For the 9/11 Families, A Day Without Answers

"C-A-S-A-Z-Z-A."

"And you lost?"

"My husband. He was in Tower 1."

John Casazza worked for the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Now his widow is raising their 13-year-old son. Patricia Casazza was unmoved by Rice's performance.

"Clearly she was not aware of a lot," Casazza said. After all, FBI agents knew Islamic radicals were taking flight training, but the Bush administration never connected the dots. "It wouldn't have taken much to stand up before the American people and give a heads-up to what was possible."

But Rice's non-apology did not bother her: "I'm not looking for an apology, I'm looking for ways to keep this from happening again."

In another cluster was Robert McIlvaine, wearing a bright orange Princeton baseball cap. His son Bobby graduated from Princeton. Bobby was a Merrill Lynch executive assigned to set up a meeting on the 106th floor of a building where he didn't usually work. After Sept. 11, McIlvaine started wearing Bobby's white Princeton cap. Then he wore it out.

"It's all about my son," McIlvaine said. "It's about why he died and we're not getting any damn answers."

But didn't Rice answer questions for nearly three hours?

"They had her as a filibuster," McIlvaine said. "I'm just angry."

A few feet away, Debra Burlingame saw it differently. Her brother Charles F. Burlingame III was the pilot of the plane that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon. On her lapel was pinned his picture and the same heart pin worn by the widow of passenger Dillard.

"The fact is, it wasn't our government who killed my brother and 3,000 people," she said. It was 19 hijackers and their sponsors. . . . We have new enemies we face. Those are the guys I want to get in the name of my brother." Her eyes began to tear up.

Burlingame changed her attitude about the responsibility of the government for Sept. 11 -- but well before Rice's testimony. Burlingame was one of those who protested Bush's reluctance to appoint the Sept. 11 commission in the first place. She joined a vigil outside the White House, carrying a big sign that said, "My Brother's Murderers Were Listed in the San Diego Phone Book" -- as one of the hijackers was.

Then she read the thick report of the congressional inquiry into the attacks, and she began to believe that preventing them was a complicated business. The government did the best it could, given pre-Sept. 11 assumptions, she now believes.