• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The testimony offered after 9/11, Farmer wrote,

was not simply wrong about facts; it was wrong in a way that misrepresented the competence and relevance of the chain of command to the response.… It was difficult to decide which was the more disturbing possibility. To believe that the errors in fact were simply inadvertent would be to believe that senior military and civilian officials were willing to testify in great detail and with assurance … without bothering to make sure that what they were saying was accurate. Given the significance of 9/11 in our history, this would amount to an egregious breach of the public trust. If it were true, however, that the story was at some level coordinated and was knowingly false, that would be an egregious deception.

“History,” Farmer wrote later in his book, “should record that, whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”

PART III

AMERICA RESPONDS

FOURTEEN

AMERICANS KNEW, INSTANTLY ASSUMED THEY KNEW, WHO HAD attacked them on 9/11. The Arabs.

As soon as news of the attacks broke, before anything was known of the attackers, a woman phoned the FBI to report an experience she had had the previous evening. She had spotted a diary in a garbage can at Chicago’s Midway Airport, she said, and the final entry had read: “Allah will be served.” That, she thought, seemed sinister.

On an airliner en route to Australia, a flight attendant had kept an eye on a “Middle Eastern male passenger” who was busy on his laptop. Its screen carried a picture of a Boeing 747 and then, suddenly, the words “Mission failed.” The attendant hurried to tell the captain. He in turn alerted the airline and the flight was diverted to the nearest airport—where it emerged that the swarthy passenger was from not the Middle East but Guatemala. The “suspicious” activity had been a video game.

In the turmoil at the Trade Center, even before the second tower fell, a New York fire chief witnessed what was almost certainly the first arrest of the day. As he led his men down to safety, Richard Picciotto remembered, he had come across a cluster of firemen and a police officer engaged in an encounter with “a middle-aged Middle Eastern man.”

The guy was dressed in a nice suit and carrying a nice briefcase, and as I pulled close to the commotion I could see there had been something of a struggle.… One of the firemen on the floor had grown concerned at the man’s sudden appearance; the firefighter had once been a police detective, and he felt there was something fishy about this guy, something about his still being on such a high floor.

All kinds of speculation had been bouncing around on our radios regarding responsibility for these terrorist attacks, and the sight of a transparently Middle Eastern individual was suspicious … plus he had a briefcase, which could have contained a bomb … the “suspect” was in handcuffs and crying uncontrollably. He was claiming innocence of any wrongdoing.… In all likelihood, this guy was guilty of nothing more than foolishness and slowfootedness, but here we were, escorting him down as he cried and as we fought back our own terrors.… It was little over an hour since the first attacks, and already we were running scared.

The Arab with the briefcase would neither be charged with anything nor heard of again. If he was roughly interrogated, though, if he was even held in jail for some time, he was one of many. Some five thousand foreign nationals, most of them of Arab descent, were taken into custody at some point in the two years after the attacks.

According to a Department of Justice inspector general’s report, detainees picked up after 9/11 “remained in custody—many in extremely restrictive conditions of confinement—for weeks and months with no clearance investigations being conducted.… Those conditions included ‘lock down’ for at least 23 hours per day; escorts that included a ‘4-man hold’ with handcuffs, leg irons, and heavy chains