John Farmer: The Ground Truth

Introduction: The View From the Ground (pp. 1-2):

In particular, three developments since The 9/11 Commission Report was issued have made possible, and necessary, this reexamination of our nation's response: the declassification of many of the primary-source records of the day, which makes it possible to portray the events as they were lived; the release of investigative reports by the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense and Transportation, which, I shall argue, ignore critical evidence in concluding that government officials did not knowingly mislead the public about the events of 9/11; and the occurrence of Hurricane Katrina, which sheds essential, if tragic, light on the government's failure to recognize and learn from the "ground truth" of 9/11.

(p. 5):

More important, because the government's version of what occurred on 9/11 overstated the efficiency and effectiveness of our national defense response, it obscured that day's essential reality, and its causes: a radical disconnect between those who were putatively in charge of conducting our nation's defense and those who were on the ground, making operational decisions. Because the government didn't tell the truth, in other words, we lost the "ground truths" of 9/11; (1) there was no connection or collaboration between Washington and the ground-level commanders, as a result of which (2) our national decision-makers in Washington -- or in the case of President Bush, in the air -- were irrelevant to how we were defended during that critical time period.

Part One: Years

Two Men in a Cave: 1996-1997: Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

1998 (p. 33):

Bin Laden responded tot he missile attacks and indictment in two ways. First, for his protection, he increased the numbers of his personal bodyguards and took to moving around frequently, sleeping in a different location each night. Second, he escalated his jihad against the United States. He responded to the news of the reward for his capture by offering a higher reward -- $9 million -- for the assassination of the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the FBI director, or the CIA director. In late 1998 or early 1999, he met again with KSM and authorized him to go ahead with the planes operation.

According to KSM, the embassy bombings represented a "watershed" in the story of the 9/11 conspiracy. They convinced him that bin Laden was serious about attacking American interests directly. They demonstrated that increasing military sophistication of al Qaeda that was being developed in the training camps of Afghanistan. In addition, the aggressive American response -- missile attacks, diplomatic pressure on the Taliban to expel him, the indictment -- had made clear that the stakes involved in bin Laden's struggle against the United States were by 1999, for bin Laden, life and death.

1999 (p. 41):

The fact that America was not attacked during the millennium, in other words, was a result not of impregnable defenses but of the fortuity of alert customs inspectors in Port Angeles, Washington, and the lack of a fully mature plan.

2000 (p. 47):

In response to the Cole bombing, the Pentagon outlined thirteen options for the use of military force against the Taliban or bin Laden; it was described as a primer on the "extraordinary complexity" of proceeding with a "boots on the ground" approach. The "overwhelming message," Richard Clarke concluded, "was, 'We don't want to do this.'" The remaining alternative, an alliance with Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance, was rejected by the senior national security staff at the White House. Nothing was done.

Part Two: 2001

Months (p. 52):

Both Shehhi and Atta were stopped and questioned by INS officials when they attempted to reenter the country. Although neither was able to present a student visa, both persuaded the officials that they needed to return to the United States so that they could complete their flight-school training.

Atta also encountered law enforcement on April 26, when he was stopped in Florida in a routine traffic stop. He presented his international driver's license, but apparently resolved to get a U.S. license; on May 2, he and Jarrah visited the Florida Division of Motor Vehicles office in Lauderdale Lakes to get Florida driver's licenses.

(p. 55):

Toward the end of June, Richard Clarke advised Rice that the threat reporting had reached "a crescendo." Six separate intelligence reports, according to Clarke, indicated that al Qaeda personnel were talking about a pending attack. The intelligence reporting "consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil and that they would consist of possible multiple -- but not necessarily simultaneous -- attacks."

(p. 60):

As the hijackers' international travels dwindled to a few flights at the end of July, the intelligence about the impending attack decreased correspondingly. On July 27, Richard Clarke informed Rice that the spike in intelligence about a near-term al Qaeda attack had ceased. He advised, however, that the alert level remain high, because some of the reporting indicated that bin Laden's plans had been delayed, not canceled.

