A Conversation with John Farmer
Author of

THE GROUND TRUTH

Q: Where did the title for this book come from?  

A: I had never run across the phrase “the ground truth” until I started working for the 9/11 Commission. Often used by the folks at NORAD, it was something we started hearing as we went around the country doing interviews at their various facilities. On one occasion we showed a NORAD general in Panama City, Florida the disparities we had discovered between what the records showed actually happened on 9/11 and the official version of events. This was not someone who was involved in telling the distorted story. As we presented the reconstructed timeline his face reddened and he got visibly upset. Then he thanked us. He said, “It looks like you got the ground truth.” That stuck with me and it became the title of the book. 

Q: There has already been so much written about the events of 9/11, how we responded, and the aftermath. You yourself helped write the 9/11 Commission Report. Why did you feel there was a need to revisit the subject?

A: Since the publication of the Commission’s Report, and of books such as Looming Tower and Ghost Wars, and the Vanity Fair piece by 60 Minutes producer Michael Bronner that promoted the declassification of the NORAD tapes, there have been a number of developments that shed new light on our response the morning of 9/11. The first of these is the release of reports by the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense and Transportation detailing their investigations of the discrepancies mentioned above. In my view they overlooked critical evidence as to whether there was deliberate deception on the part of civilian and military officials in their public statements and in their testimony before the Commission.

Another new development involves the primary-source records of the day, which had been classified at the time of the publication of the Commission’s Report. Since then they’ve been subject to the Freedom of Information Act and declassified. Further, the records of the 9/11 Commission itself, which had been sealed in the national archives, were unsealed this year making a much more detailed telling of the 9/11 story possible. And finally there was the occurrence of Hurricane Katrina. The similarities in the government’s response to that catastrophe and to 9/11 shed interesting light on the nature of the problem that has never been fully explored.

Q: What’s different about this book? What’s new here?

A: I don’t think the story of 9/11 has ever been told in this kind of detail and with this kind of granularity. It certainly has never been told in terms of how the Bush administration’s account of what happened developed over time, and how it differed from what actually happened. And finally, no one to my knowledge has ever explored the parallels between how the government handled the air defense/emergency response on 9/11 and how it handled the emergency response during Katrina. In all those respects this book offers an entirely new perspective.

Q: In trying to collect the necessary records from the FAA and the military why did the 9/11 Commission initially decide not to submit subpoenas and instead opted to rely on document requests?

A: It was a tactical decision on the part of the Commission. If you start by subpoenaing everything, and you only have an eighteen-month window to complete your work, you run the real risk that the agencies you’re trying to get information from will resist, take you to court, and try to run the clock out in litigation. You’ll also be encouraging them to interpret the requests you’re making as narrowly as possible. There was some disagreement within the Commission, and among staff members, about the proper approach. The one they settled on was to start with document requests and see how well the agencies cooperated. The feeling was that if they didn’t cooperate we’d then move on to subpoenas. And if we ended up having to do that it would let the rest of the bureaucracy know we were serious. In that respect the tactic worked—at least insofar as the work I was doing.

Of course the other side of the coin is that if you don’t subpoena something and it later turns out to have been withheld, you’re left with a much weaker case if you want to go after whoever did the withholding for obstruction.

Q: What specifically made you decide the subpoenas were ultimately necessary?

A: We had submitted detailed document requests through the spring and summer of 2003. By early September, both the FAA and the DOD had certified to the Commission that the requests had been fully satisfied. After digesting what they gave us we went out into the field to do interviews. As a matter of precaution, we would begin every field visit by asking what else might be out there. Was anybody taped? Were there any contemporaneous records kept that we hadn’t asked for or of which we weren’t aware? Virtually everywhere we went we found there were large caches of relevant documents, tapes and contemporaneous records that had not been turned over to us. That prompted me to go back to Tom Kean and vigorously argue that we needed to issue subpoenas in order to be taken seriously.

Q: Was there a particular incident of this kind that stood out?

