The 9/11 Commission Report opens like a bad novel: "Tuesday September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work."
Instead of stolid government prose thick in abbreviations and with the time delivered military-style, we get what is in essence a moment of collective bureaucratic nostalgia for a nation about to be horribly changed. It's a reminder of how routine something like checking in at the airport was then—a time, the commission reminds us, when airport security was discussed in terms of relaxing safety rules because of air rage, or the need for a "passengers' bill of rights."
But if the Report reads like fiction, it is clearly tragedy and black comedy and not at all a thriller. Instead of insidious corruption, collusion or treason on the part of U.S. politicians and authorities, at the core of the 9/11 Report is a portrait of banal incompetence, foolish assumptions, unimaginative thinking, fear of risk-taking and careerist concerns with turf-protection. In short, the report notes, with heartbreaking directness: "The U.S. government was unable to capitalize on mistakes made by al Qaeda. Time ran out."
Still, if one of the problems the Report makes painfully clear is how terrible our government was at preventing 9/11, it is also true that our after-the-fact police work is extraordinary in every way: detailed, impressive and thorough.
The people who will find the least comfort in the Report's conclusions are the conspiracy theorists of all stripes, here and abroad. For example, Michael Moore's obsession with the flights carrying Saudi nationals out of the country after 9/11 is examined and dismissed in a mere sidebar. According to the commission, Richard Clarke, the national counterterrorism coordinator—who did time in the Bush and Clinton administrations as the Cassandra raising unheeded warnings about al Qaeda—was the one who approved those flights. Though Clarke has since become a leading critic of the president on Iraq, he maintains to this day that the request for flight approval never reached George Bush or the president's inner circle. Also, the Report notes that those flights all departed after U.S. airspace reopened, not before. Most importantly, the report concludes:
"The FBI interviewed all persons of interest on these flights prior to their departures. They concluded that none of the passengers was connected to 9/11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion. Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on these flights."
The foreign press in particular has been drawn to conspiracy notions in which the United States chose passengers with Muslim names to blame the terror strike on; or that even if these people did do it, Bin Laden was not necessarily behind it. The Report, however, methodically and overwhelmingly makes clear the guilt of the hijackers, al Qaeda and Bin Laden. There is every sort of evidence (phone records, video, e-mail, travel records, personal letters, eyewitness) tracking the 19 hijackers as they are selected by al Qaeda, trained, and prepared for what was called "the planes operation."
Beyond all of that, there is this direct evidence of the terrorists' guilt: phone calls from stewardesses and passengers on the planes using some of their last moments of life to tell authorities the exact seat numbers that many of the hijackers sprang from.
The Report also documents al Qaeda's control of the attack and details how Bin Laden's personal involvement in 9/11 was substantial. He selected some of the hijackers and helped pick the targets. The attack was such a priority for him that when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, usually called the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, had another plan to attack Israel with a hijacked Saudi fighter jet, Bin Laden "instructed KSM to concentrate on the 9/11 operation first."
In fact, KSM comes off less as a mastermind and more like a homicidal flake. For example, originally, the plan was to hijack 10 aircraft, crashing nine into buildings. As for the last plane:
"KSM himself was to land the 10th plane at a U.S. airport, and, after killing all adult male passengers on board and alerting the media, deliver a speech."
It is no surprise to learn that part of the terrorist training was to regularly watch movies about hijackings. One of the 9/11 hijackers even told people he was soon going to be "famous." In addition to his duties masterminding "the planes operation," KSM was also head of the al Qaeda media committee. Among the first duties he assigned new terrorists to perform was to make their martyr video; he liked to personally direct them. The Report tells how al Qaeda leadership was disappointed when the operative assigned to film the attack on the USS Cole fell asleep and missed it.
It is hard to believe how these deluded people in the outback of Afghanistan managed to succeed in murdering almost 3,000 Americans. The difficulty in comprehending this fact—rather than any evidence—may be the main reason that conspiracy theories still flourish in some quarters.
Among the most maddening of the many missed opportunities detailed in the Report occurs on the very first page, when a stroke of luck happens and Mohamed Atta is flagged as a potential security risk by CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) while checking into his flight at Boston's Logan International Airport. In a footnote, we learn that CAPPS was designed by the airlines to "identify those who might pose a threat to civil aviation." CAPPS singled out 10 of the 19 hijackers, including all but one of the terrorists who hijacked the two American Airlines flights (one of which hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center and the other hit the Pentagon).
But, before 9/11 changed our notions of security, being seen as a potential threat to civil aviation only had the odd consequence of being forced to board the plane before your baggage. The report does not explain the point of this procedure, but assume the reasons can be found in the way the Federal Aviation Administration viewed threats to air traffic:
"In the years before 9/11, the FAA perceived sabotage as a greater threat to aviation than hijacking. First, no domestic hijacking had occurred in a decade. Second, the commercial aviation system was considered more vulnerable to explosives than to weapons such as firearms. Finally, explosives were perceived as deadlier than hijacking and therefore of greater consequence."
