The Ground Truth - book

The Ground Truth The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11, by John Farmer (Riverhead Books, N.Y., 2009)

John Farmer was senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission. Now that further information has surfaced about the unfortunate tragedy of 9/11 he has attempted to further straighten out the facts of the matter. I don’t want to say this is a bad book. In many ways it is useful and insightful, but I think it also contains a serious flaw.

Farmer believes that what occurred during 9/11 was basically a systemic failure. That is, our various institutions were simply not up to the job. He carefully traces the movements of the hijackers as they traveled to and from the United States prior to the hijackings, and shows how they rather easily penetrated our country even though there were obvious reasons why at least some of them should not have succeeded, and points out various instances that were either not reported or investigated as they should have been.

More importantly, he analyzes the organization of the most important players, The CIA, FBI, DOD, and NORAD. He demonstrates, successfully I believe, that none of these organizations were prepared for the terrorist attacks that occurred. They were, he points out, still oriented towards the Cold War, and had not managed to re-organize themselves for the new situation that had been developing for some years. Even when they attempted to change they did not always succeed. For example, even when George Tenet sent out memos specifically instructing his personnel to change their focus and concentrate more on terrorism, they failed to do so, at least quickly enough to matter. There was, Farmer suggest, a fundamental disconnect between the leadership and the organization being led. Much the same thing was true of the FBI, whose major preoccupation has always been domestic law enforcement, and had not completely embraced the newer emerging problem of international terrorism. At the Department of Defense, where, after the fall of the Soviet Union they were attempting to restructure, they had not completely succeeded. The joint Canadian-U.S. command, NORAD, that had been designed to protect our joint airspace, and at one time had a thousand fighter planes available for that purpose, by 9/11 had been reduced to a mere fourteen planes. In effect, our entire defense system was not prepared for the job it was compelled to attempt. There was little or no communication between the various agencies, jealously over their own turf, and a dysfunctional chain of command.

Farmer goes on to argue that although we should have learned from our experiences of 9/11, with respect to organization and preparedness for national disasters, we did not, and the same systemic failures occurred during Katrina. Even though Katrina was a totally different disaster, and even though the various organizations involved were not all the same, the same problems arose. He makes a good case for this.

Farmer acknowledges that what we were told by our government about 9/11 was not true. It was “spin,” designed to make us believe that the system had actually worked when in fact it had not. Basically, the story we were told was designed importantly to absolve anyone from responsibility for the tragedy that ensued, once it had been planned, presumably in the caves of Afghanistan, and once it had been successfully completed and the towers collapsed and the 3000 killed. What I find so unsatisfactory about The Ground Truth is that Farmer does the same thing, only in reverse. Whereas we were initially led to believe the system worked, and no one was responsible, Farmer argues that the system did not work, but he does not speak to the issue of responsibility or accountability. In both cases everything is blamed on “the system.”

But systems don’t operate on each other, they do not fail independently of those whose job it is to make them operate. At no point does Farmer truly suggest any individual person was a fault, except perhaps in a couple of cases where the individual made a presumably “honest” mistake. There is no suggestion that Tenet did anything wrong. He mentions Michael Brown, of course, but there is not even a hint that Brown was completely unsuitable for the job he was supposed to do. Even when Farmer reports on Brown’s testimony that he was told by the White House to lie, he does not raise any question about who lied. It appears that the White House itself, along with the other institutions involved, are reified, made into concrete objects that can speak and act on their own. But someone at the White House told him to lie, and that person was probably told to tell him to lie, the “White House” does not itself speak, nor does the “FBI” or the “CIA.” Without speculating wildly, it has to be the case that there were lies and misinformation passed along during the whole terrible misfortune and up and down the whole chain of command. Otherwise the “spin” could not have been created. When the Governor of Louisiana was told the levees had not been breached, when they had been even earlier, she was not told the truth (for whatever reason). Lies were clearly told about the New Orleans Police Department that basically disintegrated when some of the Officers began looting, and reportedly even shot some innocent civilians on a bridge. Lies were told about whether or not one of the hijacked planes was shot down, about who gave the order (in fact this order was never even communicated to the relevant pilots), about what supplies were being furnished to the disaster area, and when, and so on. I will concede that in many cases lies might have been told because of misinformation, but it cannot be the case that no one, no single individual, at any level, had anything whatsoever to do with the failures of 9/11 and Katrina. There has been no accountability, and will never be any as long as everything can be blamed simply on the system, “the system did it.”

Farmer does offer what I think is sound advice for what went wrong with the systems. Basically, he believes that people present on the ground at the time need to have more authority and power. The system has to function from the ground up rather than from the top down. Those at the top may be able to design and put into place the kind of system required, but they cannot deal with the practical realities when they occur. I had a bit of trouble puzzling over the title “The Ground Truth.” What farmer has in mind is that what is happening on the ground is the truth and should be respected above all else. I thought at first he might mean something like the truth ground into the ground, or the truth ground up and fed to us like bad hamburger, and frankly, when we are told the “system done it,” that is what we are being fed. As long as there is no individual accountability for failure there will never be a system that will work. Accountability was not valued by the Bush/Cheney administration, and it is not being valued by their current defenders either.