Weeks (p. 61):

During the first three weeks of August, the hijackers finalized their plans. On August 4, Atta drove to the Orlando airport to pick up a final hijacker, Mohamed al Khatani. Khatani was detained by INS officials, however, because he spoke no English, was traveling with a one-way ticket and little money, and could not explain what he planned to do while in the United States. He was sent back to Dubai.

(pp. 65-66):

On August 23, Director of Central Intelligence Tenet was informed about the Moussaoui case in a briefing titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." He was told some of the particulars of the case, and that, notwithstanding his alarm about the intensity of threat reporting, no connection to al Qaeda was apparent to him. Furthermore, he did not share this briefing with the FBI, the White House staff, or the president; because the arrest was made domestically, he viewed it as an FBI matter, not within his portfolio.

Days (pp. 67-68):

The Bush administration's National Security Council Principals Committee met on September 4. It was their first formal meeting to be devoted primarily to the question of what to do about Afghanistan, al Qaeda, and bin Laden. The members were presented with a draft National Security Decision Directive outlining a revised U.S. policy toward al Qaeda and Afghanistan. The stated goal of the directive was the elimination of bin Laden and his organization. The measures it proposed to undertake to achieve this goal included increased support, over a three-year period, for Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance, the principal Afghani opponents of the Taliban.

Another potential proposal involved empowering the CIA to deploy an armed pilotless aircraft, the Predator, to Afghanistan, and authorizing the CIA to use it to assassinate bin Laden. There was ambivalence within the CIA about whether it was desirable to have this power; this ambivalence may have been reflected in Tenet's presentation of the option at the meeting. The committee approved support for the Northern Alliance, while expressing reservations about the funding source, but deferred on the issue of the Predator. The Air Force itself had no interest in deploying the Predator, viewing it as an untested robot. [ . . . ]

The Bush administration's plan to support the Northern Alliance was dealt a severe blow on September 9. Its leader Ahmed Shah Massoud sat down for an interview with two reporters who claimed to work for an Arab television news organization. In reality, they were al Qaeda operatives; their television camera concealed a bomb, which detonated as the interview began, killing Massoud and thus decapitating the Northern Alliance.

Needless to say, the timing of the Bush administration's decision to re-enter Afghanistan is peculiar. It rather suggests that Bush (at least Bush's security people) had decided to lay the groundwork for provoking a wider war in Afghanistan. One thing missing from the discussion of the Predator proposal is where they planned on basing the things. Pakistan was still allied with the Taliban, and Iran and the former SSRs wouldn't have appeared as very good options.

In retrospect, the killing of Massoud looks like the first shot in al Qaeda's offensive, especially given bin Laden's explicit wish to draw America into a superpower death trap in Afghanistan.

(p. 69):

But the time for stopping a domestic attack by taking out bin Laden, or anyone in Afghanistan, had come and gone. The plot had been undetected for years by the $30-billion-per-year apparatus of American national security, and by the trillion-dollar system of bases around the world. Various threads of the plot had been picked up at various times by NSA signals intelligence, NIMA imagery intelligence, CIA human source intelligence, and other sources such as State Department reporting, and by the FBI in investigating the embassy bombings of 1998 and the USS Cole bombing of 2000, and in conducting its normal field intelligence inside the United States. No one, however, had had access to all of the various threads of information.

Fault Lines (pp. 80-81):

Secretary Aspin resigned within a year, blamed widely for the infamous "Black Hawk Down" misadventure in Somalia in October 1993, when a failed mission to kidnap a Somali warlord resulted in the deaths of seventeen American Special Forces soldiers. Because Secretary Aspin had refused the military's request to deploy tanks to the region, the American soldiers who were pinned down by Somali militia were rescued ultimately by armored vehicles from Italy and Pakistan.