A: Yes. It came when we visited the NEADS facility in Rome, New York—the command center for NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector. On our first day there I asked for a tour of the command center floor, which is packed with watch-standers manning radar consoles. I asked one of the people at one of the positions if his radio transmissions were taped. He said yes absolutely, every significant position on the floor—the identification technicians whose job it is to identify the type and location of unknown aircraft; the surveillance officers who look for potential target aircraft; the weapons controllers who serve as air traffic controllers for military aircraft, and the Mission Crew Commander, who oversees the floor and makes tactical decisions based on what he’s hearing from all the others—had their transmissions taped. We were stunned because we had been led to believe, from testimony and from the materials provided thus far by NORAD, that the exact opposite was true. The significance of this cannot be overstated. NEADS was the nerve center of the national response to 9/11. The tapes made there offered the best opportunity to discover “the ground truth” of that morning. As you can imagine, the fact that they had been withheld, coupled with our inability to corroborate the official version of events based on the materials we had seen thus far, considerably heightened our suspicions.

Q: Can you give me a thumbnail description of the official party line regarding our response to 9/11 and what FAA and military records actually showed?

A: The official version that has been portrayed in the media, before Congress and the Commission was that although no one could have anticipated and reacted in time to stop the first two hijacked planes from hitting the towers of the World Trade Center, by the time the third plane hit the Pentagon the system was becoming much more self aware. Fighters had been scrambled from Virginia and sent to protect Washington and had nearly made it in time to intercept. And by the time the fourth plane—United Airlines flight 93—had been hijacked, the military was following it on radar, the president had been briefed, he had issued authorization to shoot the aircraft down if necessary, and this had been communicated up and down the chain of command.

What we found was that there was no awareness of either the Pentagon flight or UA93; that the fighters had been scrambled in response to a mistaken report that one of the first two planes (which had already crashed into the World Trade Center) was heading south towards Washington; and that by the time there was any notification regarding United 93 it had already crashed in Pennsylvania. The official story overstated the efficiency and effectiveness of our national defense response and delivered a sense of cohesion of the national command structure that simply wasn’t true.

Q: When the Commissioners began to realize the official story was untrue—that someone had perhaps knowingly lied to or misled the public about the facts of the day—why didn’t they investigate further? Why was the decision made to pass the buck to the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense and Transportation?

A: Our job was to find the facts and to do so within a fairly tight time frame. We did reach a point where we went to the Commissioners and raised the question what do we do now? We had uncovered the facts but there were clear indications that deceptions had occurred. The Commissioners discussed it and ultimately decided to refer the matter to the two relevant Inspectors General for two reasons. Simply stated, it was outside our mandate. The 9/11 Commission was charged with uncovering the facts and writing the history of what happened. It wasn’t a criminal investigation. We didn’t have the power to prosecute or discipline people who may have deceived or misled. It was clear the Department of Justice or the Inspectors General were better suited to handling that task. And also we didn’t have the time to investigate further even if we wanted to. This all took place in late May or early June of 2004. Our report was due by the end of July. That sort of inquiry would have taken much more time than we had left.

Q: What did you expect the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense and Transportation to do? And what did they actually do?

A: We had put together substantial materials for them—including a detailed list of the relevant documents to review and people to interview—and briefed them extensively on the discrepancies we had discovered. We weren’t sure exactly what they’d do with it all. They could have referred the matter to the Department of Justice’s criminal division if they thought false statements were involved, or disciplined the relevant employees and officers. To our amazement it took them two years to complete their review. And when they finally released their reports they did so in ways often used by the government to avoid major press exposure. The Department of Transportation’s IG released its report on the evening of the Friday that kicked off Labor Day weekend 2006. The DoD’s Inspector General released its report the afternoon of September 12th, after the public had been inundated with September 11th anniversary media coverage. And in my opinion both reports did a superficial job of examining the evidence.  

Q: Are you saying this was a whitewash?

A: No. That’s a strong term and one I would not use in the book because I don’t know it to be true. What I do set forth in the book is the contrast between the conclusions reached by the Inspectors General and the evidence we uncovered.

Q: In the book’s Foreword you write “At some level of the government, at some point in time, this book concludes there was a decision not to tell the truth about what happened.” Aren’t you being just a bit coy here? Surely that kind of decision must have come from the highest level of government. Who do you think made the decision and when was it made? 

