President George W. Bush's former chief of staff says "the fog of war" accompanied the moments following the 9/11 terror attacks — and that neither he nor the president knew initially the Pentagon was under attack.
In an interview Sunday on the 15th anniversary of 9/11 on CNN's "State of the Union,"
Andrew Card said what "impressed" him, however, was that Bush "immediately started thinking about the greater burdens."
"It wasn't tunnel vision" he said, praising Bush's "terrific peripheral vision about what was happening."
"He said, I want to track down [Russia President Vladimir] Putin and call him and make sure he knows we're not going to war and that we don't want them to use an excuse to go to war with us," Card tells CNN.
"Because President Bush was going to raise the military threat level as to what was going on — it was being raised literally as we were speaking. … But he was just saying, there is a big consequence here if people miscalculate."
Card said he recalled then in the limo drive from the school in Sarasota [Florida] to Air Force One after it was first learned about the attacks in New York, Bush was "frustrated because he is trying to reach [then Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld."
"And I am on my cellphone calling back to D.C. And he said, 'I can't get through to the Pentagon.'… We didn't even know it had been hit," he recalls.
"And then we get on plane, we find out about the Pentagon being hit… and that this was not just an attack on New York City, this was going to war, this was a real war, and that the fog of war was real."
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