Deseret News (Salt
Lake City, Utah)
September 19,
2003
'Why America Slept'
By Gerald Posner
Random House, $24.95.
Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the
Assassination of JFK" and "Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the
Assassination of Martin Luther King," has a brilliant mind. He
investigates historical events and gives the impression of complete
objectivity. If the reader does not always agree with Posner, he is
usually provoked to thought.
After an 18-month investigation including classified documents and
interviews, Posner is convinced that America was woefully unprepared
to deal with the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, in a number of
ways. His conclusion is that had we been better prepared, 9/11 could
have been prevented.
Posner puts it this way: "The result is a far more infuriating book
than originally expected. The failure to have prevented 9/11 was a
systemic one. Investigators did not get a lucky break early on, and
there were many blunders in the immediate run-up to the attack. The
seeds of failure, however, were sown repeatedly in almost 20 years of
fumbled investigations and misplaced priorities. After a while, the
revelations of ineptitude presented in this book no longer cause
surprise, but only anger."
In Posner's opinion, it was at least a decade of mistakes and
distraction that allowed people who have long hated the United States
to make the preparations for their massive and successful attacks. --
Dennis Lythgoe