(Norton) $10
With an eye toward bipartisan objectivity, political gravitas, and posterity, The 9/11 Commission Report is penned in a scientific, almost cold hand: "The hijackers attacked sometime between 8:42 and 8:46. They used knives (as reported by two passengers and a flight attendant), mace (reported by one passenger), and the threat of a bomb (reported by the same passenger). They stabbed members of the flight crew (reported by a flight attendant and one passenger). Both pilots had been killed (reported by one flight attendant)."
As a result, any opinions laced into this sterile, stilted prose leap from the text like winking neon. Listen to the disdain for bureaucracy in this matter-of-fact conclusion: "About five minutes after the hijacking began, Betty Ong contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, via an AT&T airphone to report an emergency about the flight. This was the first of several occasions on 9/11 when flight attendants took action outside the scope of their training, which emphasized that in a hijacking, they were to communicate with the cockpit crew."
Indeed, it's hard not to notice that the commission has an opinion (about things like "the scope of... training") that's decidedly pointed--and, in fact, more dramatic than the commission's widely reported opinion about the need to create a cabinet-level position of national intelligence director. In the commission's opinion, the most important characters in the 9/11 story are those--like flight attendant Betty Ong, like an unnamed air traffic controller at the FAA's Boston Center, like Minneapolis FBI field agent Coleen Rowley--who didn't follow protocol; who, in fact, broke the rules. The report lauds the efforts of any player who steps outside the lines.
"Boston Center did not follow the protocol in seeking military assistance through the prescribed chain of command," the commission writes after painstakingly, and, perhaps comically, deriding the structure of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). "At 8:37:52, Boston Center reached [NORAD]," the commission continues, "this was the first notification received by the military--at any level--that American 11 had been hijacked.... That nine minutes' notice before impact was the most the military would receive of any of the four hijackings."
As for iconoclast FBI agent Coleen Rowley and her Minneapolis office's attempt to buck FBI headquarters, the commission applauds them: "The investigation of Moussaoui might... have led to a breakthrough that would have disrupted the plot.... [But] there was substantial disagreement between Minneapolis agents and FBI headquarters as to what Moussaoui was planning.... The [national headquarters agent] complained that Minneapolis's request was couched in a manner that was intended to get people 'spun up.' The Minneapolis supervisor replied that was precisely his intent. He said he was 'trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.'"
The 9/11 commission is aware that more than just Americans broke the rules. Describing the hijackers, the commission writes: "By 8:00 A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, [the terrorists] had defeated all the security layers that America's civil aviation security then had in place...." In short, the commission acknowledges that the surreptitious hijackers won tactically that day.
What's chilling, though, is that by applauding cogs in the system like Flight 11's Ong and Minneapolis' Rawley, who broke the rules, the commission is acknowledging that the hijackers won on a more profound level. The hijackers were the most inspired rule breakers of all time. The hijackers were able to execute a nearly flawless attack by studying, practicing, and mastering the playbook of U.S. commercial air travel; they knew the system so well that they also knew how to undermine it. They even went a step further and broke the rules of hijacking itself--relying on the passengers' assumptions about airplane takeovers (demands, flights to Cuba) to complete their horrific plot. This genius spate of rule-breaking on the part of the hijackers has led the 9/11 Commission to conclude that the only worthy response, perhaps the only way to fight terrorism at all, is to break the rules right back.
This is a stark acknowledgement being made by the 9/11 Commission. In reviewing the anarchy that visited the United States on September 11 (and continues to this day as we face threats from al Qaeda terrorists who pledge to "hit America's shopping malls, stadiums and kindergartens.... This is our promise...") the 9/11 Commission has rightly concluded, as the terrorists have concluded, that we live in a time when rules don't always apply.