A Sept. 11 Style article about Marilynn Rosenthal's search for the family of 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi inadvertently referred to two of his relatives by the pseudonyms Fatima and Amna. Rosenthal used false first names for the women because she had promised them anonymity, but she did not mention this to the reporter. Also, in a photograph of Rosenthal's son and a friend in Egypt, the names were reversed in the caption. Phil Wallis was shown on the left and Josh Rosenthal on the right.
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Sons of the Mothers
A week after the attacks, Marilynn Rosenthal planted this redbud to commemorate her son Josh.
(Robin Buckson - For The Washington Post)
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Her first stop was Fiduciary Trust International, where Josh had been a senior vice president managing pension portfolios. He had been meeting with a Japanese client over a tray of scones when the first plane hit the neighboring North Tower. He calmly ushered his guest to the elevator, then ran back toward his office. The second plane slammed into the South Tower minutes later. No one remembered seeing Josh after that.
Fiduciary Trust lost 86 people. The Japanese client, the shell-shocked CEO who had been out of town that day, the terrified vice president who had walked down 78 flights of stairs with his eyes squeezed shut -- all felt compelled to apologize to Marilynn for surviving. Their guilt struck her as sad and unnecessary. But victimhood, she sensed, could serve a purpose.
Back home in Ann Arbor, she picked up the phone and called the Federal Aviation Administration and the chief engineer for a major airline, politely introducing herself as a sociology professor whose son had died on Sept. 11. How much does it cost, she remembers asking, to harden a cockpit door? Airlines began doing so immediately after Sept. 11. Now she had her first answer.
"Thirteen hundred dollars," she says. "My son died for thirteen hundred dollars."
For five years now, she has awakened each morning and plugged 9/11 into her computer's search engine. She calls journalists to ask for contacts and phone numbers. She reads English-language versions of Arabic newspapers and interviews scholars on Islam. She had long conversations with a CIA expert on Osama bin Laden. She asked traders to teach her about the international oil market. A friend on Capitol Hill finessed a private briefing for her at the State Department.
As facts piled up, she grew convinced that Sept. 11 could have been prevented if not for "White House incompetence, bureaucratic nonsense and turf battles."
She hired a graduate student to help track threats against the United States by bin Laden, and to compare intelligence briefings the Bush administration had before Sept. 11 to disclaimers senior officials publicly made afterward. She categorized 144 unique threat warnings between 1999 and 2001, tallying 29 that specified crashing hijacked planes into buildings or landmarks. She put together a PowerPoint presentation on what the White House knew before Sept. 11. "Information," she concludes, "was there." She slapped an anti-Bush bumper sticker on her car.
When she needs to clear her head, Marilynn takes long walks, as she used to with Josh in their favorite Ann Arbor park. She sits on the bench that friends donated in his name and has imaginary conversations with him. One afternoon, she noticed graffiti on the bench. At first she was annoyed. But when she focused on the scribbled words -- part declaration, part plea -- they seemed exactly right: "I was here."
Divorced from Josh's father for decades and mindful of her daughter's more internal grieving process, Marilynn knew that her quest for answers would be a solitary one. Friends tell her it will give her closure. Marilynn knows better. Josh is the second child she has outlived. Her oldest son, Daniel, died at 22 following heart surgery. She understood from the beginning that learning why Josh was murdered might enlighten but would never comfort her. "My knowledge has made me angry!" she cries. "My knowledge has made me frustrated."
Marilynn used her share of the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund to endow an annual lecture on the Middle East in her son's honor at the University of Michigan, where Josh went to college and she is a professor emeritus. She rebuffed initial invitations to join Sept. 11 lawsuits. But when the North Carolina law firm famous for taking on the tobacco industry mounted a class-action suit accusing the Saudi royal family of bankrolling terrorism, she reconsidered. Not because she thought it would bring accountability, but because she knew it would yield more documents.
Marilynn was shocked by the "Instructions for Last Night" that the hijackers had left behind. They were told to shower and shave the hair from their bodies, then apply cologne and pray. To check their weapons, because "you must make your knife sharp and must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter."
"Your animal," Marilynn repeats, her narrow shoulders shuddering. She plans to buy a Leatherman utility knife like the ones the hijackers are believed to have used to slit the American pilots' throats. She wants to know what it looks like, what it feels like in the hand.
