Investigation or to personal privacy. Lbj was reluctant because every one has federal agencies thought this was a nightmare. You mean, people can be rummaging through our files . We cant do that. Bill moyers help the newspaper editors to marshal their argument about how we are in favor of open government. One of the fascinating things we found was that bill moyers had actually written a really nice signing statement for president johnson where there is this ringing language that springs from our most essential principles that democracy works best when the people know what their government is doing. They must have access to the policy rules. Government officials should not be able to pull curtains of secrecy. It is best in the light of day. What is great about that we now , know from lbjs own schedule that on the telephone, johnson called moyers and said cut that out. Come on. Moyer has to x through this ringing declaration of freedom information of information and puts in there, yes, it springs from one of our most essential principles, democracy works best this is lbjs language when the people have all of the information that the security of the nation permits them to have. Big difference. It is really interesting. It shows some of that real reluctance. Lbj, who was the absolute taskmaster of signing ceremonies, we have photographs of him sitting there with members of congress behind him where he crosses a t with one pen and then hands the pen to one of them and then dots the i hands the pen to another and underlines the n to another. There was no signing ceremony for this freedom of information act, it does not even appear on his daily schedule. Are there all there are is these repeated phone calls from bill moyers. He had been wired for the american society. Now they are news editors because the news has changed. The editors written him on july 2. This bill just came to president johnson. It might not get signed. It might be pocket vetoed. That is what it was called. It might not be signed. In the lbj of library we found style, not ourph style. He still had to drag lbj. Signingal scene 1966, thefrom july 4, middle three paragraphs are not about open government, they are about secrecy. This one is about military secrets. This is about privacy and confidentiality of deliberation. This is about the prerogatives of the president under the constitutions commanderinchief. Lbj says i do not share this concern. We do not want to do that. So the whole middle section of this historic bill is about withholding information. But the impact over 50 years has been amazing. The United States was the third country in the world to have a freedom of information act. After sweden and finland. Some of the states like wisconsin had always done their own freedom of information act. After the federal government passed theres in 1956 theirs in 1956, many other states joined in. Take the state of michigan, for example. We know today that the water crisis, the lead poisoning, of those thousands of kids and flint, michigan, is because state emails we know from their , emails. They write to each other, we are not going to do this corrosion controls in the pipes because it will cost too much. We until next year when the water plant goes online. They blame the community groups. Riling people up. It is a blame the victim thing. It wasnt, lead pipes in your house. No, it wasnt. It was the city pipes. The transmission pipes. The only note that because the freedom of information request under michigan law by reporters from the Detroit Free Press and the Virginia Tech professor, from the michigan aclu from an , angry housewife, from an epa scientists who exit showed it. Asnt the pipes in the house and then the emails came out. Within five days, the city switched back to detroit water. Those rates of lead poisoning started to drop. There are a lot of heroes in this. Freedom of information wasnt the only clue, the only silver bullet. There were over other threat levels, kids blood levels, pediatricians, people saying test the pipes, but the freedom of information act is what held the government accountable. That is 50 years later. Saving kids from poisoning. That is the effect of the freedom of information act. There is a real history to this. The fundamental idea of access to records was under british common law where if you could show a personal interest, economic interests, Family Interest in getting a hold of a courthouse record, you could get that, but only through some judicial proceedings. There was no right to know. Gradually in the 1800s in this country, the real estate Title Insurance companies brought action after action at the state saying, no, wait a courthouse records, we pay for second. Them. They are taxpayer records. They should be open. These guys wanted to make a business out of it. Create databases to check titles and make sure inheritances are correct. They are the people that were the cuttingedge. Not journalists. It is interesting. It was not muckrakers or the progresses. It was the real estate commercial interest who changed the state of the law from a need to know, if you have a need to know, you might get access, to a public right to know. It is a public record, you ought to be able to get it. In the 1930s with the new deal and the alphabet soup of federal agencies, we had the First Federal registry, the national archives. And then world war ii, when the government turned into a permanent Big National Security state with Standing Army and huge expenditures on government. There was a real push back. The Congress Passed the administrators procedure act. It is a neat idea. That if the government does something that will affect you or your business or your family, you have a right to know in advance and an ability to comment on it before it is finalized. This is the notice and comment idea. It is what has given rise to him by mental impact statements. In the procedures