‘No one ever asked him ... about al-Qaida’

Osama bin Laden just never came up.

“We had just come off of a presidential campaign, where, as you know, you and your colleagues had asked my boss every conceivable question,” said Karen Hughes, a senior counselor to George W. Bush, who had been president for less than eight months on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I thought every question imaginable had been asked of him during the 18 months on the presidential campaign,” she said. “No one ever asked him, that I remember, about al-Qaida. No one.”

Hughes was one of many former and current political figures who agreed to relive the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 in interviews with the MSNBC-TV program “Hardball.” Like everyone else, she recalled being frightened, angry and energized — sharing the “shock, disbelief, anger [and] grave, grave concern about what was going to happen next,” as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., characterized the emotions of those days.

Hughes also remembers being anxious about the new team’s capacity to respond.

“Here we were at war against al-Qaida, going into Afghanistan, and yet he’d never really been asked about all that,” Hughes said. “... I remember just feeling so responsible. It was because, you know, we were still pretty new.”

Word to the family: ‘I’m OK’
Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was in Peru for a summit of the Organization of American States when news of the attacks reached him.

There was so much to do. He dived into getting the latest intelligence and relaying it to his fellow OAS members, from whom he was able to win a unanimous statement of support.

FREE VIDEO An uncomfortably familiar sensation Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, remembers being hustled to safety after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was something she had drilled for many times, she says in an interview with MSNBC’s “Hardball.” NBC News

But it wasn’t until he was finally on his way back home from Peru that the enormity of the attacks sank in for Powell.

“I’m racing back to Washington. I have my own family — my wife is in McLean, Virginia, and my two daughters were in New York,” he said.

“And it was only when my security people came up to me on the plane halfway home and said to me, ‘We have got your daughters moved to a secure location,’ that it dawned on me that there might have been something else happening in New York. That it was not just planes flying into the World Trade Center — there could have been a bigger plot that we didn’t know about. And my security people had already thought of this and moved my daughters to another location.”

Family, sooner or later, was on everyone’s mind.

“I had the momentary clarity to call my family and say: ‘I’m OK. You’re going to see a lot of things, but I’m OK,’” said Condoleezza Rice, Powell’s successor as secretary of state. She was Bush’s national security adviser on Sept. 11, 2001.

Powell, a retired Army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told “Hardball” host Chris Matthews: “To look out my window at the State Department once I got back home, look across the river, I could still see the Pentagon smolder — a place that I spent many years of my life in. I knew every wing, every corridor of that building.”

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