Cause of 9/11: Civil Servants
Via Kevin comes this report:
For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.
“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” said Thomas Kean.
“As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done,” he said. “This was not something that had to happen.”
Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.
“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Kean said.
To find out who failed and why, the commission has navigated a political landmine, threatening a subpoena to gain access to the president’s top-secret daily briefs. Those documents may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration – that there was never any thought given to the idea that terrorists might fly an airplane into a building.
In hindsight, anything is preventable so I don’t place too much validity in this report and its attempts at blaming someone other than a few insane zealots. This will be trotted out as some sort of failure of the administration (which it’s not) rather than as a failure of security people. Of course, if the people who were grossly negligent (which is the implication) they should fired and sued.
December 18th, 2003 at 2:05 pm
September 11, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily constitute a failure of the administration. However, if individual incompetence was partly responsible, and if the administration knows this is so, and if the administration does nothing about the people responsible for that incompetence, then that is absolutely a failing of the administration.
And the administrations adamant refusal to support an independent investigation into 9/11 to determine what went wrong, and how we can prevent it from happening again, is an egregious failure of the administration as well.
I’m frankly surprised you don’t agree.
December 18th, 2003 at 2:41 pm
Actually, I do agree to an extent. I did say they should be fired though i didn’t say this is the administration’s fault. I’ll say it now, it is their fault that they’re not fired. The administration will, however, say that the dept of homeland security is the action they’ve taken.