(p. 81):

Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, the bottom line was this: the fundamental reassessment Clinton and Aspin had envisioned of the Pentagon's role in a post-Cold War world, and its attendant peace dividend, never really occurred. If anything, the military's role grew; the Cold War mission was retained virtually intact, but augmented by the need to address emerging missions like regional conflicts and transnational terrorism through the achievement of "global force projection" and "full-spectrum dominance." The reduction in American nuclear forces ceased. In addition to maintaining the hundreds of American military bases around the world, the Clinton administration supported funding for missile defense and for an expanded global military presence. Defense spending, which had been trending downward under President Bush, rose under President Clinton, from $260 billion to more than $300 billion.

(p. 82):

This state of affairs remained largely unchanged when the Bush administration took office in January 2001. As the 9/11 Commission pointed out, the new administration "focused heavily on Russia, a new nuclear strategy that allowed missile defenses, Europe, Mexico, and the Persian Gulf." The new administration's goal was to maintain American preeminence -- in Paul Wolfowitz's terms, "to prevent the emergence of a new rival." This vision would be supported by "not only the maintenance of America's global array of bases but the expansion of it. Not only the maintenance of America's huge defense budget but the expansion of it. Not only the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal, but the expansion of it. The defense industry would continue to boom. The Pentagon would continue to be the very heartbeat of government, the capital of a Pax Americana."

(p. 88):

In 2000, for instance, planners rejected a proposed NORAD training exercise, known as Positive Force, which took as its premise that a hijacked plane would be involved in a suicide attack on the Pentagon.

(p. 91):

And so it was that on the morning of 9/11, the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, New York, stood up at full alert, not in preparation for a terrorist attack but in preparation for an exercise in which Russian planes would fly over the North Pole to bomb the United States, a scenario that had been described as outdated as long ago as 1966 by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

Part Three: Day of Days

Hours: Predawn to 8:00 A.M. (p. 99):

The FAA's lack of urgency is usually explained by noting that before 9/11, it had been over a decade since the last domestic hijacking. This led to a belief among FAA regulators and airline carriers that the existing system of checkpoint screening was working well and that, in effect, "the nation had won the battle against hijacking."

Rush Hour: 8:00 to 9:03 A.M. (p. 112):

The hijackers [of American 11] moved at 8:14. As Mohammed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari rushed the cockpit, a passenger seated directly behind them, in 9B, who had served for four years as an officer in the Israeli military, may have tried to stop them. He was seated one row ahead of Suqami. He was stabbed repeatedly and left in the aisle. Two stewardesses were also stabbed. The hijackers sprayed mace toward the back of the plane to keep the passengers and other flight crew members at bay, then took control of the cockpit.

(p. 142):

American Airlines Flight 11 had disappeared from air traffic controller Bottiglia's scope at 8:46, as it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40 a.m. At almost precisely the same moment, unaware of the location of American 11, NEADS commanders issued a scramble order to the F-15s at Otis Air Force Base. Although it would not be noticed for several minutes, virtually simultaneously with the crash of American 11 into the North Tower, United Flight 175's assigned transponder code switched from 1749 to 3020, and then switched again to 3321.

That flight too, officials would discover, was under attack.

(p. 144):

It is clear that, as the order to scramble came at 8:46 a.m., just as American 11 was hitting the World Trade Center, the military had insufficient notice of the hijacking to position its assets to respond. This reality would also be repeated throughout the morning. Indeed, the eight minutes' notice that NEADS had of American 11 would prove to be the most notice the sector would received that morning of any of the hijackings, and the sector's inability to locate the primary radar track until the last few readings would also recur.

(p. 148):

At 8:57, United 175 turned to the northeast and leveled off at 28,500 feet. One minute later, it turned toward New York City. Seeing the turn, Bottiglia told another controller, "We may have another hijack over here, two of them." Controllers followed United 175 as it headed at over 600 miles per hour from the skies over Allentown. Pennsylvania, into western New Jersey airspace. They realized it was heading straight toward Delta Airlines Flight 2315 en route to Tampa, Florida, from Connecticut. Normal controller calm was replaced with urgency, as the controllers warned the Delta pilot: "Traffic, 2:00. Ten miles, I think he's been hijacked. I don't know his intentions. Take any evasive action necessary."

