This book was for me both revealing and confirming. Revealing because it exhaustively details the second-by-second actions of the FAA and the military that day relying on ever present FAA and Pentegon recordings which cannot be easily altered and which tell a tale much different from the original CYA version of events released by those agencies which led to the establishment of the 9/11 Commission in the first place. And, confirming in that my long held belief that by it's very nature, government doesn't do very many things well and huge government, the type we in America have had since the 1930's, does almost nothing well. Government's failure leading up to and then reacting the events of 9/11 was very nearly total. Individuals scattered throughout the venues that day, acting largely on their own authority, prevented a much larger disaster.

Farmer begins his story with the first meeting between Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (perhaps better known today as "KSM"), the man whose plan it was to use the airliners as weapons inside the United States. He compresses the story from the years it took to bring the idea to fruition, through the months the attackers spent in the United States in final preparations for the day, through the weeks leading up the event and then to the hours, minutes and seconds preceding the calamity.

The events of September 11,2001 were the culmination of a systematic and generalized failure of the U.S. government in its most fundamental role dating back to the early 1990's (and even earlier). Though hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent and millions of man hours invested, the most sophisticated defense apparatus in the world failed to see the plot though evidence of its existance was all around. Territorial imperatives, bureaucratic ineptness and just plain old fashioned laziness combined to allow 19 zealots to change our national future. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of opportunities to stop the plot before it could be carried out came and went without appropriate action being taken to stop it.

While Farmer acknowledges these failures, he makes the error of postulating that some procedural changes could prevent another such event. I think he is wrong. Nevertheless, Farmer's book demonstrates how, regardless of who sits in the White House, runs the FBI, or heads the CIA, the ability of government to interdict such events as 9/11 are, predictably, self-limited. It's not soothing and it's not comforting but it is reality.

And the easily documented attempt to cover up the inadequacies? It's laid out in this book. It is sometimes plodding and the second-by-second replay of FAA and Pentagon recordings of their every communication during the attacks is sometimes painfully slow; however, their inclusion was necessary in that they clearly demonstrate that the government's first official report (the 9/11 Commission's report is NOW the government's official stand on the matter) of how it reacted to the attacks of 9/11 where designed to cover up its myriad failures.

This book is not a casual read and Farmer's decision to throw the government failures in preparing for and reacting to hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 (unlike the 9/11 attacks, an event that had been predicted for decades) and to compare and contrast that with the 9/11 failures really serves no purpose other than to confirm government's ineptness to react properly to large disasters whether they are man-made or natural.

Rick Rescorla, the Vice President of Security for Morgan-Stanley/Dean-Witter, the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, had been predicting just such an attack on the twin towers for nearly a decade. His preparations, approved and sanctioned by his employer, were simple, well thought out and required procedures be followed by all Morgan Stanley employees in the building. These procedures were credited with saving the lives of more than 2700 Morgan Stanley employees that day (tragically, Rescorla was one of the few MS-DW employees to die in the towers when he returned to find any Morgan Stanley stragglers). James B. Stewart's biography of Rescorla: "Heart of A Soldier," is a must read for anyone interested in the events of that day.

The Ground Truth is worth your time, especially for anyone who wants to get a truncated understanding of the 9/11 Commission's findings.

And just in passing........a slap at the terrible bit of editing as the book (in this case, the CD audio version) repeatedly refers the "Mode 3" transponder beacons of the various aircraft involved that day. It isn't "Mode 3," it's MODE "C," a descrete code required to be used by any civil aircraft (and most military planes) operating in the nation's busiest airspaces. As a pilot of many years, this error, committed dozens of times in the narration, was fingernails on a chalk board each time I heard it. An extremely sloppy job of editing.

Disclaimer: I cannot assess the quality of the book, because it puts me to sleep every time I pick it up. Great cure for insomnia.

Disclaimer: I cannot assess the quality of the book, because it puts me to sleep every time I pick it up. Great cure for insomnia. I will keep trying, but can't make any promises.

