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:
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
5 educational cartoons about the Harvard pushbackCartoons Artists take on academic freedom, institutional resistance, and more
-
One-pan black chickpeas with baharat and orange recipeThe Week Recommends This one-pan dish offers bold flavours, low effort and minimum clean up
-
Merz's coalition deal: a 'betrayal' of Germany?Talking Point With liberalism, freedom and democracy under threat globally, it's a time for 'giants' – but this is a 'coalition of the timid'
-
Why Puerto Rico is starvingThe Explainer Thanks to poor policy design, congressional dithering, and a hostile White House, hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Puerto Ricans are about to go hungry
-
Why on Earth does the Olympics still refer to hundreds of athletes as 'ladies'?The Explainer Stop it. Just stop.
-
How to ride out the apocalypse in a big cityThe Explainer So you live in a city and don't want to die a fiery death ...
-
Puerto Rico, lost in limboThe Explainer Puerto Ricans are Americans, but have a vague legal status that will impair the island's recovery
-
American barbarismThe Explainer What the Las Vegas massacre reveals about the veneer of our civilization
-
Welfare's customer service problemThe Explainer Its intentionally mean bureaucracy is crushing poor Americans
-
Nothing about 'blood and soil' is AmericanThe Explainer Here's what the vile neo-Nazi slogan really means
-
Don't let cell phones ruin America's national parksThe Explainer As John Muir wrote, "Only by going alone in silence ... can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness"
