Tara McKelvey reviews John Farmer's The Ground Truth
:Government officials lied about 9/11. Not in a terrible, devastating way, of course -- but through various, small details that twisted the story and made it seem like they had done a better job than they really did. : Government officials lied about 9/11. Not in a terrible, devastating way, of course -- but through various, small details that twisted the story and made it seem like they had done a better job than they really did.
In The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11
, John Farmer, who served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, shows how the mendacities unfolded: Officials claimed that they were surprised by the attacks on the World Trade Center but that they barely missed intercepting the American Airlines jet as it crashed into the Pentagon "at a speed of 530 miles per hour." Additionally, White House representatives said that they had known about United Airlines 93, which had taken off from Newark Liberty Airport in the morning only to be hijacked -- and that Air Force fighter jets were prepared to shoot it down if it approached Washington. At least this was the story told by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other Bush administration officials -- a story that soon "attained the status of national myth." But the government was not nearly as prepared as suggested, according to Farmer. The military was nowhere near stopping American Airlines Flight 77 from hitting the Pentagon. Air Force fighter jets were not "scrambled" to pursue United 93 until after it had crashed into a Pennsylvania field, and the fighter jet pilots were not authorized to shoot the commercial plane down.
