SMH : Right sets attack dogs on Jersey Girl widows

Right sets attack dogs on Jersey Girl widows

Paul McGeough | Chief Herald Correspondent in New York | September 9, 2006

THE angel-faced Kristen Breitweiser had it all. She hung out in the bars on the beaches of New Jersey. She did the law degree - but did not need to practise. She eloped and married on a tiny Caribbean beach.

So how did a poster child for a privileged version of the American dream become one of the Witches of East Brunswick?

After she married and settled down, her husband, Ron, knew best. She always said she would read the pieces he marked in The Wall Street Journal but, in truth, she was obsessed with home decorating and did not go much beyond the lifestyle pages.

Fast forward to April 2004, and Breitweiser is being shredded on the opinion page of Ron's beloved Journal. Media-savvy friends explain it is a measure of how she is perceived as a threat to be reckoned with by dark forces in Washington.

Just a few weeks ago she faced a full-frontal assault in a new book by the so-called Queen of Mean, the radical right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, who labelled Breitweiser a witch.

Americans warmed to Breitweiser and three other September 11, 2001, widows. They were dubbed "the Jersey Girls" as they campaigned for the US equivalent of a royal commission into the al-Qaeda attacks on Washington and New York.

There were shades of Thelma and Louise as they wore a path to the capital, finding the courage to stare down the President, George Bush; Vice-President, Dick Cheney; and Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. They demanded an explanation of the failures that allowed their husbands to be incinerated in the World Trade Centre.

Breitweiser's four-wheel-drive became the "widowmobile". Each had her favourite seat for the long drive from their homes in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Breitweiser and Mindy Kleinberg were always up front, and Patty Casazza and Lorie Van Auken in the back. They would arrive in DC with their personal anthem blaring on the stereo - Diana Ross's Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

The widows' success in provoking an inquiry that criticised the CIA, the FBI and successive presidential administrations has infuriated Coulter, a mouthpiece for the neo-conservatives.

Coulter's book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, with a print run of 1 million, mounts a ferocious attack on the Jersey widows: "These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and [they act] as if [it] only happened to them."

"These broads are millionaires … I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much [and] how do we know [the] husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy."

For some, it was just another measure of how low and vicious Coulter can be when it comes to selling her books. But for many, she had just used her savage tongue to mark out the breadth of the political divide in George Bush's America.

Breitweiser personifies a majority US viewpoint that now sees the Iraq war as a misguided and unwinnable conflict that is burning up funds and resources that could be better directed towards upgrading domestic security to ensure that September 11 is not repeated.

She told the Herald this week: "It breaks my heart when people talk of the war in Iraq as vengeance for my husband's death. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but we still have FBI computers that don't work - one of the reasons for 9/11 was our failure to join the dots and the FBI has spent $US170 million on new software and they still can't do it."

Ron Breitweiser's office was on the 94th floor of the World Trade Centre south tower. On the morning of September 11 he called just after the first strike, on the north tower. He assured his wife that he was safe, but she turned on the TV and within minutes she watched a huge fireball consume the top of the south tower.

The weeks that followed were numbing. But as the process of compensation was explained to families, Breitweiser's untried legal training kicked in and she wondered: if the families signed away their right to legal action as part of any compensation settlement, how would there ever be a proper public examination of what had gone wrong?

Clearly, September 11 was an attack instigated by foreign terrorists. But what mistakes by American agencies had made them possible? Or had made the outcome worse than it needed to be? She became fixated on the extent to which both government and business accepted lax security for the simple reason that the risk of actions for negligence was cheaper than doing all that was expected of them.

She met the other three widows in the aftermath of the attacks and they bonded in phone calls that went into the early hours of the morning - when they could cry without distressing their children.

In her own book, Wake-Up Call, Breitweiser writes: "If the Government took away our right to sue and to hold people accountable in a court of law, then we wanted accountability through an exhaustive [public] investigation."

They wanted to know more about the CIA's role in flying members of the bin Laden family out of the US in the days after the attacks; why workers in the towers were ordered to stay at their desks after the strikes; they wanted to know how the attacks had been executed when US intelligence agencies seemed to know so much about the attackers.

Describing Cheney as "the principal attack dog" in opposing calls for an inquiry, she writes: "I couldn't help but wonder what Ron would be thinking. He venerated [him, but Cheney] had been a big fat stumbling block from day one … He was the puppeteer pulling strings in the background."

The widows fought, and won, on the principles of the inquiry's independence and its right to summons witnesses and documents. And then they went head to head with the White House's first candidate as head of the investigation - the fabled Henry Kissinger. The veteran Republican warrior and contemporary Washington lobbyist invited the Jersey Girls to his office for coffee, over which he was somewhat taken aback when they demanded to see his client list, to ensure that there was no conflict of interest.

Breitweiser writes: "Kissinger told us to trust him. We told him we couldn't … Kissinger seemed stunned … He didn't understand the fuss about his client list - they were all reputable people, he said.

"Kissinger seemed stricken and became unsteady. In reaching for his cup of coffee he bobbled, knocked the pot, spilled his own cup and nearly fell off the couch." Kissinger never answered their question and the next day he resigned from the chairmanship of the September 11 commission.

Bush refused to meet the widows. And when they thought they might get to him with an approach to the first lady, she didn't even reply. But in the end, Bush gave evidence - even if it was in private and with Cheney by his side. Rice, too, was made to take the stand.

The commission became a warts-and-all examination of the failings and shortcomings of the US intelligence services and other agencies that responded to or might have prevented the September 11 attacks. Its voluminous findings - including recommendations for an overhaul of the intelligence services - vindicated the stand taken by the widows.

Throughout, Breitweiser was also going through the brutal process of adapting to widowhood and her new status as a "single mom".

The first police visit came about a month after the attacks - a wedding ring engraved with Ron Breitweiser's name and the date of their engagement had been recovered at ground zero. Like so many others, she could not accept the finality.

In January last year, she and her seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, were making a new start, moving into an apartment in Manhattan when the friend who had acted as an intermediary with the authorities called again: "More of Ron's body parts [have been] recovered."

She writes: "It was Ron's right arm, from the shoulder on down, with his hand and fingers intact".

The shock prompted a conference call, during which the other three Jersey Girls stayed on the line as Breitweiser called the medical examiner. She explains: "[They] had lost his right arm in the freezer for three years."

What can you say after an exchange like that? Patty, one of the back-seat passengers in the widowmobile, filled the void by resorting to the black humour that often sustained them. This was Ron's way of "sending a helping hand" on the day that Kristen and Caroline were moving house, she said.

Breitweiser still worries when she thinks about the carefree world in which she was reared and the very different country in which her daughter is growing up.

Publishing schedules can be merciless, but Breitweiser had the good fortune to be able to squeeze an open letter to Ann Coulter into the last seven pages of Wake-Up Call. It begins: "Dear Ann: But for the murder of our husbands on 9/11, we would not have gone to Washington …"