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11
FORESIGHT--AND HINDSIGHT
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I n com p o s i ng th i s narrat ive, we have tried to remember that we write
with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see
the past clearly--with 20/20 vision. But the path of what happened is so
brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply into shadow. Comment-
ing on Pearl Harbor, Roberta Wohlstetter found it "much easier after the event
to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals.After the event, of course, a sig-
nal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since
the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with
conflicting meanings."
1
As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what
happened become still clearer.Yet the picture of how those things happened
becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and
uncertainty, recedes and the remaining memories of it become colored by what
happened and what was written about it later.With that caution in mind, we
asked ourselves, before we judged others, whether the insights that seem appar-
ent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what
people then could reasonably have known or done.
We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination,
policy, capabilities, and management.
11.1 IMAGINATION
Historical Perspective
The 9/11 attack was an event of surpassing disproportion. America had suf-
fered surprise attacks before--Pearl Harbor is one well-known case, the 1950
Chinese attack in Korea another. But these were attacks by major powers.
While by no means as threatening as Japan's act of war, the 9/11 attack was
in some ways more devastating. It was carried out by a tiny group of people,
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