The inspector general's staff interviewed 36 senior officials involved in the department's emergency response planning and summarized the finding: "It was clear that no person or entity is managing the overall Department's response activities." You could almost see them scratching their heads and saying, "No one's in charge here."
After the inspector general's report, Paul McHale, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who also served as an assistant secretary of defense under George W. Bush, told the Los Angeles Times: "There is a sense of complacency that has settled in nearly a decade after Sept. 11." The paper also quoted Randall Larsen, the former executive director of the commission that gave the government low marks in January: "They just don't see the WMD scenario as most likely," he said.
They don't? They must be idiots. They must not be reading all the government reports of the past eight years, declaring terrorist attacks on U.S. soil not only likely but virtually certain. There are many reasons for this, and just one has to do with something Ronald Reagan mused about in his office 25 years ago. "Man has never had a weapon he didn't use," he said, to a handful of aides. If you develop the atom bomb, it will be used, as it was. If man, in his darkness, can develop and deploy nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, they will be used, too.
No one wants to think about it. I don't want to think about it. But you have to make plans. You have to imagine, you have to think about the worst case, and then you have to plan for it—literally.