James Ridgeway

The 9/11 Commission Report is widely declared to be the definitive account of the most devastating attack ever to take place on American soil, but in truth the most vital questions about 9/11 have not been asked:

*Why wasn't a decade of warnings and hundreds of previous deaths enough to improve airline security? Whose interests does the FAA really protect?

*Why was Dick Cheney running the country from a secret bunker on 9/11? Where was Donald Rumsfeld? And how did the Bush administration plot to use the attacks to advance their policy goals?

*With al-Qaeda firmly on the radar for years, why were the FBI and CIA, the world's premier intelligence services, unable to see this coming?

*What did ISI, the Pakistani intelligence organization, know, when did they know it, and whom did they tell? How did U.S. allies in the region help pave the way for these attacks?

*Why didn't this "independent" commission find anyone accountable for more than 2,700 civilian deaths? Why are so many of their findings still classified?Which questions did they ask-and which did they ignore?

An ever-growing number of facts casts clouds of suspicion over the actions and motivations of many key government officials and agencies. The 5 Unanswered Questions cuts through the official accounts and political "spin" to the questions that lie at the heart of this American tragedy.


"Ridgeway...finds no hidden plot behind the 9/11 terrorist attack. Instead, he cites the open secret of a general and long-standing tendency to put American corporate interest ahead of the interest of citizens. Ridgeway focuses on five key questions: why the government couldn't stop the attack, why it didn't protect us, why we were unaware of plans for the attack, how U.S. "allies" abetted the attack, and why the 9/11 Commission couldn't get at the truth. In separate chapters, Ridgeway examines the political and economic issues behind the questions and offers a grim look at the actions and inactions of the Bush administration, which left the nation vulnerable to the terrorist attack, unwilling or unable to act on intelligence that raised the possibility of such an attack, and still vulnerable to troubling policies and attitudes. The placing of airline profitability above public safety, the coziness existing between regulators and the airlines, and U.S and Middle Eastern funding of Islamic extremists are all elements inadequately explored by the 9/11 Commission, according to Ridgeway."
--Vanessa Bush, BOOKLIST