act, there was a provision that was supposed to open up government records but it did not. In the 1950s, a crusading democratic congressman named john from california, he was assigned to a podunk committee, think it was civil service, a subcommittee and he tried to get , information out of the eisenhower administration. They stonewalled him. He came a with this idea, we need a particular statute that says, we have a right to know. There is some presumption of disclosure unless the government can show a real damage from the release of the document. We should be able to get it. He could never get that passed in the 1950s. Public and president , a lot of pushback. Into the 1960s, you have a democratic resident. Especially after lbjs landslide, you had a number of Republican Congress members who kind of got interested in the idea as a way to rein in some of power president ial , power. John moss picked up this bright, young illinois congressman as a cosponsor. A guy named Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfelds statement on the hat floor on the floor of the house is a pretty good explanation of why the bill became a real majority bill. Rumsfeld said government has gotten so big. It is involved in so many different pieces of our lives, commercial lives. Medicare is passed social , security. We need the right to get those records out of agencies to be able to uphold our own standard liberty and freedom. So rumsfeld signed up and thomas was ready. All the federal agencies had weighed in and said this is a , bad idea. Really bad idea. The news editors had mounted a major Editorial Campaign and , is johnsonto the going to be secretive or is he going to stand for open government . They converted bill moyers. The very influential and press secretary to johnson and thomas and like the sun son johnson never had. Moyers became convinced and convinced his boss. If you veto this, every newspaper will editorialize you. People will read the compilation of news clips. Now it has been digitally put into it ipad. Back then it was a stack of xerox copies. Ceremony, with no really unwillingly it was not chosen on july 4 for patriotic reasons. That just happen to be the last day before a pocket veto would kick in, on the fifth. We now celebrate it as a patriotic win of course, but it was accident. The law, the bill gave him a full year before they went into documentation. It did not take effect until july 4, 1967. And then agencies figured out every kind of way to throw up obstacles. The earlymple, in law, there were this National Security restriction you saw in lbjs final signing statement. So there is a body of unclassified stuff, they would stick in a piece of classified information. It was called the contamination technique. They would say, oh, it is classified now, whatever level. They would use all these little tricks. They built in huge delays. They would even asked stiff members of congress. A congresswoman named patsy mink who represented the state of hawaii was trying to get the wind patterns in the pacific are such that our Nuclear Tests of the bikini atoll would send wind that would touch parts of the hawaiian islands. She represented hawaii, so she wanted the data on the wind flows of radioactivity. The government said, no, you cant have them. But she said it is in the constitution. They said, you cant have them. She brought a case under the freedom of information act. They denied her. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, well, the law does not specifically say that a court can overrule an agency. It will have to accept the agency claims. And she lost. That was 1973. That led to a whole movement. 1973, i can 74, it happened right at the moment of watergate, the vietnam war scandals, the beginnings of the cia scandals, impeachment of president and senate, his resignation. Then you had impeachment of hisident and send nixon, resignation. The congress developed a set of freedom of information amendments. Sonnet Senate Leaders on this were senator Teddy Kennedy or phil from michigan or edwin muskie of maine. These amendments were meant to strengthen the 1966 bill by saying explicitly that courts can overrule agencies. They need to look at what is on the record. That there are restrictions on the ways that people like the fbi could claim, oh, this will impinge on investigation, it will need to be under law enforcement. It builtin this extra check and balance of the court which had not really been there the first time around. What is amazing is under the freedom of information act, when one of Teddy Kennedys staff people got the file years later of his negotiations with the fbi about the bill. Because they were writing amendments to try to make it work. In the file is a memo that the fbi legislative liaison had written to her peers. The white house called us and told us to stop negotiating with Teddy Kennedys staff because they want this bill to be as bad as possible so we can sustain a veto. In other words no more , amendments to make compromises with the fbis interests and interest of openness. Leave it as bad as possible. That is the bill that passed the congress. Gerald ford vetoed it. His chief of staff was a guy named Donald Rumsfeld who cosigned the bill. It is hard to figure out exactly if we had gotten all the ford library documents. He clearly wanted to sign it. Buchanan wanted him to sign it. But all the agencies, a lawyer named antonin scalia. They wanted him to sign it. This would be bad for you guys. Lobby. Show it to the inside the administration, there was a guy named Donald Rumsfeld and a guy named cheney. We do have notes of two meetings they held with president ford in the 10 days before he vetoed the bill. And the meetings were all about probable leaks or stuff in the press. He puts rumsfeld and type in charge of a type of plumbers group. This is what was on the top of fords head. Even though when he took office, he vows