I wondered why I was able to get this book so quickly from my public library. When I tried reading it, I realized why. The author did not write a book; he wrote a very long report. The writing style makes my dad's old Encyclopedia Britannica read like a thriller. Even events which should be interesting sound boring. I found myself longing for an executive summary.

Read David Ray Griffins review to get the real scoop. All i can say, is if you want to learn more about 9/11, to gain a better picture, SKIP THIS BOOK

"cascade of incompetence Farmer exposes"
Farmer isn't the village idiot. He omits critical facts such as the Building #7 collapse even though it wasn't hit by anything, especially a plane, and the testimony by Willie Rodriguez. Farmer makes it super clear that the attack was expected by key officials. He omits critical pictures that show thousands of steel beams cut and blasted symmetrically in all directions. Jet fuel fires can't cut steel beams. The "cascade of incompetence Farmer exposes" prevents admitting his own crime of conspiring to cover up the expert demolition, rigged weeks before 9/11. Farmer didn't write this book to convict himself and the other phony Commission members.

THE GROUND TRUTH: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA UNDER ATTACK ON 9/11 comes from a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission who lead the team charged with reconstructing the day's tragedies. Many records remained classified in their report: GROUND TRUTH draws upon recently de-classified documents to provide a fuller account of 9/11 and is a pick for any library seeking an authoritative discussion of events, reactions and long-range implications.

There are conversation logs reproduced as images in the book, and the font is too small to read on the Kindle, even after zooming in.

In recent public opinion surveys, roughly half the country believes the official account of what occurred on 9/11/2001 to be substantially true, and half is skeptical. Apparently John Farmer, the man who penned the official 9-11 Commission Report in 2003, is in the latter group. Farmer has written a book as paradoxical as the Government testimony which he picks to pieces: He details one incident after another, meticulously documenting the lies that high government officials told in testimony before his commission. But even after leaving our mouths agape at the mendacity and deception of the Administration (the word `perjury' appears nowhere in the book), he reports unskeptically other parts of the story for which this same Administration was the only source, as if he has no choice but to believe them.

On the surface, the book is a scathing indictment of lethal government incompetence, and of the Bush Administration in particular. It charges ineptitude and a kind of blindness to reality at the highest levels of government. But, to turn a phrase, the book may be praising the Administration with faint damnation. As Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, Farmer was in as good a position as anyone on the planet to pursue a competent and thorough investigation, to get to the "Ground Truth" behind the terror attacks and the government's response. And yet he chose to play softball, to settle for the testimony that he was offered, and base his conclusions on a partial and contradictory record. The Commission made no use of Congressional subpoena power or the Capitol Police. They did not recall witnesses whose testimony had been discredited. Every forensic investigator from the local police sergeant to the Special Prosecutor knows that if you jail the underling who is lying to protect his boss, he will often break under pressure and tell the truth that passes responsibility up the chain. And yet, empaneled to investigate this greatest crime of the nation's history, the 9/11 Commission forswore such tactics, sat back and scratched their heads when offered contradictory testimony.

The book climaxes in a chapter titled, "Whisky Tango Foxtrot", which, Farmer explains, was the Commissioners' constant refrain as the misleading testimony unfolded.

"The official version first put forward by Paul Wolfowitz had attained the status of national myth... This official version departed from the facts of the day in four critical respects. First, the official version indicated that the Langley fighters were scrambled in response to American 77, and thus omitted completely the pivotal report of the morning and the source of the Langley scramble: the report that American 11, the first hijack, was still airborne and heading for Washington. Second, the administration version insisted that the military was tracking United 93 and, as a consequence, was positioned to intercept the flight if it approached Washington. This was untrue; the military could not locate the flight to track it because it had crashed by the time of notification. Third, the official version insited that PresidentBush had issued an authorization to shoot down hijacked commercial flights, and that the order had been processed through the chain of command and passed to the fighters. This was untrue.

"Fourth, the administration version implied, where it did not state explicitly, that the chain of command had been functioning on 9/11, and that the critical decisions had been made by the appropriate top officials. Thus the presideent issued the shoot-down order; top FAA Headquarters officials coordinated closely with the military; Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta issued the order to land all airplanes; NORAD Commanding General Eberhart monitored closely the decisions taken at NEADS and CONR; and so on. None of this captures how things actually unfolded on the day."

