KIRKUS REVIEWS
THE GROUND TRUTH:
The Untold Story of America Under
Attack on 9/11
By John Farmer
Senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission Farmer presents a dismaying catalogue
of incompetence and dissembling before and after the attack on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The author makes excellent use
of declassified primary-source documents from 9/11—including transcriptions
of frantic last-minute phone calls of air-traffic controllers—to demonstrate
how a massively funded national-security system, a relic of the Cold
War, failed to counter a small band of terrorists.
Bipartisan in assigning blame, Farmer believes that failure resulted
from a bureaucracy-laden government. Information sharing was not
only undercut by the constitutional separation of powers, but by
boundaries between the CIA and FBI, even by limiting intra-agency
recipients only to those on a “need-to-know” basis. He shows that
the Clinton administration never sufficiently applied its pledge
to warring national-security and law-enforcement players to “reinvent
government,” and that the Bush administration ridiculously claimed
that by the end of the morning of September 11, military and aviation
officials were effectively coordinating responses. Communication
on 9/11 was atrocious, the author notes, making all the more ironic
the contentions of people like Richard Clarke “that their actions
in those critical moments made a difference.” The Department of Homeland
Security merely widened the gulf between policy-makers and those
on the ground struggling with crises—a fatal flaw underscored by
the egregiously poor response to Hurricane Katrina.
An important systematic brief on how an elaborately constructed
national-defense system was penetrated, and why lessons of that day
for disaster response remain dimly understood.
Close this window |