to, you know, the dark line of the past, what Richard Nixon did, we are going to have an open administration. He will have english lessons in the toaster for the residents. They were open. But then they vetoed the bill. Unfortunately for him, the congress turned around and overrode those vetoes. That is the core of what we have today. And is why we can win. Why the aclu can bring a lawsuit like this and get a judge to force continuous reviews. The final analysis on the last of the documents, the court will always role for the governments favor. In between the beginning and the end, we get document found. That is the core of it. It is a deadline of 20 working days for the government to respond. The government hardly ever meets that deadline. If you have patience and persistence it took 17 years to get the cias family jewels. Appeals, litigation, negotiating and finally getting that out. Persistence getting human beings , on the inside. Most people who work for the government are public servants. They are in there to do the right thing. If you can get one of those folks on the phone, talk to you about your request, you can often get responses. We were set up back in the mid1980s when government secrecy was going through the roof on some National Security grounds. A lot of journalists and historians understood that a lot of what the government said was secret did not really stand up scrutiny if people got behind the black blotches. Massive overclassification. They all wanted to write their own memoirs. They will tell you, no, this is what i saw, this is what was released. So these journalists and historians set us up to be that kind of institutional memory to house the documents when they came in. Back there, there was not an internet. We created an actual library with brown boxes all around full of documents released from the freedom of information act. Now we post them on the web and publish them for university libraries. So we file requests we are , research institute, we try to publish. We do cure ration. Curation. A lot of what the government holds should have gone one way or another. We could learn from not just for history but a future. In that regard, one of my favorites to show you, this was one of the the documents we got through the freedom of information act. A whole series of Henry Kissingers meetings with foreign leaders. This happened to be with the Turkish Foreign minister in antara, turkey back in ankara , turkey back in 1975. The turks say you need to ship us weapons so we can kill more greeks. Our Ambassador Says that is illegal. Kissinger jumps in, ah, before the freedom of information act, i used to say that the illegal we do it immediately. Unconstitutional takes a little longer. Then there are brackets of laughter. He goes on to say since the freedom of information act, im afraid to say things like this. This is also that deterrent effect of open government. The freedom of information act being in place means that these guys can go and do bad things in secret covered by National Security classification, but we are going to find out. It may take years. This was 1975, and we did not get this until 2005. It will take decades. But when we publish it, history gets judgment. We just had a conviction this past week in federal court of a Chilean Army Officer who killed their biggest folksinger during the middle of the 1973 coup. States,ed, moved to the moved and worked as a cook tracked down by other victims. ,of his whole death squad. There were some documents saying , yes, he was commander of this particular unit. They had eyewitness testimony. They grabbed him in florida and suit. Im in civil he was just convicted the other day. Justice takes a long time, but it is worth it. Because every martyr and every torture murder and every torture, every death squad in the world, you can keep running, but you cant hide. One of the big stories nowadays in the United States is opioids. The Opioid Epidemic a lot of , people hooked on oxycontin and a lot of the other opiates. The government has been collecting all kinds of data on how doctors prescribe these things. There was a famous case of rush limbaugh, a radio host saying he had given them this. A great Public Interest journalism outfit has information on this practice for opioids. The centers for medicare and medicaid had been collecting data for years, but the American Medical Association and dr. Society did not want it out. That will infringe on public privacy. So through the freedom of information act, they know the Public Interest value of this is so strong that you cannot show us an identifiable harm, you have got to give it to us. So they got it. So every state Licensing Agency for doctors started coming to this database to check it was overprescribing. Who is really outside the norm . What is the norm in a given area . Say greensboro, georgia for opioids . The good doctors say, am i out of line . Do i need to rein it back in . The licensors can go after the doctors who were really abusing the system. The government can learn how to then change the pricing patterns and the reimbursement patterns for opioids to put some limits on what had become a real epidemic. I worry about this because in the last year, they found some strange search terms in their database. They wrote a big story about this. The number one search people are doing now in our database doesnt seem to be coming from licensors. It seems to be coming from folks who want to know doctors who will prescribe anything. And they concluded, the addicts are on board now. An ethical choice, do we take down this data, is it helping people find a doctor who will give them anything . No. We need to do some more reporting on this. Keep the data up and every place we are referring to, any opioids connected to the centers for Disease Control damage sheets, side effects, what can happen to you, warnings about it, and use the data to keep doing what