Farmer goes on to theorize that the false testimony had been offered to cover up bureaucratic incompetence, especially in the military, and a criminal failure to prepare for the new dangers of a post-Cold-War world. His thesis is that the chain of command is too slow to function in a crisis, and that local officials must be trained and empowered to act quickly on their own initiative when extraordinary circumstances demand it. This, Farmer says, requires a fundamental rethinking of the way in which government operates.
The conclusion strikes me as good general advice, an extension of the warning that Dilbert and Laurence Peter before him have offered us for decades. But the recommendations look small compared to the ways in which 9/11 transformed our world - ushering in a never-ending war, sharp curtailment of civil and political liberties in the Land of the Free, a cloak of secrecy for the most criminal Administration in US history, and a centralization of power in the Presidency (OpEd News book review) that continues a year after Bush has left office.
9/11 reporting has been divided between those on the fringe who charge a massive government cover-up, and those in the mainstream who decry the former as `conspiracy theorists', maintaining that any such widespread deception would require too broad a network of cooperation to be plausible. The odd thing about this book is the way it breaches this divide. On the one hand, Farmer is the establishment. He was a Republican US Attorney, then Attorney General of New Jersey, before being tapped by the Kean Commission in 2002. In his capacity as Senior Council to the Commission, he wrote the 600-page 9-11 Commission Report that defines the official government version. On the other hand, Farmer tells us that the Report was falsified in some crucial respects. He charges a cover-up of exactly the kind that the mainstream has said is implausible on its face.

But then he tries to close Pandora's box without addressing the larger questions that loom in the realm of conspiracy theorists: How could fires cause three steel-framed buildings to collapse straight down in free-fall time, looking to every Youtube viewer like a classic example of controlled demolition? How could a jetliner with a 150-foot wing span have disappeared inside a 20-foot hole in the Pentagon? And how could four planes vaporize, black box and all, leaving nothing behind but a few paper passports that conveniently floated through the air into the hands of the waiting FBI?

How could cell phones have functioned at 30,000 feet, far outside the range of the broadcast towers which are designed with a horizontal beam? (And how lucky we were that the recipients of these calls had their tape recorders turned on at the crucial moment!) Remember that all we know about the drama within those four planes -- the stories of brown-skinned men with box-cutters speaking broken English, the murder of stewardesses, the storming of the cockpits and the heroism of passengers on Flight 93 -- our only source for all this is transcripts of these cell phone conversations which could not have occurred in the way they were reported.

The 9/11 Commission swallowed these camels without a hiccup.
Reading Farmer's book, I was struck by the vast gulf in documentary standards between the book's first and last chapters. In the last chapter, the story of the military response to 9/11 is detailed, and compared with FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina four years later. Documentation is meticulous. Testimony is cited verbatim, right down to the words that were lost in noise and could not be transcribed from the FAA radio tapes. In the opening, Farmer tells the story of Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, plotting revenge on the Great Satan from his cave in Afghanistan. Quotes are offered as if Farmer had been there himself, witnessing the meetings. No sources are given, and there is no indication why Farmer believes the story he was told.

I am left wondering why Farmer does not question the Administration witnesses who were presumably the source of the background connection to bin Laden and Al Qaeda, even after he has documented for us the fact that these same Administration officials concocted a story to cover their asses.

Since `9/11 changes everything' don't we deserve to know what really happened on 9/11? Last year, writing on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Kean and Hamilton warned us that the Commission's report was tainted. Now the attorney who actually composed the report tells us he was propagating lies.

Still, we continue to `look forward, not back', and somehow that means we must press on with two wars conceived in mendacity, and that Constitutional liberties borrowed from us on false pretenses will not be restored any time soon.

President Obama had it exactly wrong. The only way to move forward is to re-evaluate the choices made by the Bush Administration. A new, open and unimpeded investigation of the events of 9/11 is exactly the way to begin.

