JOIN US"He (Bush) was sitting in a restaurant in Dallas when the Secret Service told him that President Obama wanted to speak to him. He then learned about the assassination," according to documentarian Peter Schnall.
Bush "said to us certainly there was no sense of jubilation (and) certainly no sense of happiness," Schnall stressed. "If anything, he felt that finally there was a sense of closure," Schnall was quoted as saying by CNN.
Schnall interviewed Bush, the 43rd US President, as part of a documentary airing on National Geographic on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Bush was in a Florida classroom for an education event when he first heard about the attacks.
"We could see in the interview that the President was very taken by the events of that day," Schnall said. "He was very emotional."
Bush told Schnall that initially he thought a small plane had hit one of the towers at New York's World Trade Center.
"First, I thought it was a light aircraft, and my reaction was, man, either the weather was bad or something extraordinary happened to the pilot," Bush, who was President from 2001 to 2009, said.
But then-White House Chief of Staff "Andy Card's Massachusetts accent was whispering in my ear -- 'A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack.' "
Following the terror strikes, Bush had ordered the military to shoot down commercial planes that failed to respond to a Federal Aviation Administration demand to land as quickly as possible.
For a time, the President was unsure if that order was responsible for the crash of United Airlines flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the report said.
"Those were decisions that (Bush) had to make. ... They troubled him then, and I think they still trouble him now," Schnall said.
"What struck me the most was that during those hours, the days of 9/11, the President was overwhelmed" by events, Schnall added. He was "overwhelmed in the sense that ... (initially) they didn't really know who the enemy was. They didn't know if there were more attacks about to happen."
Bush "spoke about that fact that he was journeying through the fog of war."
When asked whether he regretted launching the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks, Schnall said Bush "kind of looked at me ... and said, 'I hate that damn question,'".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Bush had declared that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive" in some of the most bellicose language used by a White House occupant in recent years.
"I want justice," he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed when an airliner crashed into the building. "And there's an old poster out West that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive,'" Bush had pointed out on September 17, 2001.
Bin Laden, 54, was killed by US commandos in a covert raid in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad on May 2.