we have started which was bring down the opioid abuse rate. That is an incredible use of the freedom of information act that affects thousands of people. It challenges the power of a small group of physicians in this country who had been prescribing whatever they wanted to prescribed for many years with little more than professional ethics. This puts another check and balance on that power, for the public health. So other unknown stories to give you a sense of the change even in the debate about Climate Change is that for the freedom of information act, weve been filing freedom of information requests to look at all the negotiations over the last 30 years on Climate Change. The u. S. Were positions, the farm positions, what interests were served, who got the argument . We found that Ronald Reagan was really the hero back in 1987. Big split in his administration. The issue was the montreal to banl, which was going the whole class of chloroflourocarbons. It used to be the engine for the bottles. In it, andhe cfcs they were known to be destroying the ozone layer, which were leading in all kinds of bad white raise. Rays. Half of his administration said that would be a job killer. It was language like you here today about regulating Greenhouse Gases and any kind of change in industrial use to protect the climate. Back then, and maybe was just hollywood friends and the deep suntan he was worried about the potential for melanoma, whatever it was, but he overruled the job killing objections and ordered the signing of the montreal protocol. Save the ozone layer. Very interesting. The washington post, when it reported on these documents, said what a difference in the Republican Party between then and now. On Climate Change. It spreads. Then we get after our specialty is the classified documents. This is one of my favorites. How often do you see a declassified document appear on latenight television . It is usually not that much money in them. Hey, it is Stephen Colbert grilling Donald Rumsfeld earlier this year. Back in 2002 when rumsfeld and others in the George Bush Administration were screaming about mushroom clouds are coming at us, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, inside, in secret, we now have it through the freedom of information act, rumsfeld is writing to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff saying, please take a look at this material as to what we dont know about weapons of mass destruction. It is big. A real contrast. The public pr face versus inside what we dont know. That is really important for public to know about the disaster in iraq and their own decisionmaking. Dash fascinating the quick that rumsfeld squirms in the chair. The president had available to him intelligence of all elements of the government. And the National SecurityCouncil Members had that information. It was all shared. It was never certain if it were if it were a fact, it would not be called intelligence. Wow. [laughter] i think you answered my question. [laughter] tom blanton this is because of the tribute to freedom of information. This is called the snowflake. Rumsfeld was famous when he was secretary of defense for managing the department by sending these little one line or two line memos down to subordinates. In this case it was not too far down, it was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. People who work for rumsfeld called these snowflakes. Some days there would be a blizzard of them coming down. People never knew what to do. Do you spend the next day answering this snowflake . Sometimes you did, and he went back. Rumsfeld was glad to hear it. Sometimes the snowflake just melted and wasnt heard from again. In this case, my bet is it melted away because they decided to invade iraq. What we donting know. Turns out what we dont know was the absence of evidence was the evidence of absence. It justified this iraq war decision, were there to centers on the inside, how did they control information . Who actually decided . We knew from some of the memoirs like Colin Powells and the joint chiefs of staff, he actually said, we never had a debate. There were no debates about invading iraq. It was just understood from a very early time that the president intended to invade. There was never a formal discussion about it. We went back and looked at some of the key dates from september 2002. We were really interested in that period in particular. In this case, we knew a particular type of document, we knew that copies of it were in the executive secretarys office. At the department of defense, so we could with some precision, we could put in, we would like any snowflakes written by secretary rumsfeld in august of september 2002. And then you can come up with some pretty good ones. That helped us trackback. So the decision, what about one when president bush met with british Prime Minister tony blair in march . Lets look for some of those. Talk about what difference freedom of information makes, here starting after 9 11, we now know a lot with investigations and lawsuits and Senate Intelligence committee hearings. Real credit to the aclu asking for all the documents about our torture programs or the suspected al qaeda terrorists we grabbed weather in yemen or afghanistan had to answer whatever. Court,st time around in even with a federal judge ordering the government to review the document, the version of the document the aclu got was this one. This is a page out of the cia Inspector Generals own investigation of the torture program. All you have is the headline enhanced interrogation techniques at the top, and then down at the bottom three words. This is on page 15. The waterboard technique. This is all the government would release of this page as of 2008. 