Rice, under review

A local woman attended Thursday's hearing.
& lt;a href=mailto:milliken@vindy.com & gt;By PETER MILLIKEN & lt;/a & gt;
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
Some family members of Sept. 11 victims with ties to the Mahoning and Shenango valleys characterized Condoleezza Rice as evasive, long-winded, nervous or combative in her testimony before an independent commission, but a Grove City woman said Rice was calm under fire.
"I thought she was a very good evader. She evaded a lot of questions with her long answers," said John Koborie of Sharon, whose daughter, Rebecca, 48, an executive secretary on the 97th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower, died in the 2001 terrorist attacks. The national security adviser avoided giving outright yes or no answers, he said Thursday.
"I didn't hear anything that would impress me too much, one way or another," he said. "I'm not at all impressed with anybody's answers at the present time. I know for a fact that somebody goofed. Blaming somebody now is not going to do us any good at all.
"The fact that they didn't prevent it and caused the deaths of 3,000 people -- to me, that's a very big letdown by our government," Koborie continued. "Regardless of what they say, they are responsible for it.
"The CIA and the FBI should have been up on all of this, and they should have followed these thugs all over the country because they knew that these people were learning to fly airplanes in mid-air, not to land them and not to take off."
Koborie was referring to Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected terrorist who immigration authorities arrested on a passport violation Aug. 17, 2001, after he allegedly told officials of a Minnesota flight school he wanted to learn to steer jets, not land them.
"Somebody should have been smart enough to realize that these people were up to something no good," Koborie said.
Koborie's wife, Julianne, said she watched all three hours of Rice's testimony. "She didn't say any more than we already knew about it," she said. Although Rice seemed knowledgeable and intelligent, she said, "I still have the feeling that they didn't do enough with the information they had" in advance of the attacks.
Similar feelings
Jackie Lynch of Poland, widow of Terry Lynch, 49, who was killed in the attack on the Pentagon, voiced similar feelings:
"I wasn't impressed. I thought she was really nervous, and she put herself into that position by not being willing to testify when the families had asked her to do it. I think the Bush administration put her in a terrible position.
"She was scared to death, and you could see it in her," Lynch said, adding that the partisan divide between Republican and Democratic commissioners was apparent during the hearing. "The families had been so angry. The press had eaten her up alive," Lynch said, explaining why she thought Rice was afraid.
"I thought she was kind of combative," Lynch observed. "This administration really hung themselves, and the families want answers and they want apologies, and they're not getting them."
The only new information Lynch said she obtained during Rice's testimony was that there had been a meeting at which national security experts discussed Al-Qaida in July 2001. Lynch noted that her husband, a consultant, had worked with Democratic commission member Bob Kerrey when Kerrey was a Nebraska senator and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
'Reluctance'
"I was struck by her reluctance to take on any responsibility for the government failures that happened on Sept. 11," said Mary Fetchet, a former Youngstown resident and mother of Brad Fetchet, 25, an investment broker who died at the WTC, where he worked on the 89th floor of the South Tower.
"My son was in the second building and certainly had enough time to escape," Fetchet said, noting that Port Authority officials told him to stay in the building after the other tower had been hit. Some 600 to 700 people in the South Tower died as a result of those instructions, she said.
"It seemed like her opening statement was really a party line report of their reaction after Sept. 11. The commission should be focused on what led up to and occurred on Sept. 11. And every government agency failed to protect our country," Fetchet said from her New Canaan, Conn., home after returning from attending Thursday's Washington hearing.
Fetchet founded the advocacy group, Voices of Sept. 11, which campaigned for establishment of the independent 9/11 commission and is now working on plans for the WTC Memorial. She is also a member of the commission's family steering committee.
She said Thursday's hearing seemed partisan. "It seemed like the Democrats were really the ones that were asking the pointed questions, and that wasn't the case with the Republicans. We were in favor of a bipartisan commission," she said.
'Wonderful job'
Alice Ketler of Grove City, the aunt of Ruth Ketler, 43, who was killed in the South Tower of the WTC where she worked on the top floor, saw it differently.
"I really thought she did a wonderful job," she said. "They invited her there, and then they wouldn't let her even answer the questions that they asked. I was very disturbed by the way some of them kept interrupting her.
"I thought she did a terrific job under a great deal of pressure," Alice Ketler said. "She could have become very rattled with the way [some commission members] attacked her verbally, but she kept her composure and she kept her thoughts in order. She wasn't sidetracked."
She agreed, though, that relatively little new information was revealed.
"You can always try to find somebody to blame, but I don't think anybody could have done anything. It was one of those situations that took us all by surprise," Ketler said. However, she agreed with Rice that it would have been a good idea in the years before 9/11 to make airline cockpits more secure.
Staying out of it
James Reszke, a former Austintown resident whose wife, Martha, 56, was killed at the Pentagon, where she was a budget analyst, had little to say about Thursday's hearing.
"I'm not really that interested in what's going on, said Reszke, who lives in Stafford, Va. "My whole way of dealing with it is not to get involved in it. The more you get involved in it, the harder it is on you," he said.
Reszke said he didn't hear or watch Rice's live testimony, but watched a brief TV news account of it later in the day.
"There's nothing that can bring anybody back," regardless of what the administration knew or didn't know in advance of the attacks, he said. "I had no reason to sit there and listen to it and watch it because all it would do is tick me off."