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I just finished a C J Box thriller that referenced this report, and I got Fall and Rise as a gift. I've owned The 9//11 Commission Report for years, but hadn't yet read it, so this seemed like a good time. It's well-written and goes into detail about what actually happened that day (although not from an architectural engineering POV, sorry truthers). There is some background on the history, but not nearly as much as The Looming Tower. It is more a study of what went wrong as far as preventing or anticipating the attack and follows up with recommendations going forward. This is a government commission, so the focus is on law enforcement and intelligence, not steps for private industry or civilians.
There is sort of a time capsule effect reading it so many years later. It's interesting to see what recommendations were acted on and how things have changed in general. We're much more sensitive to this particular type of terrorism and aviation safety, but issues with cyber crime and the 2016 election show that we still tend to "fight the last war" as they say.
I also think that if you told the commissioners at the time of writing that we'd still be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan all these years later, they would have found it hard to believe. Nonetheless, here we are, and this book helps show how we got here.
There is sort of a time capsule effect reading it so many years later. It's interesting to see what recommendations were acted on and how things have changed in general. We're much more sensitive to this particular type of terrorism and aviation safety, but issues with cyber crime and the 2016 election show that we still tend to "fight the last war" as they say.
I also think that if you told the commissioners at the time of writing that we'd still be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan all these years later, they would have found it hard to believe. Nonetheless, here we are, and this book helps show how we got here.