2009, you had a new president come in. They are faced with the whole torture program. They have to make a series of policy decisions. They look at the documents and say, we are against torture. Were going to end this program. President obama had already said on the campaign trail he would end it with an executive order. He does an executive order to end it, and the Obama Administration releases the same page of the same Inspector General report releasing all of the enhanced interrogation techniques. Sleep deprivation for days and days at a time, forcing people to stay in cold cells with no clothes on. Being confined in boxes we could where you could introduce an insect. Wall stand where they put them ,p against the wall, face slap show domination by the interrogator. All of these conventions, and they were torture. They were approved. This one is great euphemisms the government often comes up with. Actually, it just means torture. Now we know. Aclu kind of lost their lawsuit the first time around but kept at it, and under the freedom of information act under a new administration said, wait a second, we ended the program. We dont do this anymore. We have prohibited these techniques, you cant classify them anymore. Lets release them. Here they are. It makes it more likely that we wont resume, although they are still sitting there in some dark bottom drawer in the cia. Another terrorist attack, another thread rises, you go back to that dark well. Maybe we know more about it. This is one of the great scientific successes of our time. Central intelligence, you can see all the redatctions here. The black is a little too visual. White, more like swiss cheese. This is a memorandum on the views on trained cats for use. We know a lot about this. The cia invested tens, hundreds of dollars in testing whether you could wire up cats to use them as surveillance instruments. If you had a soviet diplomat, sitting in Lafayette Park across the street from the white house, send a cat to curl around his legs and pick up whatever he is saying. They describe it. Well, it was a remarkable Scientific Achievement but would lend not lend itself to a practical sense and are highly specialized needs. This is bureaucratic language. What actually happened is they surgically implanted the mics, wires, transmissions, first field test and they let the cat out, and it gets run over by a taxi. Shucks. Cats can be trained to move short distances. Maybe we can train them to go to the park bench, but the environmental and security factors used in this technique in the real foreign situation, it would not be practical. What if the cat gets distracted by a mouse or a pigeon . Or run over by a taxi. Too bad. They did not want to release it because this is sources and methods. This is intelligence methods, this is damaging to National Security. We only got it on appeal. But it made some news around the world. Goes to the point we often run into, the claim is classified on National Security grounds, the real reason is embarrassment. Our law today has created a kind of an extraordinary flow of documents. You can see it from what im showing you. But in 1966, we were one of the few laws in the world. Us, sweden and finland, really. And then at the fall of the berlin wall, all the new democracies wanted a freedom of information law. We had hungarians dissidents over here looking at how to do this. How do you get that stuff, we have got to get the communist party down. We helped a lot of folks all around the world. Japan, chile, hungary right new write new freedom of information laws. Now there are 109, 110 freedom of information countries. Worth theem are not paper they are written on. They are just like, we will check this box for the national committee. Some of them are much better than our law. A good example, think about mexico. We think about a broken judicial system. Forces, drug gangs, a level of routine violence you would not want to experience a , government that has played with corruption. And yet their freedom of , information law is not only rated higher than ours and produces real results that we cannot get with our system. A great example, there are these famous cases a year ago of these 43 disappeared students. The government blamed it on a drug gang. Then it turned out that the local police were in cahoots with the drug gang. Then they blamed those guys. The victims families went looking for more evidence because the story did not fit. They brought in international experts, legal experts, guatemalans. They said Something Else is going on here. Well a whole group of those , human rights organizations with some help from us filed a case with the information tribunal in mexico. Our law does not have an Ombudsman Office that can overrule a commission or an agency. It does not have an information commission. It is not have a tribunal that has legal power. It says, you have got to release this because they are right. In mexico, tribunal overruled the attorney general. Forced him to release and showed what the International Critics said was right. There had been a cover up because it was actually federal le in the squashing and disappearing of these students. Not just the local police. All of them were involved. So investigations were continuing. But mexico, they got a released through a stronger law that we would not have been able to get that investigative file here in this country. There are examples like that in india. There is an information commissioner in every one of the states of india who regularly intervenes and overrules. These missing pieces of the American Freedom of information act are kind of the next agenda maybee 60th anniversary where we really need an Ombudsmans Office with some power. We have a mediation office. The congress created in they 2007, pick up the phone but they are like it divorce mediator. A divorce mediator. They cannot sit up there at the top of the courtroom and bank a gavel bang a gavel and say you are being outrageous. , they get on the phone and say, come on, be good, be nice. Isprevents litigation and it nice, but it has the feeling of