On 9-11, a Gilligan government

The minute-by-minute recount of the events that transpired on Sept. 11, 2001, was publicly presented last week by the 9-11 Commission in a 29-page report entitled "Improvising a Homeland Defense" -- much more aptly named, it turns out, than we had previously thought.\nYou see, on Sept. 11, our government was apparently Gilligan.\nGilligan, the lead character on the popular 1960s television sitcom "Gilligan's Island," was a bumbling fool. He and six fellow castaways tried to escape their blue lagoon each week and get back to society. Somehow Gilligan always spoiled the plan. (He did have an extremely innocent quality to him, which in hindsight is why I think they probably just didn't kill him and move on.) \nOur government had that same bumbling problem the morning of the attacks. Three of the four hijackings were a success -- and on United Flight 93, the fourth plane heading toward Washington for possible targets like the Capitol or the White House, citizens saved the government, not the other way around. (The overall system may have failed on 9-11, but the citizens who took charge in planes, on the ground and in the towers seemed to be steadfast and effective.)\nBut until now, we never knew just how enormous the upper-level failings were. We now see in clear evidence that no one really knew what the hell was going on.\nThe commission's report shows civilian air traffic controllers and air defense officials ad libbing a defense for a disaster for which they had never been trained. Senior officials were in a state of intense confusion. At times they learned more from television news accounts than from classified intelligence reports.\nAmong them:\n-- Military workers were unable to tell if Federal Aviation Administration warnings were "real-world or exercise."\n-- American Airlines Flight 11 was a "phantom aircraft," which the military was chasing -- even after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.\n-- For 36 minutes, the FAA center in Indianapolis, in charge of watching American Airlines Flight 77, lost track of the plane entirely, which was then able to turn around and fly east toward its target, the Pentagon, undetected by radar.\n-- Fighter jets dispatched from Langely Air Force Base in southeastern Virginia originally were sent in the wrong direction, out over the Atlantic Ocean.\n-- Once it became clear what was going on, and before hijackers had taken over, the FAA office in Boston recommended to FAA headquarters that cockpit security measures be implemented, but their suggestion was not taken.\n-- And the following conversation, which is only done true justice when heard as an audio recording:\nCommand Center: Uh, do we want to think about, uh, scrambling aircraft?\nFAA Headquarters: Uh, God, I don't know.\nCommand Center: Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna' have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.\nFAA Headquarters: Uh, you know, everybody just left the room.\n The commission said the government was drastically underprepared and firmly contended the military's assertion that the hijacked planes could have been shot down if the FAA had told the military as soon as it knew. ("We're not so sure," the commission reported.)\n It might seem hard to condemn the government for an inability to respond to a hectic 149 minutes unlike anything ever seen in America before. The government succeeded in parts (they orchestrated the landings of 4,500 airborne flights that day) but failed unconscionably amidst chaos.\n I'll be the first to admit I didn't have enough faith in the 9-11 Commission. A few months ago in this newspaper I wrote that the commission "was a good idea, but it's likely now to travel down an unfortunate path to insignificance" ("Commission impossible" staff editorial, April 12). I was clearly wrong. The commission has done quite an effective job of breaking down the 9-11 attacks, and by exposing the government's pratfalls, it is helping ensure that something like this never happens again. \nAnd if it does, we might just have to rely on average Americans again instead of the military.