Steyn's essay is called How the Sept. 11 commission blew it. Quote:
"These poseurs have blown it so badly they've become the definitive example of what they're meant to be investigating: a culture so stuck in its way it's unable to change even in the most extreme circumstances. Take this example from their report on Sept. 11:
"FAA Command Center: "Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?"
"FAA Headquarters: "God, I don't know."
"FAA Command Center: "That's a decision somebody's going to have to make, probably in the next 10 minutes."
"FAA Headquarters: "You know, everybody just left the room."
"What's going on there? Well, the guys at HQ didn't understand this was their rendezvous with history, and they were unable to rise to the occasion. Isn't that just what the 9/11 Commission's done? They were appointed to take a cool, dispassionate look at the government's response to an act of war, but they were unable to rise above the most pointless partisan point-scoring.
"But I'd go further. I'd say the underlying assumption behind all the whiny point-scoring is false, and deeply dangerous. Most of what went wrong on Sept. 11 we knew about in the first days after. Generally, it falls into two categories: a) Government agencies didn't enforce their own rules (as in the terrorists' laughably inadequate visa applications); or b) The agencies' rules were out of date --three out of those four planes reached their targets because their crews, passengers and ground staff all blindly followed the FAA's 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late, as the terrorists knew they would.
"The next time a terrorist gets through and pulls off an attack, it will be for the same reasons: There'll be a bunch of new post-9/11 regulations, and some bureaucrat somewhere will have neglected to follow them, or some wily Islamist will have rendered them as obsolete as his predecessors made all those 30-year old hijack rules..."