power, not real power like the mexican or chilean or india commissions have. So we need to build in more of that Public Interest down the path like mexicos human rights override. Gross violation of human rights, 43 students. That overrides the attorney general and the confidentiality. That is more important. We dont have that kind of balancing in our system. So even in a case like the torture case, it took a change of policy by the Administration Rather than an override. If we could do those two things have a real tribunal or ombudsman that could overrule these and have a real Public Interest human rights balancing test, we move up. Right now, this is a page out of one of the International Rankings from a canadian ngo. We are ranked 45 out of 109. We are in between tunisia and trinidad and tobago, way behind mexico and india and chile and countries like that. We have got some work to do here at the 50th anniversary. We have got a lot done, but it should also be a wakeup call we have got to make our bill better. We used to be the world leader. We could be again. I give a huge amount of credit to a couple of senators who have been leaders on this. One is from texas and john cornyns, one is from vermont. From 2006 to the present, you will not find many truly bipartisan bills. A number of them are called cornyn leahy or leahy cornyn bills. When the agencies were not paying attention to that little mediator office, and we have audits showing the agencies are performing, which is wrong, cornyn and leahy did a bill in 2007 that set up the mediating lawsuit and forced agencies to tell the truth about their forensics. In the last five years, we have been able to show through audits that agencies were not updating the regulations on freedom of information even though president obama had done a whole memo saying we have got a presumption of disclosure here. More than half the agencies did not recognize it. What got cornyn and leahy most upset was that more than half the agencies did not change the regulations when they passed the bill in 2007. They did not mention this Medium Office that would reduce litigations. We can prove that. Cornyn and leahy and they brought in grassley, senator grassley from iowa. On the house side, real champions, on a few bipartisan bills coming out of the Government Reform Committee with elijah cummings, of maryland who is the ranking, darrell issa and new chair Jason Chaffetz from utah. It was a bill that would do some of the same things, make them update their regulations, build into the statute so the court can look into it. Deadlines, give this mediating office the power to report directly to congress. Which gives them some independents governing agency, and sets a sunset on a provision that has been really abused by the agencies process. They say, we have to have a zone of confidential discussion to get anything done. The cia claimed that extended 35, 50 years. How would that show todays discussions . The law does not set a deadline on it. This new bill does. It just got passed by the congress, and president obama says he is going to sign it. I think the last day he has decided is july 4, 2016. He has to sign it is july 4, 2016. I dont know if the white house is going to want to have a signing ceremony either. It has taken eight years in effect for them to get into the law something that the president promised on day one. [video clip] the freedom of information act is one of the key ways in which citizens are able to find out what exactly is going on in government. The good news is is that, over the course of my presidency, we foiave processed more requests, freedom of information than ever before and we have worked to make it easier and more transparent. Having said all of that, we are getting many more requests for foia than ever before. We have had to figure out ways in which we can reform just to make it easier, faster, cheaper for people to get the information that they want. Fortunately, congress, on a bipartisan basis, has provided the tools through legislation to codify some of the reforms and we have already made and to expand more of these reforms so that government is more responsive. And im proud of all the work we have done to make government more open and responsive, but i know people have not always been satisfied with the speed with which they are getting responses and requests. Hopefully this will help. This will be an Important Initiative for us to continue on the reform path. I am going to sign that right now. Tom blanton my hope is that people on this 50th birthday will say, that is good that we got the opioid persistent database. That is good we made those torture documents. That is good we know about Climate Change. That is good we know that the Parmesan Cheese being sold by target actually does not have any parmesan in it and has 10 wood chips. We know this from the freedom of information, which had done a spot check. Grated parmesan, 100 of it might be grated, but it is not parmesan. And we know it now because of the freedom of information act. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer we look back at the stories of americans at the white house, the World Trade Center and the pentagon. At noon eastern, we hear from john jester, former chief of the matalin, and mary former aide to dick cheney. I went down to the Vice President s office, a floor below mine, took the stairs down to check my gut. When the second plane hit. We knew instantly that this is not an accident. It was some kind of act of terror. Announcer and u. S. Navy rear admiral thomas, tom daschle, gary walters, and major heather penny, former pilot from the district of columbia air national guard. Flight 93 is not in the near vicinity and able to prosecute an attack at that point in time. We need to get staff and make sure we can play the short goalie games now we have cleared of the airspace. ,hen we returned back to d. C. That was when gs