How Can an Unfinished Book Win the National Book Award?
Well, okay, “unfinished” is technically inaccurate, and odds are it wouldn’t win anyway, but as Jim Dwyer’s NYT article from last Friday makes clear, The 9/11 Commission Report nominated for the NBA’s nonfiction prize doesn’t contain the complete report. The unpublished material, concerning “broadly inaccurate accounts provided by several civil and military officials about efforts to track and chase the hijacked aircraft on Sept. 11,” and hasn’t been finished, suggests Mark Carallo of the Department of Justice, because the commission filed it too late: The monograph was submitted to the Justice Department just as the commission’s term expired on Aug. 21, a date selected by Congress after long negotiations to avoid bringing out the commission’s report at the height of the presidential campaign.It arrived not only as the commission became legally defunct, but also as many commission members and the staff lost their security clearances, Mr. Corallo said. That meant no one from the commiss