Although John Farmer's "The Ground Truth" has attracted a lot of favorable attention, it is a deeply flawed book, containing misleading claims and providing an extremely one-sided account of 9/11.

Much of the attention received by the book has been prompted by misleading claims made by Farmer and his publisher. The book's dust-jacket calls it the "definitive account" of 9/11, but it actually deals almost entirely with only one question about that day: why the airliners were not intercepted.

Also, the book's subtitle calls it "the untold story" of 9/11 and its dust-jacket says that it "breathtakingly revises" our understanding of that day. In reality, however, it simply provides new support for the story told about the planes in "The 9/11 Commission Report," which appeared in 2004, and in two publications that appeared in 2006: Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton's book "Without Precedent," and Michael Bronner's essay in "Vanity Fair."

Most provocatively, Farmer presents his book as a rejection of the "official" account of 9/11, which was given by "the government," by which he means primarily the FAA and the Pentagon. But this rhetoric is misleading for three reasons.

First, Farmer's book is a defense of the 9/11 Commission's report, which he calls "accurate, and true" (2), and the Commission was itself a governmental body: its chairman, Thomas Kean, was appointed by Bush; the other members were appointed by Congress; and the executive director, Philip Zelikow, was essentially a member of the Bush White House.

Second, the "official account of 9/11," as generally understood, is the Bush-Cheney administration's conspiracy theory, according to which the 9/11 attacks resulted from a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and some members of al-Qaeda, and Farmer supports this theory.

Third, in rejecting the "official version," Farmer is referring only to the first version of the official account. It was replaced in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission's version, which since then has been the official version of the official account. In spite of his rhetoric, therefore, Farmer is defending the official account of 9/11 produced by the government in 2004, so the book is far less radical than it has been promoted as being.

Even more serious than the book's misleading rhetoric is its one-sidedness. Rather than containing an impartial examination of various types of relevant evidence, this book by Farmer - a former prosecuting attorney - reads like a lawyer's brief: Besides citing a large number of facts that appear to support the Bush-Cheney conspiracy theory and trying to undermine some of the contrary evidence (which supports the alternative theory, according to which 9/11 was an inside job), it seeks to suppress, by simply ignoring, the enormous bulk of this contrary evidence.

This one-sided approach is acceptable within an adversarial law court, given the presence of an opposing lawyer, but it does not result in a book that is acceptable by scholarly standards.

The one-sidedness of Farmer's book is manifest in his endnotes, which include no reference to any writings aimed at exposing serious problems with the 9/11 Commission: Besides not referring to any of my own books, one of which is entitled "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," Farmer does not even mention "The Commission" by former New York Times writer Philip Shenon - who pointed out, among other things, that Zelikow had secretly written a detailed outline of the Commission's report before his research staff had even begun its work.

This bibliographic one-sidedness is important because it is reflected in substantive one-sidedness, one form of which is the ignoring of a great number of relevant facts. I will mention 15.

1. Claiming that the military did not have information about AA 77 in time to prevent it from striking the Pentagon, Farmer strongly attacks the claim (in the first version of the official account) that the FAA had notified the military about this flight at 9:24 AM. In doing so, he ignores a memo - even though it was discussed and read into the Commission's record in May 2003 - that was sent by the FAA's Laura Brown, explaining that 9:24 was only the time of the "formal notification" - that the FAA had set up phone bridges with the Pentagon and that "real-time information . . . about . . . Flight 77 . . . was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification" (Griffin, "The New Pearl Harbor Revisited" [NPHR] Chs. 1 & 2).

2. Simply assuming that Osama bin Laden authorized the 9/11 attacks, Farmer fails to mention that the FBI has admitted that "no hard evidence" supports this assumption (Griffin, "9/11 Contradictions" [9/11Contra] Ch. 18).

3. While mentioning that some of the alleged hijackers spent time in Las Vegas (62), Farmer fails to point out that, while there and in other places, they drank, went to strip clubs, and did other things that contradicted the Commission's portrayal of them as devout Muslims ready to die for their faith (9/11Contra Ch. 15).

