SOURCE: Sina, Joshua. “Eyes Wide Shut: Missed Signals of September 11.” Washington Times (29 September 2002): B8.

In the following review, Sina asserts that Breakdown is one of the most “insightful and penetrating” books about the intelligence failures that are believed to have led to up to the attacks on September 11.

Breakdown is the inside story of the intelligence community's failure to anticipate, preempt, and prevent the horrific simultaneous suicide aircraft bombings of September 11. According to Bill Gertz, the book's author, and others, al Qaeda's success in carrying out these attacks represented a Pearl Harbor failure of catastrophic proportions for the nation's counterterrorism community.

One of the many strengths of this important book is that Mr. Gertz places the September 11 attacks in context. He sees the assaults as much more than a single counterterrorism failure and he presents instead a chronicle of this nation's ineffectuality in thwarting previous al Qaeda attacks...