When it's okay to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories

The south tower of the World Trade Center
(Image credit: AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)

Col. Miles Kara (Ret.), a highly credentialed member of the congressional joint commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, is one of the most dogged and least ideological of those who believe that the ground truth of what happened that day has not been fully and faithfully disclosed to the public. In that sense, Kara wants the truth. But he is not a 9/11 Truther; he is not, so far as I can tell, an adherent to the discredited theories about who planned the attack, who carried it out, whether the U.S. government "allowed" the attacks to happen deliberately, or whether the attacks were a deliberate "false flag" operation to shock the world out of its post Cold War reverie.

What he does believe is, frankly, what the 9/11 Commission's report concluded: that the government's response to the events of 9/11, to the intelligence they received beforehand, and to the questions they received after, were deeply flawed. Kara believes that if the government had organized its response around two centers of gravity — the NMCC in the Pentagon and the FAA's Command Center — and had feedback loops been in place and rehearsed to allow for inevitable mistakes to be caught and quickly corrected, much of the chaos that delayed critical decisions could have been reduced. In his own words:

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.