4. Farmer calls Hani Hanjour, who allegedly flew AA 77 (a Boeing 757) through an extremely difficult trajectory to crash into the Pentagon, a "trained pilot" (45), failing to mention the much-documented fact that Hanjour could not even safely fly a single-engine plane (9/11Contra Ch. 19).

5. While claiming that "American 77 crashed into the Pentagon at a speed of 530 miles per hour" (186), Farmer does not point out that, according to the official seismic report, no station, including one only 63 km away, recorded the impact. He also fails to mention that many witnesses at the scene, both inside and outside, reported seeing no crashed airliner (NPHR Ch. 2).

6. Claiming that the alleged hijackers purchased tickets and boarded planes (62, 106), Farmer fails to mention that none of their names - indeed, no Arab names whatsoever - were on the passenger manifests of the flights released by the airlines or on the Pentagon autopsy report (NPHR Ch. 6).

7. Repeating the Commission's claim that Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari took an early morning flight from Portland (Maine) to Boston to catch American Flight 11 (103-05), Farmer does not point out that this story was a late invention, created after authorities learned that Adnan and Ameer Bukhari, originally said to have taken that flight, had not died on 9/11 (9/11Contra Ch. 16).

8. Writing as if the alleged phone calls from the airliners actually happened, Farmer does not point out that, after originally supporting the view that many of the reported calls were made on cell phones, the FBI in 2004 - after members of the 9/11 Truth Movement showed that cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners would have been impossible - quietly withdrew its support for such calls. The FBI thereby contradicted, among others, Deena Burnett, who was positive that she had been called by her husband, Tom Burnett (whom Farmer mentions), because she recognized his cell phone number on her Caller ID (9/11Contra Ch. 17).

9. Farmer repeats the claim, supported in 2004 by "The 9/11 Commission Report," that CNN commentator Barbara Olson had twice called from AA 77 to talk to her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson (163, 166). But Farmer fails to point out that in 2006, after members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had reported that American's 757s did not have onboard phones, the FBI - in its report for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called 20th hijacker) - said that Barbara Olson's (one) attempted call did not go through and therefore lasted "0 seconds" (9/11Contra Ch. 8).

10. Farmer endorses the claim that the hijackers had box-cutters (161, 163), not mentioning the fact that this claim had been made only in the reported calls from Barbara Olson, which the FBI now says never happened (9/11Contra Ch 8).

11. While repeating the Commission's claim that al-Qaeda hijackers finally succeeded in breaking into UA 93's cockpit 30 seconds after they started trying (189), Farmer fails to ask why, in all that time, the pilots did not use the transponder to squawk the hijack code - a procedure that takes about 2 seconds (NPHR Ch. 6).

12. While claiming, like the Commission, that "Vice President Cheney learned that the Pentagon had been hit while he was in the tunnel under the White House leading to the shelter" (207), Farmer does not point out that Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta told the Commission that Cheney had been in the shelter (the Presidential Emergency Operations Center) at least since 9:20 AM, hence about 20 minutes before the reported time of the Pentagon attack - an observation that was supported by other witnesses, including counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke (9/11Contra Ch. 2).

13. While acknowledging that Richard Clarke's account of his White House videoconference contradicts the 9/11 Commission's claims about the whereabouts of not only Cheney but also Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Farmer simply asserts that Clarke's account "does not square in any significant respect with what occurred that morning" (184), failing to point out that the question of who told the truth could be cleared up simply by looking at the videotape.

14. Suggesting that the Twin Towers came down because each one was "fragile at its core" (28), Farmer implicitly denies the fact that each tower was supported by 47 massive core columns and ignores the question of why several scientific studies, including one by the US Geological Survey, showed that the dust at Ground Zero contained various elements that, unless explosives had been used to bring down the buildings, should not have been there (Griffin, "The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7," Ch. 4).

15. Although Farmer's entire case for the 9/11 Commission's version of the official account, which involves his accusing a remarkable number of people of lying, rests entirely on logs and audiotapes not examined by the Commission until several years after 9/11, he fails to consider reasons that have been provided for believing that these tapes and logs had been doctored (NPHR Chs 1-3, 10).

