Wright gets it right and the commissioners get lost in paper
By JASON VEST | September 11, 2006
NO OUTRAGE: Most disappointing about Without Precedent is its lack of reflection on the mentality of partisanship. |
The five years since 9/11 have seen not just a slew but a deluge of books devoted to the event and anything remotely connected with it. Among the latest arrivals are Thomas H. Kean & Lee H. Hamilton’s Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The latter is worth an immediate purchase; if you have to buy the former, wait for the paperback. The first several chapters of Without Precedent may be heady stuff for persons who study organizational management or aspects of public policy, but those aside, it’s not a scintillating read. And that’s true for the rest of the book. Many would agree that a matter-of-fact tone was appropriate for the actual 9/11 Commission Report. But when you see a book subtitled “The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission,” it’s not unreasonable to expect a bracing narrative with at least a few compelling characters, an account that captures the range of feelings experienced by an eclectic group of people handed a near-impossible task. Far from being an “inside story,” Without Precedent has chairs Kean and Hamilton rendering a sober TV procedural drama in book form and adding detached, bloodless observations about the hows and whys of what unfolded.
This isn’t to say it fails to enlighten or illuminate. Although they’re not exactly edge-of-the-seat descriptions brimming with fly-on-the-wall detail, the mentions and recollections of meetings between commission elements and various government officials do provide a crucial layer of detail in establishing the commission’s history. But Without Precedent is short on introspection. Perhaps most disappointing is the near-total lack of reflection on the mentality of partisanship. From the beginning the authors hammer on how important it was for the commission to be “bipartisan” in its composition, and how important it was to them as individuals to act in a “bipartisan fashion.” Yet as the phrase “the commission split down partisan lines” crops up again and again, and as virulently partisan attacks on individual commissioners (in particular Jamie Gorelick) are revisited, there’s no rumination, no outrage — just casual acceptance of a political status quo that doesn’t allow for non-partisanship in the service of the national interest.
We get exploration of the moments where the commission was defined by the disjunction between Kean (a former Republic governor of New Jersey) and Hamilton (a former Democratic congressman from Indiana) on the one hand and the rest of the commission on the other, or of the partisan, petty public spats between commissioners, or between commissioners and witnesses — or the moments where it was the commission versus one party (generally the Republicans). We get no window into the minds and souls of the commission members, no meditation on how party loyalty could be allowed to trump the most fundamental notions of epistemological process. What we do get is having it both ways: all manner of shit-heel behavior from both Democrats and Republicans (on and off the commission) is rehashed, with some meriting stern disapproval, and yet it all ends with self-congratulations for having done the best that was possible under circumstances. If you were hoping for some insight into the thinking behind some of the commission’s more dubious “reform” recommendations, look elsewhere.
Related:
It’s all true, Bojinka, Rethinking 9/11, More 
- It’s all true
Here’s a selection of non-fiction books that the Phoenix liked this year, in alphabetical order by author.
- Bojinka
The mainstream media has more or less treated the news that a group of British-based Islamist terrorists planned to blow up as many as ten airliners with colorless liquid explosives as the planes cruised over the Atlantic as a new development. It isn’t.
- Rethinking 9/11
The Phoenix decided to ask ten people prominent in a range of fields a question.
- Cutting edge
Some who’ve watched the on-line videos of al-Qaeda executions may suffer a shock of recognition at some images in Eastern Promises .
- Fighting words
Imagine that suicide bombers have just blasted three American shopping malls.
- Suicide Attacks Target Kabul Peacekeepers
KABUL, Afghanistan - Two separate suicide attackers rammed car bombs into vehicles belonging to
NATO-led peacekeepers Monday in Kabul, killing at least one German soldier and wounding at least 13 people in the first major attack on foreign troops in the capital in more than a year.
- Is Homeland Security dough well spent?
“Because it is human nature to overspend on unlikely catastrophic events, it is likely that terrorists have succeeded in getting the world to overspend on counterterrorism,” they write.
- Review: The Baader Meinhof Complex
Terrorism made simple in Uli Edel's Complex
- Bring it on
On a quiet Sunday morning a month after the September 11 attacks, I visited the ruins of the World Trade Center. Slideshow: Joel Meyerowitz photos from Aftermath
- Keeping It Real
We’ll get used to it, I suppose, this new category of moviegoing distress. Sooner or later, we get used to everything.
- Nefarious circle
I could not believe what I was reading when your editorial suggested an independent commission like the one that investigated 9/11 should investigate the improprieties of the Big Dig.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Politics, Domestic Policy, Political Policy, More
, Politics, Domestic Policy, Political Policy, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Al Qaeda, Terrorism, War and Conflict, Richard Clarke, September 11 Attacks, Osama bin Laden, Less