A: I really don’t know. Because of my background as a prosecutor I like to stick with the things I can assert with confidence. In this case I couldn’t draw a definite conclusion. There are a couple of possibilities and they both involve a critical meeting at the White House on September 17th, the Sunday after 9/11. We know that the documents created by the FAA with NORAD’s cooperation to brief the White House contained no information with respect to who was notified when about the last two hijacked flights—American 77 and United 93. By the next day both the FAA and NORAD had suddenly reached a conclusion about those flights. There are two equally plausible possibilities to explain this. The first is that the White House literally directed the story and told them what to say about the flights. The second is that the White House responded with some variation of “this just won’t do, we need to know what happened” and they came up with those conclusions on their own.

My own experience in government—having served as chief counsel to the governor of New Jersey and as the state’s attorney general—tells me that the latter of the two is the most likely possibility. I think the White House essentially told the FAA and NORAD, “We can’t use this to create an official chronology of events because it leaves half the day unaccounted for, so go figure it out.” I think they then went and “figured it out” and presented something that didn’t hold up. I can’t prove which scenario is true but I can show pretty persuasively it wasn’t bureaucratic incompetence that accounts for it. Quite frankly, if it was bureaucratic incompetence it’s almost a scarier story.

Q: In the grand scheme of things isn’t the government’s deception about how we were defended on 9/11 a minor matter? After all, this wasn’t like the Johnson administration’s fabrication of the Tonkin Gulf incident that escalated Vietnam. It didn’t provide the pretext for aggression like the manipulation of intelligence about Iraq’s WMDs, nor did it cause a constitutional crisis like Nixon’s lies about Watergate or Clinton’s lies about Monica Lewinsky. So why should we care?
 
A: In its own way the deception prevented us from achieving the kind of reconsideration of government that the true story of 9/11 should have led to. In the 1990s there was a lot of rhetoric and action on the part of the Clinton administration to reinvent government. The idea was that in the post-Cold War world the threats and challenges we were facing were much more complex and required a fundamental change in the way bureaucracies were allowed to function. This book lays out in great detail the ways in which various government agencies and departments functioned in the years, months, weeks, and days leading up to 9/11. In doing so it shows that nothing had changed. Government hadn’t been reinvented to face the new threats and challenges. And that, in large measure, is why we failed to interdict the 9/11 plot.

After the attacks of 9/11 there should have been a searching reexamination of the nature of government, how it operates, and how government bureaucracies function—as top-heavy silos of isolated and narrowly defined missions, jealous of the information to which they are privy and structured not to solve problems but to deflect responsibility. Overstating the efficiency and effectiveness of our national response prevented that critical reexamination from taking place. If you look at what happened with our response to Hurricane Katrina, the consequences of our failure to do so becomes apparent.  

Q: Why do you consider Katrina so significant?

A: I’ve actually presented this at various lectures and it’s something that has always had a huge impact on my audience. We’ve often been told the response to 9/11 ended up the way it did because it was a high-consequence/low probability event. The chances of it happening were so extraordinarily remote there was no way the government could have prepared for it. That’s what makes the comparison to Hurricane Katrina so interesting. Katrina was a high consequence/high probability event. In fact it was something for which the government had spent years preparing. When you see the same kinds of problems occurring even when the catastrophe is not a surprise, it forces you to reexamine 9/11. The government responded to 9/11 the way it did not because it was taken by surprise but because that’s the way our government was designed to respond.

Q: You say unless we change government we will fail to protect ourselves, with horrifying consequences. What kinds of changes need to be made? And if we weren’t able to make them even as the smoke was still smoldering over the wreckage at Ground Zero, how will we ever be able to make them now?