There would be much more to say in a complete review, but the above points suffice to suggest that Farmer's book is deeply flawed, providing an account that is far from the "ground truth" about 9/11.

Looks to me like there is a bug in the catalog, this is a US book about the US that is available in the US in paper. Why no Kindle edition available in the US?

As far as the conspiracy theorists go, there is no way that any book on 9/11 is going to make them happy unless it mentions their favorite conspiracy. That is not what books are for, at leas as far as I am concerned. I read books to find out what I do not know, not to have confirmation of what I would like to believe.

Poorly written.Both wordy,repetitve and had significant gramtic errors.

The author, never to my recall mentions the "notorious Gorelick wall",which specifically prohibted the CIA and FBI from sharing certain information.This is either incopetence on Farmer's part or deliberate decetion. He is relentless on this criticism of these agencies.

Farmer seems to have a point of view he wants to sell.Enjoyable if you like reading advertisements of used car dealers.

I am happy I read it because:
1.It reinforced my view that government agencies are inefficient and can not be relied upon in time of need.
2.It gave examples of planned lying by government officials

Now,we are asked to entrust our health with these bureauocrats!!!

Farmer's book is a critical review of the bureaucratic structure of Washington, relating to the events of 9/11 and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The book has five chapters: 1) focuses on intelligence data collected up to 2001; 2) discusses the interaction of various defense related departments; 3) integrates the collection of intelligence data in the months/days preceding 9/11, 4) discusses the bureaucratic climax to 9/11, and 5) focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Farmer ties these chapters together by analyzing the failure of our bureaucracy to communicate freely among and within departments, and he emphasizes the desire of the Clinton administration to ""change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment"" that went "tragically unrealized in the years, months, weeks, and days leading to 9/11." An Appendix contains a time-line of the hijackers' movements: 1991-2002.

Farmer frequently references The 9/11 Commission, on which he served as Senior Counsel. He stresses the difficulty the Commission had in obtaining information from various defense related agencies, notwithstanding the administration itself, however, he does not object to the "official" explanation of 9/11. Hence, truth can sometimes be misleading when what is reported is documented but fails to include all aspecs of that truth.

A few omissions include: conflict of interests within The 9/11 Commission, the resignation of Congressman McClellan, key testimony from FBI personnel, and reference to the collapse of Building #7. Farmer does not distinguish between the disintegration of Flight 77 and forensic testing that identified all passengers on that flight from DNA analyses! Curiously, his list of hijackers is compatible with that of the administration, which fails to account for those hijackers missing on flight manifests, notwithstanding those named hijackers discovered to be residing citizens of Saudi Arabia.

let's blame Stalin's mass murders on incompetence...let's blame the trillions of dollars give-away on incompetence. When the many, many "official" non sequiturs, and the government's "official conspiracy theory", concerning the 911 "attacks" and the subsequent demolition of all three WTC buildings are now seen in light of the most recent hard evidence (the presence of military-grade, high-tech, nano-thermate in the dust samples around the area) we can no longer trust what anyone in the government says. Check out this scientific paper showing the results of tests done on the dust samples taken (one only 10 minutes after the event of the demolition of one of the WTC building): http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM

Of course, the guilty would rather we all think that they were just incompetent and bungling, and point fingers until we get confused and tired of it all, rather than guilty of high treason against our country. Since the news media is controlled largely by the vested interests that would keep you in the dark, hoping you will just shrug your shoulders and keep struggling with your menial problems...like eating...like health care...you will never be a threat to their power and influence. The 911 Commission was a whitewash where they blatantly ignored the testimony, or refused to even hear the testimony, of many valid witnesses like firefighters, policemen, and even survivors (people who escaped from the buildings) of 911.

