John Farmer, The Ground Truth

I've read the lead up to the day itself. Farmer's book is designed as a chronology (years, months, weeks, days) leading up to 9/11. His stated reason for doing so is to give the reader an understanding of how many steps were missed along the way and how good options were no longer available once the hijackings started. For example, the best case scenario was that NORAD would have shot down planes filled with passengers.

His main source for his theory of what went wrong on 9/11 is Amy Zegart. She is the author of Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and Origins of 9/11.

She gave a presentation about her theory: Zegart presentation followed by Scott Shane and Mark Lowenthal commentary

From Zegart's presentation:



While Farmer and Zegart make good points about bureaucratic problems their analysis doesn't ring true when they pretend that the conduct of specific officials wasn't applicable to the success of the attacks. There are repeated instances where individuals acted in a manner indicative of bad faith. Instances where individuals took advantage of bureaucratic problems in order to impede al Qaeda related investigations. The Farmer/Zegart analysis tracks with the popular media view of holding powerful officials to an extremely low standard of conduct. Tenet's contradictory conduct--dire warnings of possible attacks vs. withholding of information about suspected perpetrators of those possible attacks--couldn't possibly be chalked up to some sort of political corruption. It simply had to be because the CIA was still on Cold War footing.

orders...I could understand and accepted that. But the story is that we couldn't intercept any of the 4 aircraft that day. That would take a concerted top-down effort to make this not happen.

Learn the difference between bases "on alert" and those that are merely "combat ready" and also learn what an ADIZ is and you can actually answer your ownb question.

Roundtable interview

Farmer makes it clear that he thinks there was a coverup with respect to the air defense response. At the same time, he says around 13:30:



Ruh roh. I believe you have a prediction on the table about this. (I think Bolo has a similar prediction.) The OP is fairly polite, but we'll see what happens next.

A sociologist studying group behavior would have a field day on it.

Thanks for that.

The detachment from real world aspects. For example, the 9/11 Commission being completely detached from the fact that torture was being used to give them answers for their report.

As if the group think was: "Oh well, who gives a shit. We have a deadline. This baby is gonna be a bestseller. It's written like a thriller! Vince Flynn has nothing on us."

Because it seems that you are responding to what I said, and yet you replied to your post, not mine. Such a response doesn't appear on my personal page for checking replies to my posts. Of course, doing something like that on purpose, to hide a reply for as long as possible while still being able to score some kind of personal point in the thread, that would be cowardly and childish and ironic, given the point that you are making.

But I think you just accidentally replied to your own post when you meant to hit Reply on mine. Right?