Jersey Girls

This is about a group of American activists; for expressive works with similar titles, see Jersey Girl.

The Jersey Girls or Jersey Widows is an informal description of four American activist women. They are Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken, and Mindy Kleinberg, each, as of September 11, 2001, a resident of New Jersey and married to a man who died in the terrorist attacks that day.

Role in the establishment of the 9/11 Commission

Together with William Rodriguez, the Jersey Girls were instrumental in the creation of the 9/11 Commission. Matthew Purdy noted that "The commission grew largely out of pressure from families of victims, including four New Jersey widows who call themselves 'the Jersey Girls.' It's no mistake that the White House put New Jersey's most popular politician [Tom Kean] in charge." Kean became the Commission's Chairman after Henry Kissinger resigned the position; according to Peter Lance, "The Jersey Girls could take some of the credit for his hasty departure." Van Auken told Lance, "We were shocked. Kissinger had huge conflicts of interest -- major dealings with the Saudis... The day before he resigned, we had a meeting with him in his office in Manhattan. Kristen [Breitweiser] had done impeccable research. She'd looked up all of his companies. So I asked him, 'Mr. Kissinger, do you have any Saudi clients?' He mumbled something. And then he asked if someone would pour him some coffee. So then I said, 'Do you happen to have any clients by the name of bin Laden? He almost fell off the couch." A few months before the Commission released its report, Kean said that the Jersey Girls "call me all the time. They monitor us, they follow our progress, they've provided us with some of the best questions we've asked. I doubt very much if we would be in existence without them."

The eventual appointment of Philip D. Zelikow to the position of Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was also troubling to the Jersey Girls who demanded his resignation. They cited close personal ties with the Bush family and the National Security Advisor as conflicts of interest. Mindy Kleinberg said, "As executive director, he has pretty much the most important job on the commission. He hires the staff, he sets the direction and focus, he chooses witnesses at the hearings." Joe Conason wrote that the widows "fear that even with the best of intentions, Zelikow's connections to the Bush White House will 'taint the validity' of the commission's final report. Their demand that he resign or be fired has been rejected by the commission's co-chairmen, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton. 'We respectfully disagree with them,' replied Al Felzenberg, the commission's press spokesman, who said Zelikow was chosen 'for his scholarly credentials and his knowledge of national security issues.' He hastened to praise the widows for doing 'a very positive thing,' adding that while he understood their concerns, he expected that "they're not going to be satisfied with everything we do."

Monitoring and criticizing the 9/11 Commission

As part of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee they helped form, the Jersey Girls monitored and often criticized the 9/11 Commission after they lobbied successfully for its creation. The Jersey Girls pressured the U.S. government for months to have National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testify in front of the Commission; when the White House did not send her to hearings in March 2004, "they walked out in silent protest." The White House gave in and Rice testified, although she refused to testify under oath.

When it became clear that the Commission had omitted crucial information from its report, the widows called for a new independent panel. "I'm very disturbed, and I want to get some answers," said Breitweiser. "I want to know what the truth is." She called the 2004 findings "an utterly hollow report."

Congressional testimony

The Jersey Widows testified for hearing led by congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on July 22 2005 In Lorie Auken's statement she said this of the 9/11 Commission Report:

And finally, without compromising our national security, it would have reported all of its findings, with its redactions blacked out and submitted to the American people. In essence, the Commission could have produced a final product where the resulting conclusions and recommendations could be trusted. Instead, at the end of the day, what we got were some statements that truly insulted the intelligence of the American people. Violated our loved ones’ memories, and might end up hurting us, one day soon.

One such statement is that 9/11 was a ‘failure of imagination’. A failure of whose imagination? What exactly does that mean? When you have a CIA director with his hair on fire, a system blinking red, 52 FAA warnings, an August 6th, 2001, PDB entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States’, leads on several 9/11 hijackers including Alhazmi, Almihdhar and Marwan Al-Shehhi, warnings from many foreign governments, a Phoenix memo warning of Islamic extremists taking flying lessons, the arrest of would-be terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, facts imparted to one agent, Agent Frasca at the RFU at the FBI, 9/11 was truly a failure alright.

Political controversy

The Jersey Girls have been the target of attacks by conservatives at various times. In 2004, the New York Times reported that "The phenomenon has sufficiently alarmed the White House that earlier in the month its media allies tried to discredit the 9/11 families, particularly the so-called 'Jersey Girls,' the four telegenic suburban widows who have forced the administration to reverse its stonewalling of the 9/11 commission at nearly every juncture. Rush Limbaugh labeled Kristen Breitweiser a Democratic operative. Bill O'Reilly sounded the alarm that 'some 9/11 families have aligned themselves with the far left.' But this stab at damage control went nowhere." In her 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, controversial right-wing pundit Ann Coulter created a firestorm of controversy with her remarks about the Jersey Girls. Coulter wrote:

These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. ... I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much ... the Democrat ratpack gals endorsed John Kerry for president ... cutting campaign commercials... how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy."

These statements received national attention after an interview on The Today Show, and were widely criticized. The Jersey Girls themselves also responded critically to Coulter's remarks. Kristen Breitweiser stated, "I'd like her to meet my daughter and tell her how anyone could enjoy their father's death... She sounds like a very disturbed, unraveled person." Lorie Van Auken said that "she was stunned by the vitriol." She said, "Having my husband burn alive in a building brought me no joy. Watching it unfold on national TV and seeing it repeated endlessly was beyond what I could describe. Telling my children they would never see their father again was not fun. And we had no plans to divorce." Nevertheless, Coulter has repeated her criticism of the Jersey Girls in subsequent columns.

After the 9/11 Commission issued its report, the Jersey Girls pressured the Administration to follow its recommendations. They specifically commended the Commission for not politicizing blame in the report. "The USS Cole was bombed under Clinton's watch, and 9/11 happened under Bush's watch," said Rosemary Dillard. "I don't blame either administration; I blame the people who were reporting to them." As the 2004 election neared, the widows criticized Bush for the failure to enact the recommendations of the commission; many interpreted this as an endorsement of Bush's opponent John Kerry; the New York Times reported, "In a statement clearly meant to influence voters in next week's election, the group did not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, but said Mr. Bush had 'allowed members of his own party to derail the legislative process.'" There were other 9/11 victim's families who supported the Bush campaign; Debra Burlingame, whose brother flew in the plane that was crashed into the Pentagon, responded to the widows: "The Jersey Girls criticized President Bush because he wasn't rounding up Arabs in airport lounges before Sept. 11. These are the same people who are now decrying the use of the Patriot Act."

Media appearances

The Jersey Widows were interviewed on the PBS show called Now. A documentary film, called 9/11: Press for Truth, was released on September 5th, 2006, and features three of the Jersey Girls (Breitweiser does not appear except in news clips). It can be viewed online at Google video.

Recognition

Kristen Breitweiser won the Ron Ridenhour Awards honoring "truth-telling" in 2005 for her work with the Jersey Girls.

See also

• 9/11 Press for Truth
• One World Trade Center tenants
• Two World Trade Center tenants
• 9/11 Commission
• 9/11 Family Steering Committee

External links

• Commondreams.org website page containing April 2004 Wall Street Journal editorial strongly criticizing the Jersey Girls, and a May, 2004 New York Daily News column detaling a "Jersey Girl's" response.
• Ms. Magazine 2004 Women of the Year