Dan Fletcher interviews Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer: A New Look at the 9/11 Commission
Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, tasked with investigating the government response to the attacks. His new book, The Ground Truth, picks up where the commission left off — taking a deeper look at the government's disorganized response to the attacks and exposing officials determined to hide their failings from the inquiry. Farmer uses newly released transcripts and recordings to cast doubt on the official version of events and show that the U.S. government was struggling to figure out which planes were hijacked and where they were going, even hours after the initial plane hit the World Trade Center. He spoke with TIME about the attacks and how to improve the U.S. response in a crisis.
What was your involvement with the 9/11 Commission?
I was assigned to head a team looking at the day of 9/11 itself and our response to the attack. I thought it would be one of the easier stories to put together because there was so much already written and broadcast about it. But as we started to get access to primary source material, the stories didn't match. And they didn't match in some pretty significant ways. What became clear was that during the time that the attacks were occurring, there was a complete disconnect between the national command structure and the defenders on the ground, who had to improvise a response based on faulty information.
Why do you think government proved to be so inept at dealing with both the terrorist threat and the actual attack?
The chaos that occurred on 9/11 was really inseparable from the various policy decisions and communication lapses and failures to share information throughout the government in the preceding decade. It all revolved around what I call an estrangement between the people running the departments and agencies and the people who were actually operational. [Former FBI Director] Louis Freeh could identify terrorism as a major threat, but that imperative got lost somewhere in the bureaucracy. The same thing happened throughout the government. It's really foolhardy to single out individual agency heads as we tend to do in our culture when really, I think the problem is deeper — the problem is the difficulty of orchestrating a change in mission when government is structured a certain way.
Yet after the 9/11 commission report, government responded by creating even more bureaucracy.
People do what they're comfortable doing. The government was comfortable creating a new Department of Homeland Security, and so that's what they did. If you look at the 9/11 Commission's recommendations and which ones were adopted and which ones weren't, the ones most critical of the bureaucracy were the ones that weren't done.
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What was your involvement with the 9/11 Commission?
I was assigned to head a team looking at the day of 9/11 itself and our response to the attack. I thought it would be one of the easier stories to put together because there was so much already written and broadcast about it. But as we started to get access to primary source material, the stories didn't match. And they didn't match in some pretty significant ways. What became clear was that during the time that the attacks were occurring, there was a complete disconnect between the national command structure and the defenders on the ground, who had to improvise a response based on faulty information.
Why do you think government proved to be so inept at dealing with both the terrorist threat and the actual attack?
The chaos that occurred on 9/11 was really inseparable from the various policy decisions and communication lapses and failures to share information throughout the government in the preceding decade. It all revolved around what I call an estrangement between the people running the departments and agencies and the people who were actually operational. [Former FBI Director] Louis Freeh could identify terrorism as a major threat, but that imperative got lost somewhere in the bureaucracy. The same thing happened throughout the government. It's really foolhardy to single out individual agency heads as we tend to do in our culture when really, I think the problem is deeper — the problem is the difficulty of orchestrating a change in mission when government is structured a certain way.
Yet after the 9/11 commission report, government responded by creating even more bureaucracy.
People do what they're comfortable doing. The government was comfortable creating a new Department of Homeland Security, and so that's what they did. If you look at the 9/11 Commission's recommendations and which ones were adopted and which ones weren't, the ones most critical of the bureaucracy were the ones that weren't done.