A: I think if we understand the nature of the problem we can fix it. The simplest way to put it is that we have to plan to respond to crises the way we now know crises are actually experienced. It’s not from the top down—with the president giving orders that move smoothly down the chain of command. Instead it’s all about people on the ground confronted with extreme situations having to make critical decisions, and national leadership becoming relevant only when the crisis has reached a point where you can allow for hours between decisions. 9/11 did indeed spur some government reorganization. We resorted to the predictable method of creating a new bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security. But the practice of top-down decision-making was left unchanged. We assured ourselves this was a great solution but had in fact done nothing to enhance our ability to deal with a major emergency. That’s why our response to Katrina was almost an exact replication of our response to 9/11. Once again it was all about teleconferences among top leaders—another echo chamber of officials—talking to themselves and passing along inaccurate information while people on the ground were making decisions they weren’t supposed to be making, based on the model devised after 9/11. In the future we have to make plans to deal with crises the way we know they’re going to be experienced, and that’s from the ground up.

Q: What do you think would happen now if there were another mass casualty attack like 9/11?

A: I think our reaction time will be a lot better because of our past experiences. But I’m concerned that the model for how crises are handled still very much emphasizes the primacy of “top officials.” The protocols of this model have been practiced in a series of so-called TOPOFF exercises begun in the wake of 9/11. By all accounts the exercises were constructed with little or no input from state and local law-enforcement or first-responder communities. Back in 2007 then-Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano was among those complaining they were too top heavy, too expensive, too protracted, and too remote from anything resembling a real-world scenario. I am encouraged by her background as a two-term governor and before that as an attorney general. She understands that state and local officials have to be integral to any response they come up with or it won’t work.

Q: And yet in the book you also point out that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was simply another layer of bureaucracy added to the pile.

A: I don’t think it’s possible to unring that bell. Was it a good idea to create Homeland Security? Perhaps the answer is yes as part of a larger effort of reimagining government. But whether the answer is yes or no, it’s there now. We need to figure out how to make it work in a way that is consistent with the way crises are going to be lived on the ground.

Q: What surprised you most as you put all this together and what do you think will most surprise readers?

A: It might sound obvious but what surprised me most is how alike all the bureaucracies are. The same kind of challenges I saw at the state level—managing a department in state government—existed with much greater consequences and implications at the federal level. There’s a sameness to the way government works, whether it’s at the state, local or federal level, that we all need to be concerned about. I assumed that as you went up the food chain certain realities would change and things would run more smoothly. In fact I found it was just the opposite. Bureaucracies exist more to deflect blame than to solve problems. That has to be dealt with as we move forward. I hope that’s one thing that will surprise readers.

Another thing that will perhaps surprise them is how the acts of government officials frustrated the process of getting at the truth. The image of Sandy Berger—Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor—sneaking documents out of the national archive, hiding them at a construction site, and then taking them home and shredding them is almost farcical but it shows you the length to which people will go so that the government’s shortcomings aren’t discovered. There’s also the NORAD/FAA story, which is told at length, and the different clever ways their officials talked around what actually happened on 9/11. Then there’s the CIA destroying the tapes of the interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo and not telling the Commission they existed. I hope people are surprised and outraged by these instances of deception because the only truly insurmountable obstacle to fixing a problem is if you can’t discover that the problem exists.

Q: There are those who will say the 9/11 Commission, and its report, was guided by anti-Bush administration political motivations and that the same thing is now guiding you in writing this book. What’s your reaction?

A: It’s simply not true. Politically I’m an independent. If anything I’ve always tended to tilt toward the Republican side of the aisle. I was Christie Whitman’s chief counsel when she was governor and served as attorney general in her cabinet. And Tom Kean, a Republican, was the one who recruited me to the Commission. This book lays out in fairly good detail the foibles of both the Clinton and Bush administrations as they tried to come to terms with terrorism. So I think the charge of bias or political motivation—to the extent it’s leveled—just isn’t true. 

Q: What do you want readers to get out of this book?

A: I want them to be concerned about how government operates. I want them to develop a resolve to really push back and to urge a change in the way bureaucracies function. Although real change will be exceedingly difficult, I don’t think it’s impossible. By all accounts the response to last year’s Gulf hurricane was a vast improvement over the Katrina response. So things can be improved. Some people might say bureaucracies are a reflection of human nature and we’ll never be able to fix them. I hope that’s not true. I hope people will come away with a resolve to change the way government works so we can all be safer.