(p. 153):

Lee Hanson got off the phone with his son at 9:03. He turned on his television as United 175 banked over Lower Manhattan and slammed into the South Tower. The time was 9:03:11. America was under attack.

Minutes: 9:03-9:37 A.M. (pp. 154-155):

An hour after the first flight, American 11, took off from Logan Airport, the "planes conspiracy" that had been hatched years before in the remote mountain wilderness of Afghanistan was halfway to triumphant completion. American 11 had crashed at 8:46 into the upper floors of the World Trade Center's North Tower, blowing through floors 93 to 99. All three of the building's stairwells became impassable from the ninety-second floor up. Hundreds were killed instantly by the impact, hundreds remained alive but trapped above the crash site. By 8:57, the New York Fire Department chiefs on site had instructed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police and the Trade Center building personnel to evacuate both towers because of the extent of the damage to the North Tower. At 9:02, a minute before United 175 hit the South Tower, an announcement over the public-address system in that building advised that an orderly evacuation could begin, if conditions warranted.

United 175 hit the South Tower from the south, banking into the seventy-seventh through eighty-fifth floors, killing everyone on board and hundreds of people on those floors, but leaving one of its three stairwells passable, at least initially, from the ninety-first floor down. As The 9/11 Commission Report stated, "What had been the largest and most complicated rescue operation in [New York] city history instantly doubled in magnitude."

(p. 155):

President Bush, in Sarasota, Florida, for a reading event at Booker Elementary School, had been informed before his 9:00 a.m. event by senior advisor Karl Rove and chief of staff Andrew Card that "a small, twin-engine plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The president's reaction was that the incident must have been caused by pilot error."

(pp. 155-156):

Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, had had breakfast that morning with members of Congress. Despite hijacking protocols that called for his notification and approval before scrambling fighter jets, Rumsfeld was not aware of the hijacking of American 11 or of the scrambling of the Otis fighters. An aide interrupted his daily intelligence briefing to inform him of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. There is no indication that he asked whether fighters had been deployed; he did not order them deployed himself at that point, He did not seek to contact NORAD or the FAA. He resumed his daily briefing while awaiting further information.

(pp. 160-161):

American Airlines Flight 77 had begun its takeoff roll from Dulles at 8:20 a.m. The flight proceeded normally through airspace controlled by the Washington Air Traffic Control Center, and was handed off to Indianapolis Center at approximately 8:40 a.m. [ . . . ]

Sometime between that transmission and 8:54, the hijackers brandished knives and box-cutters. They forced the passengers and crew in first class to the back of the plane, then moved to secure control of the cockpit.

At 8:54 a.m., the flight began a left turn toward the south without authorization. Shortly after it began the turn, the aircraft was observed descending. At 8:56 a.m., as the plane continued to deviate slightly to the south from its flight plan, it was lost from radar completely; not only was the transponder signal gone, but the plane also disappeared as a primary target.

(pp. 170-172):

At 9:24 a.m., Great Lakes Regional Operations Center notified FAA Headquarters of the simultaneous loss of radio communications and radar identification for American 77. No one from headquarters contacted the military with this information.

A White House videoconference led by Richard Clarke was organized at 9:25 and eventually included the CIA, the FBI, the departments of State, Defense, and Justice, and the FAA. It took at least ten minutes for the call to begin in earnest. No information relating to American 77 was passed on this call. [ . . . ]

At 9:29, President bush addressed the nation from the Booker Elementary School in Sarasota. [ . . . ] As he was speaking, the Langley Air Force Base F-16s lifted off and headed east over the Atlantic to avoid other aircraft. American Airlines 77 was flying at 7,000 feet, heading east, thirty-eight miles west of the Pentagon, unknown to air traffic control supervisors and unknown to the military. [ . . . ]

At 9:32, air traffic controllers at Dulles International Airport Terminal Approach observed "a primary radar target tracking eastbound at a high rate of speed." They called Reagan National Airport and told officials there of the approaching aircraft.

