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Page 344 of the 9/11 Commission Report contains this striking assertion: "Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.. ..It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing the exercise of imagination. Doing so requires more than finding an expert who can imagine that aircraft could be used as weapons" (344).
The background for that assertion includes examples like this. The attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001 involved a novel mode of destruction that had people scrambling for ways to label it. "Suicide hijacking" and "aircraft as explosives" were two of the labels that stuck. The idea of a suicide hijacking was imaginable and had been imagined before 9/11 by the Federal Aviation Administration. It was on a short list of plausible terrorist scenarios, but it was judged unlikely because it did not offer an opportunity for terrorists to have a dialogue in order to gain the release of captive extremists being held in the U.S. Unimagined was the possibility that terrorists might not be interested in dialogue at all, but only in destruction (Ibid., 345). Furthermore, analysts imagined that any use of aircraft as weapons would originate overseas and that the threatening aircraft would be intercepted en route. The idea of a suicide hijacking had also been imagined by Richard Clarke who developed a scenario in which a Learjet was commandeered in Atlanta, Georgia, loaded with explosives, and flown into the capitol building. Clarke circulated this scenario to federal agencies and asked them what they could do about this. Their answer was that they could scramble aircraft to intercept the Learjet, but they'd have to get rules of engagement from the president before they could do anything, and there was no mechanism to do so (345). In the context of imagination, it is interesting that Clarke got many of his ideas about domestic vulnerability to terror attack from reading Tom Clancy novels and not from government intelligence sources. It is also interesting that Clarke's imagined scenario was constrained. He imagined "aircraft with explosives," not "aircraft as explosives."
The failures of imagination uncovered by the 9/11 Commission resemble those uncovered by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) that studied NASA's second shuttle disaster. When the space...