The Ground Truth

July 13, 2009
Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, updates the commission's report in this thorough and bipartisan analysis. Drawing on newly declassified records and recent investigative reports from the departments of defense and transportation, the author concludes that the failure to detect and prevent the attack “lay in the nature of modern government.” Most significantly, “rules proscribing information-sharing” within and among agencies meant that no one had complete access to all available intelligence or information—typical “bureaucratic inertia” that presaged the government's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. Farmer faults the disconnect between decision-makers and operational employees, concluding that “leadership was irrelevant on 9/11” and the official version of events “was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue.” Farmer's conclusion that bureaucratic government “does not adapt fast enough to changing missions to be effective” is not original, but in his careful exegesis of the events of 9/11, he transcends easy generalizations to expose the fault lines in contemporary governance and point the way to fundamental reform.