(pp. 178-179):

Controllers at Reagan National Airport, having learned of an unidentified fast-moving aircraft heading toward them, directed an unarmed National Guard C-130H cargo aircraft, which had just taken off en route to Minnesota, to identify and follow the plane identified by Dulles International Airport. The C-130H pilot spotted it, identified it as a Boeing 757, and observed it making a 330-degree turn to the south. At the end of the turn, the plane descended through 2,200 feet and flew toward the Pentagon or White House. When the tower advised the Secret Service of this turn, the Service ordered the immediate evacuation of the vice president at 9:36. Agents lifted the vice president from his chair and propelled him to the bunker. He entered the tunnel leading to the shelter at 9:36.

American 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37:46 a.m., at 530 miles per hour, killing all on board plus 125 on ground.

(pp. 184-185):

Furthermore, Clarke's recollection that Garvey reported eleven flights off course or out of communication before 9:30 is belied not only by the fact that the FAA was not yet on the conference but by the contemporaneous log of the conference, which records that at 10:03 the conference received reports of other missing aircraft: "2 possibly 3 aloft." His recollection, however, that the number "eleven" was reported into the conference squares with the reality of that morning: the report that American "eleven" was still flying and en route to Washington, D.C.

The decision to order a national ground stop was in fact initiated by the national operations manager at the FAA's Herndon Command Center, Ben Sliney, on his own authority, not as a consequence of the videoconference. Similarly, the decision to form a combat air patrol over Washington was made by Major Nasypany at NEADS and verified up the chain of command, not prompted by the conversation on the videoconference. The White House videoconference "learned of a combat air patrol over Washington" at 10:03.

(p. 187):

Most ominous, FAA Headquarters was responding to the news it had received, at 9:34, that a fourth aircraft had been hijacked over Ohio. The pilot and copilot and a flight attendant aboard that flight, United 93, had been murdered. The passengers aboard that fourth aircraft, United 93, were learning what was happening everywhere else and discussing desperately what they should do. The morning was being lived now not in hours or even minutes, but in seconds.

Seconds: 9:37-10:30 A.M. (p. 188):

Unlike the other hijacked flights that morning, United 93 had not taken off on time; its departure from Newark Airport was delayed until 8:40 a.m. because of the usual morning traffic congestion leaving that airport. The flight was passed routinely from the terminal approach controllers to New York Center, and then to Cleveland Center.

Only four hijackers were on board, perhaps because the fifth, Mohamed al Khatani, had been turned away at Orlando airport on August 4; Khatani would be captured after 9/11 in Afghanistan. United 93 was also unlike the other hijacked flights in that significant time had elapsed with no attack from the hijackers.

(pp. 189-190):

At 9:28:16, the hijackers breached the cockpit; over the radio, amid crashing sounds and static, came the words "Mayday mayday . . . Hey, get out of here!" Thirty seconds later, at 9:28:46, the words were repeated: "Get out of here! . . . Get out of here!" Because the Cleveland controller was unsure which of the flights under his control was the source of the transmission, he said: "Somebody call Cleveland?" He then noticed that United 93 had dropped dramatically in altitude, losing 685 feet in a matter of seconds.

(pp. 209-210):

The passengers and crew of United 93 had come to the realization that they were the last line of defense; every element of the vast architecture of national defense, intelligence, and law enforcement, from the CIA and the NSA to DoD to State to the FBI to the FAA and NORAD, over years, then months, then weeks, then days, down to hours, to minutes, to seconds, had been stripped away. No one could save them now.

They gathered themselves in preparation to rush the hijackers. The GTE operator heard someone yell, "Are you guys ready? Okay! Let's roll!"