NIST was fully aware of weapons grade nano-thermate and chose, against procedure, to completely ignore looking for it or other explosive materials as evidence. They chose to ignore the evidence. Their "mind-set" was that the collapse of the towers and building 7 were all due to a plane crash and the heat generated by that and office materials. The temperature (well below 1800 deg F) could not have been hot enough to melt steel (at about 2900 deg F). So where did all of the molten metal come from that was pouring out of the side of the tower? Molten aluminum would not be of the temperature that the color indicated. What about the molten metal in the basement that many firemen, and others reported..."molten metal flowed like in a foundry". The towers fell at free fall speed which can only occur during a demolition (explosives removing the support beams in a timed event). The laws of physics would have had to be violated if the NIST explanation were to be believed. Every structure below the crash was not even weakened by a fire and would have presented a certain resistance to a collapse of the upper structure slowing it down. The squibs were very apparent in the videos, just like in a demolition, and some evidently fired early because some occurred many floors below the falling area. The witnesses and the sound in the videos reported hundreds of explosions as the buildings fell. The fact that Bush didn't want an investigation and the beams were shipped out for melt down in Korea indicates a guilty manner. There are hundreds, if not thousands of non sequiturs and oddities that make the Bush regime at least seem guilty as hell.

This is a very powerful book. Answers many questions about our government's response and the lack of shared information leading up to that day. Tragic. Received on time, no problems. Thank you.

An easy-to-set-aside, slow moving story about the "truth" behind 9/11 by the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission. Much of it regarding the lead-up and planning by Al Quaeda leaders isn't quite believable given this point in time when we know a lot of the "confessions" of terrorists were obtained by torture. Also, the author himself says many of the government entities lied - or withheld information - in their testimony before the commission. Thus, I read it more as a skeptic than as someone expecting the truth about what really happened on 9/ll.

Midway through the first chapter I began to jump forward in hopes of finding something more. It's difficult to judge the intent of book like this; is the distortion merely the world view of the author or something more unfaithful?

Sadly, there are two words one most needs to know about the deaths of 9/11: Jamie Gorelick. When you add the sloth of the Boston unions to the murderous legacy of the notorious Gorelick wall, the potential for bureaucratic dysfunction and government sloth resulting in mass murder of civilians becomes easier to understand. Amidst the blinding fog of partisan rancor, we forget there is no greater danger to our nation than bureaucratic obstructionism driven by a plague of otherwise unemployable lawyers, academicians and the pernicious union subcultures that dominate and subvert the government workplace.

For those who genuinely want a primer on the lead-up to 9/11 and the parlor assassins that dominated the bureaucratic aftermath and resulting institutional disorder, the best work you can find is written by Laurie Mylroie. For a grasp of the broader institutional and geopolitical mechanics, Doug Feith's last book shines a remarkable light on the humans involved with our government.

Disappointed, I'll still read Farmer's book to understand how it fits in the puzzle of information, disinformation and paranoia that surrounds the 9/11 debacle and the tragic loss of life that day. The cascade of incompetence Farmer exposes rings true. We give our government systems too much credit. Then we give them too much to do. Then we saddle them with employees riven with personalities and special interest ties that are unmanageable.

Then we pretend there is no such thing as a disaster government can't handle, thereby ignoring the one thing we should indeed be paranoid about.

"The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11," by John Farmer -- senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, claims that the government presented a "fundamentally false version of events". If this leads some to believe that Mr. Farmer will present the true version of events, they will be disappointed.

What the book does is expose the shortcomings of the government's response to the hijackings on 9/11. Mr. Farmer does not question the identity of the hijackers although several were later reported by British newspapers as being alive.

He accepts the official version that 9/11 was directed by Osama Bin Laden although Bin Laden himself denied that to a Pakistani newspaper. The FBI says they have no hard evidence against Bin Laden. They do not even mention 9/11 in their "Most Wanted Terrorists" poster of Bin Laden!

Mr. Farmer's book basically describes how the hijackers were able to penetrate multiple layers of U.S. security: National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, the State Department's visa offices, and airline screening.

His book may be useful to those wishing to "reinvent government." Until that is done, says Farmer, the passage of new statutes, or the creation of new procedures, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security leaves the U.S. vulnerable to "terrorist" attacks.

