. But in December 2003 his attitude began to shift. The commission had discovered that even though the administration insisted that no one could have imagined terrorists using planes as missiles, the government had picked up warnings of precisely such plots since at least 1991. Investigators had also confirmed that as early as 1999, the nation’s intelligence apparatus had identified three of the future hijackers as “notorious” terrorists connected to an Al Qaeda “operational cadre,” and yet had allowed them to enter the country, rent an apartment in San Diego from an FBI informant, and ultimately board the plane they would crash into the Pentagon even after they had set off airport metal detectors.

Kean was getting angry-and worried that the government was not doing enough to prevent another attack. On December 3, he told CBS that “I do not believe [9/11] had to happen.” He added: “There are people that, if I was doing the job, certainly would not be in the position that they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed.”

It was a statement the White House never expected to hear from Tom Kean. A Bush spokesman promptly shot back: “There is nothing that we have seen that leads us to believe September 11th could have been prevented.” But Kean never backed off.

Kean is haunted by what he has learned, down to the minutiae. He can recite like the birthdays of his children the precise times when the nation’s air-security apparatus picked up signs of disaster on each of the four planes. He struggles with the knowledge that had the airlines and the government responded in time, at least one of the planes-Flight 93, the one carrying his friend-could have, and should have, been saved. He runs through the evidence once more: By 8:24 that morning, before any of the planes had crashed, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Secret Service knew that Middle Eastern men had hijacked more than one plane. “But,” notes Kean, “neither the American Airlines nor the United Airlines crisis centers, nor the FAA crisis center, think to issue a general warning to all airplanes: ‘Watch out, cockpit security-multiple hijackings.’”

It’s precisely the kind of detail some of the 9/11 families were hoping the commission would focus on. They were particularly anxious to see the commission produce a timeline of the actions and inactions of leaders including Bush, Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the morning of September 11-an analysis that might answer the question that consumed them: “Who knew what, when did they know it, and what did they do about it?”

But that detailed timeline never came.

Instead, the commission’s final report, released in July, was focused on “just the facts,” Joe Friday style; it didn’t include the more interpretive staff reports, or transcripts of witness interviews in which excuses were laid bare and secrets revealed. It was a way to avoid charges of partisanship, to preserve the commission’s unanimity, and, Senator Graham suggests, to limit censorship from the White House. “I’m sure they didn’t want the report combed over for months with lots of pages cut out,” he says, “the way ours was.” (For a more detailed analysis of the report, see www.motherjones. com/911).

The family members felt let down by the commission’s measured assessment, particularly its refusal to name names and lay blame. “Every time we asked a question about the total absolute failure in communication between the leaders of the country and the lead agencies that are supposed to protect us from attack,” two of the widows, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Aucken, told me after the final hearing, “the staffers would say the same thing: ‘The outcome wouldn’t have been any different if the leadership had gone from top down.’”

Yet the commission forced Americans to confront for the first time the ugly truths about 9/11. The report amplified the note Kean first sounded last December-that the tragedy could have been prevented, and that the blame went all the way to the top. The White House was left on the defensive, unable to refute damaging conclusions including the finding-which Cheney continued to refuse to accept-that there had been no collaboration between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Asked for his own assessment of the commission’s work, Kean is characteristically diplomatic. “We’re very grateful the president has said he’ll listen,” he says. “For a while, we were afraid we were going to be up against closed minds.” In public statements, he tends to accentuate the positive: “We are safer than we were-no question about it.”

Never mind that the commission unearthed a long list of evidence to the contrary: The administration has failed to over- haul security agencies that have been exposed as fatally flawed; spies, law enforcement investigators, and government analysts still aren’t prepared to fight a mobile, high-tech, global army of jihadists; and, except for CIA director George Tenet, not one of the leaders who failed to prevent the catastrophe has been pushed out.

It’s a troubling litany that Kean knows all too well. “I didn’t say we’re safe,” he qualifies. “I said safer.”

Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief opponents of investing real power over purse and personnel in a new national intelligence chief, told the 9/11 commission that an intelligence czar would do the nation “a great disservice.” It is fair to ask what kind of service Rumsfeld provided on the day the nation was under catastrophic attack.