By 9:57, as the passengers and crew aboard United 93 began their rush up the aisle, NEADS personnel were tracking not United 93 but Delta 1989, although by that time they were almost certain that the Delta flight had not been hijacked. Any chance the NEADS air defenders had of learning about United 93 had been thwarted by the failure of FAA Headquarters to pass along the information it had been receiving regarding United 93 since 9:34, by the inability of the National Military Command Center to get anyone from the FAA on the Air Threat Conference Call despite repeated attempts, by the failure of the FAA executives on the White House videoconference to pass on the information, and by the direction of the FAA's Command Center in Herndon to the Cleveland Center not to call the military because that was FAA Headquarters' job. At 9:44, NORAD reported to the Air Threat Conference Call that Delta 1989 might be a hijacked plane based on the information NEADS had received from the FAA's Boston Center. Four minutes later, a caller from the White House shelter asked if there were any further reports of hijacked planes; the National Military Command Center's deputy director mentioned Delta 1989, reporting that "that would be the fourth possible hijack." There was no mention of United 93.

(pp. 219-220):

The sounds of the struggle were picked up by the cockpit voice recorder, which was recovered after the incident. On the tape, the sounds of struggle -- shouting, crashing -- grew louder, suggesting that the uprising was moving steadily toward the cockpit door. At 9:58:57, Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker pilot, told one of the other hijackers to block the cockpit door. He rocked the wings of United 93 sharply from side to side in an effort to throw the passengers and crew off balance. The assault continued unabated.

One minute later, Jarrah changed tactics, pitching the nose of the airplane up and down to disrupt the assault. There were "loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and the sound of breaking glasses and plates." At 10:00:03, Jarrah stabilized the flight path, then asked, "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?" One of his fellow hijackers responded. "No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off." Jarrah resumed pitching the nose of the plane up and down. At 10:00:26, a passenger yelled, "In the cockpit! If we don't, we'll die!" Sixteen seconds later, a passenger yelled, "Roll it!" A reasonable inference is that the passengers and crew had subdued the hijacker resistance outside the cockpit and were now at the threshold, ramming the door.

At 10:01, Jarrah stabilized the plane again, and said, "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!" He then asked, "Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?" The other hijacker replied, "Yes, put it in and pull it down." The crashing noises continued. At 10:02:23, a hijacker yelled, "Pull it down! Pull it down!" [ . . . ]

Heading almost straight down at 580 miles per hour, United 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C., at 10:03:11 a.m.

(pp. 225-226):

High over Washington, one of the Langley fighters had spotted a target flying at low altitude near the White House. The fighter requested rules of engagement, and was told, "ID. TYPE. TAIL." In other words, even after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck, even after the intention of the hijackers to use planes as missiles was clear, the NORAD rules of engagement had not changed from the rules of a classic hijacking. There was no clearance to shoot the plane down. [ . . . ]

Word came back that the mysterious aircraft was one of the Langley fighters flying low. "That was cool," said a Weapons controller. "We intercepted our own guys."

(pp. 226-228):

Sometime between 10:10 and 10:15, a White House military aide told the vice president that the aircraft was eighty miles out. The vice president was asked for authority to engage the aircraft. Scooter Libby described Cheney's reaction as quick and decisive: taking "about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing." He authorized the fighter pilots to engage. The aide returned a few minutes later, between 10:12 and 10:18, and informed that the flight was sixty miles out. The vice-president reaffirmed his authorization of the shoot-down. [ . . . ]

The issue became controversial, in large part, because the president and vice president later insisted, adamantly, that the president had already authorized the shoot-down in an earlier conversation. Both men, however, were surrounded by people like Lynne Cheney and Ari Fleischer, who had a strong sense of the historic moment, and by officials whose job it was to record the significant events of the day. [ . . . ] There is no record anywhere of a prior conversation between the president and vice president regarding the shoot-down order. Given the historic nature of the order, it strains credulity to believe that such a conversation occurred and went both unrecorded and unremarked upon in its immediate aftermath.