Mr. Farmer does not address the mounting evidence -- see 9/11 Unveiled -- that the twin towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center were demolished with explosives. He does seem to admit that United Airlines Flight 93 may have been shot down, but he makes no reference to the lack of hard evidence that American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.

Indeed his failure to address the evidence is particularly striking where he refers to the phone calls made by the passengers and crew of Flight 93 and Flight 77.

The claim that Flight 77 passenger Barbara Olson called her husband, Justice Department's Solicitor General Ted Olson, twice, was contradicted at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in 2006.

The FBI reported that only two cell phone calls were made from all four planes -- both from United Flight 93.

Mr. Farmer may have done the 9/11 truth movement a favor. By revealing the government's conspiracy to lie about its response to 9/11, Mr. Farmer casts doubt on ALL the findings of the 9/11 Commission.

"The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11," by John Farmer -- senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, claims that the government presented a "fundamentally false version of events".

If this leads some to believe that Mr. Farmer will present the true version of events, they will be disappointed.

What the book does is expose the shortcomings of the government's response to the hijackings on 9/11. Mr. Farmer does not question the identity of the hijackers although several were later reported by British newspapers as being alive.

He accepts the official version that 9/11 was directed by Osama Bin Laden although Bin Laden himself denied that to a Pakistani newspaper.

The FBI says they have no hard evidence against Bin Laden. They do not even mention 9/11 in their "Most Wanted Terrorists" poster of Bin Laden!

Mr. Farmer's book basically describes how the hijackers were able to penetrate multiple layers of U.S. security: National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, the State Department's visa offices, and airline screening.

His book may be useful to those wishing to "reinvent government." Until that is done, says Farmer, the passage of new statutes, or the creation of new procedures, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security leaves the U.S. vulnerable to "terrorist" attacks.

Mr. Farmer does not address the mounting evidence -- see 9/11 Unveiled -- that the twin towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center were demolished with explosives. He does seem to admit that United Airlines Flight 93 may have been shot down, but he makes no reference to the lack of hard evidence that American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.

Indeed his failure to address the evidence is particularly striking where he refers to the phone calls made by the passengers and crew of Flight 93 and Flight 77.

The claim that Flight 77 passenger Barbara Olson called her husband, Justice Department's Solicitor General Ted Olson, twice, was contradicted at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in 2006.

The FBI reported that only two cell phone calls were made from all four planes -- both from United Flight 93.

Farmer's main source for his theory of what led to 9/11 is Amy Zegart. She is the author of Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and Origins of 9/11. While Farmer and Zegart make good points about bureaucratic problems their analysis doesn't ring true when they pretend that the conduct of specific officials wasn't applicable to the success of the attacks. There are repeated instances where individuals acted in a manner indicative of bad faith. Instances where individuals took advantage of bureaucratic problems in order to impede al Qaeda related investigations. The Farmer/Zegart analysis tracks with the popular media view of holding powerful officials to an extremely low standard of conduct.

Farmer quotes Tenet: "The country had no systematic mechanism to translate foreign threats into a meaningful program of protection of the homeland."

For 20 months the CIA withheld from the FBI the fact that two ID'ed al Qaeda operatives were in the US. The withholding continued after the USS Cole attack. Bear in mind that Tenet and Black (head of the CTC at the time) both bragged about how on point the CIA was in relation to sounding the alarm about al Qaeda. The obvious question--if they were so on point then why was crucial information withheld from the FBI? We cannot get an honest answer to that question.

Most of the reviews of John Farmer's book miss its importance.
Farmer has no way of knowing what happened on 9/11 or who did it.
What he does know and has figured out is that the 9/11 Commission
was lied to by people who were supposed to be helping the Commission
deliver the truth to the public.
Whether the lies were big or little, whether the lies were told to coverup
a false flag operation or to cover the butts of agencies that had failed
in their responsibilities, whether Farmer's explanations for the lies are
correct or incorrect, the fact remains that the Commission was misled.
The conclusion to be drawn is that the Commission's report is unreliable
and, therefore, that we do not have the truth about 9/11.
That this conclusion comes from the legal counsel to the Commission is
compelling evidence that a new investigation is required.
Paul Craig Roberts