FORESIGHT—AND HINDSIGHT

¶In compo sing this narrative, we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly—with 20/20 vision. But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply into shadow. Commenting on Pearl Harbor, Roberta Wohlstetter found it "much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals.After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."¹¹ All times are Eastern Daylight Time. Sometime around 10:30, after the decision had already been made not to return to Washington, a reported threat to "Angel"—the code word for Air Force One—was widely dissemi- nated in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) and aboard Air Force One. Notes from the morn- ing indicate that Vice President Cheney informed President Bush in a phone conversation shortly after 10:30 that an anonymous threat had been phoned into the White House that was viewed as credible.At about the same time, news of the threat was conveyed on the air threat conference call. The Secret Service's Intelligence Division tracked down the origin of this threat and, during the day, deter- mined that it had originated in a misunderstanding by a watch officer in the White House Situation Room.The director of the White House Situation Room that day disputes this account. But the Intelligence Division had the primary job of running down the story, and we found their witnesses on this point to be credible. During the after- noon of September 11 the leadership of the Secret Service was satisfied that the reported threat to "Angel" was unfounded. At the White House press briefing on September 12, spokesperson Ari Fleischer described the threat to Air Force One as "real and credible."White House transcript, Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, Sept. 12, 2001 (online at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010912-8.html). Fleischer told us he cited the information in good faith. Indeed, Fleischer had conferred with Vice President Cheney and Karen Hughes before the briefing, and they had decided to let people know about the threat, all of them believing it was true.According to Fleischer, only weeks later did he learn—from press reports—that the threat was unfounded. We have not found any evi- dence that contradicts his account.Ari Fleischer interview (Apr. 22, 2004); Chuck Green interview (Mar. 10, 2004); Deborah Loewer meeting (Feb. 6, 2004); Ralph Sigler meeting (May 10, 2004); Andrew Card meeting (Mar. 31, 2004); Edward Marinzel interview (Apr. 21, 2004); Secret Service briefing (Jan. 29, 2004).Show full note

¶As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer.Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes and the remaining memories of it become colored by what happened and what was written about it later.With that caution in mind, we asked ourselves, before we judged others, whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done.

¶We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.