Part Four: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The Tale of Tales (p. 235):

The government's response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 did not cease with the response to the news that United 93 had crashed. The FAA was in the process of guiding 4,500 aircraft to land at their nearest airports; it did so without incident, in one of the more remarkable feats in aviation history. The military responded throughout the morning, raising the alert status of American armed services to DEFCON 3 just after 11:00, despite the fact that DEFCON 3 was a Cold War-era designation, devised to respond to nuclear threat. By noon, Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and General Eberhart put together a set of improvised rules of engagement that would have effectuated the shootdown authorization. NEADS and the FAA established later that morning a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week open line that operates to this day. The military made the transition nearly seamlessly into Operation Noble Eagle, a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week guardianship of America's airspace that continued for months. The military's alert status has been heightened ever since.

(pp. 265-272):

Kevin [Schaeffer] and Miles Kara (another team member, who was a Vietnam veteran and an Army colonel who left his position in the Department of Defense Inspector General's office of Intelligence Review to join the Professional Staff of the Joint Inquiry) laughed and explained that "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" was a military euphemism for "What the fuck!"

I don't recall today the particular discrepancy between the official version of what happened on 9/11 and what we were discovering that prompted Kevin's utterance; there were so many that "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" became a regular refrain for the members of my team. Among our Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moments, these stand out:

1. The discovery that the FAA could not have notified NEADS at 9:16 that United 93 had been hijacked. In fact, the flight had not even been hijacked by 9:16; it was proceeding normally. [ . . . ]

2. The discovery that the FAA did not notify NEADS that American 77 was hijacked at 9:24, as represented to the public by the FAA and DoD since September 18, 2001, and as testified to before Congress and the Commission. [ . . . ]

3. The discovery of the mistaken report that American 11 was still airborne and heading for Washington. [ . . . ]

4. The discovery that the documents and other materials provided to the 9/11 Commission by the FAA in response to its document requests were significantly incomplete. [ . . . ]

5. The discovery that the documents and other materials provided to the Commission by the Department of Defense were woefully incomplete. [ . . . ]

6. The claim by senior officials at the FAA and the Department of Defense, once the subpoenaed documents had been turned over, that the senior agency officials had not made a serious effort to reconstruct the events of 9/11. [ . . . ]

7. The evidence that an effort was in fact made, in the days after 9/11, to reconstruct the events of the day, and that the correct timeline had been identified. [ . . . ]

Anyone who has worked in government for a significant period will be sympathetic to the superior claim of incompetence over conspiracy. More often than not, government is too inept to be capable of successfully executing an elaborate scheme to conceal or deceive. That certainly has been my experience.

(p. 290):

Taken as a whole, the government's response to the emerging threat of terrorist attack was a stunning collapse of competence; 9/11 was its trailing consequence. The response on 9/11 replicated in compressed time the miscommunications, the garbled signals, the years of bureaucratic frustration that had preceded it. It was the product of a government that doesn't work, and the false story put forward about the events of that morning allowed the government to avoid the kind of searching reexamination of government that was appropriate to the situation, given the bureaucratic collapse that culminated in 9/11. Thus, years later, Richard Clarke could still believe that his high-level videoconference had been the nerve center of the nation's response; no one had done the thoroughgoing analysis that would have exposed the reality that national leadership was irrelevant during those critical moments. As a consequence, no one had acted to ensure that similar disconnects would not recur in a future crisis.

Part Five: Aftermath: Katrina and the Consequences of Denial (p. 294):

I also knew, from attending FEMA workshops and studying FEMA assessments over the years, that, as Douglas Brinkley puts it, "Most experts ranked a hurricane in New Orleans with an earthquake in California and a terrorist attack on New York as the gravest threats to the nation." I had attended a FEMA certification workshop in Manhattan, in which the scenario of a Category 3 hurricane striking New Orleans was played out in detail. The projected results had been devastating, but the level of detail involved in the presentation indicated that an emergency like the one Katrina promised to deliver had been anticipated and worked through in a painstaking manner. However powerful the storm, this would not be, I assured myself, another 9/11. Katrina would surprise no one.

The Days of Katrina

I didn't really get into this section, which provides a careful timeline on the forecasting and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

posted 2010-11-17