Ernest R. May

Correspondence: Sins of Commission? Falkenrath and His Critics

In response to Richard Falkenrath’s critique of The 9/11 Commission Report, we would like to make three points.1 First, his criticisms, which have mostly to do with whether the commission’s recommendations oow from the narrative of 9/11, are well taken. While some of the recommendations do stand essentially on their own, Falkenrath is reacting fairly to an overly abbreviated summary of them. The original outline of the report envisioned ave chapters of systemic diagnosis, not just two. The commission concluded that the attendant detail would interest only Washington insiders.2 The commission also tried to avoid a “Hickam Field fallacy.” In response to Pearl Harbor, one could offer a policy recommendation not to line up planes on the runway at Hickam Field anymore. If all policy recommendations simply react to past foibles, they will defeat, in an imaginative sense, the previous attack. They may not really defeat the next one. Thus our investigation, as it reconstructed a historical narrative (about which, Falkenrath’s comments are gratifyingly complimentary), also yielded an opportunity for broader diagnoses of a disordered system. Policy recommendations oow from looking at the present and future, not just at the unreplicable past. Second, Falkenrath’s critique makes too little allowance for the circumstances in which the report was composed. Keeping peace within a large and diverse staff and avoiding the appearance of partisan tilt sometimes required muting interpretation. While no factual conclusion was ever watered down, the report often does not tell readers how to weigh those facts, and some readers—Falkenrath among them—feel frustrated that the commission did not instruct the American people to agree with their preconceptions. The fact that ave Republicans and ave Democrats endorsed such a long and complex report without dissent about a single line is important. We live in a period of venomous partisanship, matched probably only by the early national period