“Two planes hitting the twin towers did not rise to the level of Rumsfeld’s leaving his office and going to the War Room? How can that be?” asked Mindy Kleinberg, one of the widows known as the Jersey Girls, whose efforts helped create and guide the 9/11 commission. The fact that the final report failed to offer an explanation is one of the infuriating holes in an otherwise praiseworthy accounting.

Rumsfeld was missing in action that morning - “out of the loop” by his own admission. The lead military officer that day, Brig. Gen. Montague Winfield, told the commission that the Pentagon’s command center had been essentially leaderless: “For 30 minutes we couldn’t find” Rumsfeld.

For more than two hours after the Federal Aviation Administration became aware that the first plane had been violently overtaken by Middle Eastern men, the man whose job it was to order air cover over Washington did not show up in the Pentagon’s command center. It took him almost two hours to “gain situational awareness,” he told the commission. He didn’t speak to the vice president until 10:39 a.m., according to the report. Since that was more than 30 minutes after the last hijacked plane crashed, it would seem to be an admission of dereliction of duty.

Rumsfeld’s testimony before the commission last March was bizarre. Asked point-blank by Commissioner Jamie Gorelick what he had done to protect the nation - or even the Pentagon - during the “summer of threat” preceding the attacks, Rumsfeld replied simply that “it was a law enforcement issue.” That obfuscation - was the FBI expected to be out on the Beltway with shoulder-launched missiles? - has been accepted at face value by the commission and media.

Rumsfeld is in charge of NORAD, which has the specific mission of protecting the United States and Canada by responding to any form of air attack. The official chain of command in the event of a hijacking calls for the president to empower the secretary of Defense to send up a military escort and, if necessary, give shoot-down orders.

Yet President Bush told the panel he spoke to Rumsfeld for the first time that morning shortly after 10 a.m. - 23 minutes after the Pentagon was hit and moments before the last plane went down. It was, says the report, “a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed.”
As a result, NORAD’s commanders were left in the dark about what their mission was. When fighters were told to scramble from Langley, Va., they were sent not to cover Washington but on a fool’s mission to tail and identify American Airlines Flight 11, which was already boiling the first Trade Center tower to the ground.

Why wasn’t Rumsfeld able to see on TV what millions of civilians already knew? After the Pentagon was attacked, why did he run outside to play medic instead of moving to the command center and taking charge? The 9/11 report records the fatal confusion in which command center personnel were left: Three minutes after the FAA command center told FAA headquarters in an update that Flight 93 was 29 minutes out of Washington, D.C., the command center said, “Uh, do we want to, uh, think about scrambling aircraft?”

FAA headquarters: “Oh, God, I don’t know.”

Command center: “Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s going to have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.”

But nobody did. Three minutes later, Flight 93 was wrestled to the ground by heroic civilians.

How is it that civilians in a hijacked plane were able to communicate with their loved ones, grasp a totally new kind of enemy and weaponry and act to defend the nation’s Capitol, yet the president had “communication problems” on Air Force One and the nation’s defense chief didn’t know what was going on until the horror was all over?

The failures of 9/11 were not inherent in the system; they were human failures. Yet, so far, no one has been fired, which leaves the 9/11 families - and all of us - in a conundrum.

The inaction of both the president and the Defense chief under the ultimate test offer little reassurance to a nervous nation under the shadow of new terror warnings. Before we attempt to revamp the entire security system, shouldn’t our government look first at why the people in charge failed to communicate or coordinate a response to the catastrophe?

In the predawn hours of Tuesday, March 23, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza dropped off their collective seven fatherless children with grandmothers and climbed into Ms. Breitweiser’s S.U.V. for the race down Garden State Parkway to the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. It’s a journey that they could now make blindfolded—but this one was different. On March 23, testimony was to be heard by the commission investigating intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others.

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.

You may reach Gail Sheehy via email at: gsheehy@observer.com.

This column ran on page 1 in the 3/29/2004 edition of The New York Observer.