With Rudy Giuliani at his side the other day in Denver, former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele declared that Barack Obama lacked the homeland security cred to be president. While he was at it, Steele showed off his own loose grasp of the subject.
"We need a president who's prepared to deal with enemies both abroad and at home," Steele said at a news conference meant to rain a little on the Dems' parade. "And I take that last point very seriously because as lieutenant governor of my state, the first briefing I got two days after I assumed the office with the governor was a homeland security briefing in which I found out at that time that part of the al-Qaida operation that attacked the twin towers in New York, flew into that field in Pennsylvania and flew into the Pentagon a short distance from my home also lived in my state, in the town of Laurel, for up to two years before the attacks."
Two years?
News accounts immediately after the attacks and the official Sept. 11 commission report issued years later all told a different story: that some of the terrorists stayed in Laurel right before Sept. 11, but only for a short time. Does Steele know something we don't?
"He is completely wrong," said Dietrich Snell, who served as senior counsel to the Sept. 11 commission (officially, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States). "He's totally wrong."
Some of the terrorists - the group that hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 after takeoff from Dulles - did pass through Laurel, lodging at the Pin-Del and Valencia motels and working out at a local gym. But that should hardly have been a revelation to Steele by the time he took office in January 2003. The terrorists' Laurel connection was widely reported within days of the attacks.
And their stay was not anywhere near two years, according to the commission's report, which first mentions Laurel under the heading, "The Final Days." It says they gathered in Laurel in the first week of September and stayed there until the night before the attacks, when they moved to a hotel in Herndon, Va., near Dulles.
"More like two weeks," said Snell, a former New York deputy attorney general now in private practice in New York. "It's a very complicated path that they all had, but a lot of them didn't even arrive in the country until the spring and summer of 2001. And they didn't go straight to Laurel, any of them."
