The devastating events which unfolded on the morning of September 11^th 2001 have caused us to look with great scrutiny at the actions leading up to them. The most comprehensive overview of those actions is found in The 9/11 Report. The report covers many topics from how Osama Bin Laden Al Qaeda gains support in the Islamic community to Intelligence leading up to September 11^th to the immediate reaction of the United States to the attacks. However, there is one specific area which I found most interesting. That area involves the reports chronicling of how key federal agencies interacted with one another during this crisis and how well informed those at the top really were.

The picture which I derived from the report is of a government in which information is slow to move from agency to agency and confusion or misinformation is what gets transmitted more often than not.

As I was reading through the report I was truly astounded at the high level of confusion and difficulty that each government agency faced when trying to cooperate with each other. An example of this difficult interaction would be the relationship between the FAA and NORAD. Despite the fact that protocols were in place for the interaction of the FAA and NORAD in the event of a hijacking the communication between the two agencies was horribly mismanaged and seemingly disastrous.

The faulty connection between the FAA and NORAD is just one example of many that persisted throughout the day and ultimately added to the government’s failure to react to the threats posed that day. Another clear example of this is the fact that two groups of federal agencies set up conference calls, the FAA and white house compared to The Pentagon, which both seemed to consider themselves as the decision making authority during the crisis. They also did not seem to be aware of one another. This fact was quite shocking to me.

Another shock to me was how uninformed the president and vice president seemed to be on the situation at hand. I had always assumed that the president and the white house would have full information about a national crisis, from each key agency, before anyone else. However, as I read on through the report it became quite apparent that was not the case because (as we know) the president was not informed of any of the hijackings while they were still airborne. The report also tells us that the both the president and vice president believed that there was another plane heading towards the white house after all of the hijacked planes had already crashed. There were also many problems with communicating between the president and other key members of the administration, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which I find very disheartening. I strongly feel that the lack of quality information given to the president of the United States is a grave failure that had the potential to aggravate the situation even further.

However, all of these disconnects are a great testimony to the un-preparedness of the government to be able to handle an attack on the United States such as the one which occurred on 9/11. And that revelation, which is shown through the 9/11 report, is what’s truly shocking to me about the events of September 11^th 2001.

But I suppose it is quite obvious why we were so unprepared for the events of that infamous day. Even though, our intelligence from the summer of 2001 was strongly predicting a massive Al Qaeda attack on US and Israeli interests. We naturally assumed that those attacks would come abroad in other countries as they had so many times before. We were quite comfortable with our own national security and became some what lazy. We hadn’t truly considered the possibility of a large scale attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

Another problem with an attack coming from within instead of coming externally is that our defense systems, namely NORAD, were designed with soviet bombers in mind. Our procedure for dealing with hijacked planes was a traditional one as well. Nobody had really considered the possibility of someone hijacking an American jet liner and using it as a guided missile to destroy our buildings. Something of that nature had never actually been attempted before. Perhaps the biggest failing of the government in regards to 9/11, beyond ineffective information sharing, is that our defense systems were designed for a different kind of threat and a different kind of war. What we needed prior to that day was forward thinking and creative planning. Sadly there just wasn’t enough of an emphasis on creative forward defense thinking in the pre 9/11 era.

We have paid a great price for September 11^th. Our lack of coherence in crisis management cost us dearly, our ineffective information sharing has cost us dearly, and our complacency has cost us dearly. Now everything has changed and we must adapt to a new war, a new world, and a new way of thinking.