In essence, the airlines, following the concern of the FAA, never conceived that a terrorist would be suicidal enough to get on board a plane knowing he'd checked a bomb as luggage. In 1997, Vice President Al Gore chaired a commission on aviation security that in its final report fretted about the remote threat of surface-to-air missiles but "did not discuss the possibility of suicide hijackings." Over the next few years, suicide bombings became an increasingly common terrorist tactic throughout the world, yet the FAA never revisited this issue. So Mohamed Atta and his comrades selected by CAPPS were forced to board before their baggage. This, of course, did not interfere with their plans in the least.
Likewise, an alert customer-service representative marked two of the hijackers for extra security because he found them suspicious and because one terrorist didn't even have a photo ID. The result of this comes out of the Report like the chorus of a too-familiar song: "The only consequence of their selection was that their checked bags were held off the plane until it was confirmed that they had boarded the aircraft."
A number of the terrorists set off the metal detectors checking into the airport, too. But all eventually got through, presumably carrying mace and knives. Amazingly, screeners passed two of the hijackers of American 77, who set off detectors, even though the Report notes that "the screener should have ‘resolved' what set off the alarm." In other words, the terrorists were allowed to pass the checkpoint despite setting off the detector for reasons left unknown. Even a little effort would have made a difference here. The terrorists were not brilliant at anything, and this seems to include hiding their weapons. The Report notes that: "The video footage indicates that he was carrying an unidentified item in his back pocket clipped to its rim." It is depressing to realize that this wouldn't have passed the standard concert security at the House of Blues or the Hard Rock, where security always checks your back pocket for weapons. How can airport screeners miss it?
It is moments like this that the lackadaisical security becomes almost unbearable, yet it is important to remember that these screeners are the last stop in a vast chain of shame and incompetence.
The 9/11 Commission Report spares no one. Along the way it acknowledges how nearly every American policy disaster contributed to our vulnerability on September 11: the Bay of Pigs (causing a fear in the CIA of covert action), Iran-Contra (a suspicion of the legality of presidential approval of covert action) and Somalia (an aversion to "boots on the ground"). It is a great strength of the 9/11 Commission Report that it fully explores this chain with a credibility and competence that only the most die-hard partisans and conspiracy nuts will discount. Nothing is held back. But still it is hard to comprehend just how unprepared the government was for the attacks on September 11.
The Report makes clear that sitting in my apartment watching CNN that morning, I was more accurately and more quickly informed of the transpiring events than the president, the vice president, the FAA and, especially, the military.
The military response in particular turns out to be far different than has been previously reported. When terrorists begin using planes as missiles, the military is called upon to defend the nation. But the problem was that no one in the FAA thought to make that call in time. Of course, the military should have its own ways of finding planes that are aimed at the Pentagon. And those failed, too.
Eventually, the military did send out fighters to respond, but when they were sent has become a very confused issue. This did not have to be the case. But the military officials at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) consistently gave inaccurate testimony to the commission and to the public. Of course, the record was easy to correct as the military logged and recorded all phone calls, communications, radar and instrument readings that day. The commission was able to consult those. As a result, until the publication of the Report, NORAD looked merely slow to respond, when in fact the military was clueless about what was happening:
"Thus the military did not have 14 minutes to respond to American 77, as testimony to the commission in May 2003 suggested. It had at most one or two minutes to react ..."
and:
"Nor did the military have 47 minutes to respond to United 93... By the time the military learned about the flight, it had crashed."
The reason this becomes crucial is that the military has an agenda and the Report cuts right through it. "NORAD officials have maintained consistently that had the passengers not caused United 93 to crash, the military would have prevented it from reaching Washington D.C. That conclusion is based on a version of events that we now know is incorrect."
In fact, it turns out that the fighters sent from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and authorized by the vice president to shoot down civilian craft not only didn't get that order, they didn't even know what they were chasing. One pilot told the commission: "I'm thinking cruise-missile threat from the sea. You know you look down, you see the Pentagon burning ... [Y]ou couldn't see any airplanes, and no one told us anything."
One of the most troubling accounts in the Report—and one that has drawn far less attention—is that there were other fighters scrambled on September 11 to defend Washington (also put in the air, as it turns out, too late that day to matter). These fighters came from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on the order of General David Wherley and were authorized to shoot down civilian aircraft. While the NORAD chain of command proved so cumbersome the vice president's authorization to shoot (confirmed twice with the president, according to notes) never made it to the Langley pilots, the Andrews pilots were authorized based solely on a chaotic phone call between two secret service agents: "A Secret Service agent had a phone in each ear, one connected to Wherley and the other connected to a fellow agent at the White House, relaying instructions that the White House agent said he was getting from the vice president." Dick Cheney, however, has no memory of this conversation. And at the military command center, no one seems to have known those fighters from Andrews were in the air, let alone authorized to use weapons. "The president and the vice president indicated to us they had not been aware that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews, at the request of the Secret Service, outside the military chain of command. There is no evidence that NORAD headquarters ... knew ... that the Andrews planes were airborne and operating under different rules of engagement."
The Report does not delve any deeper into this incident, yet it is chilling to discover that these Andrews planes—the only ones operating under the assumption they could fire on civilian aircraft—were sent based on a conversation that was a conference call played out like a game of whisper-down-the-lane. Of course, it is hard to argue that this method proved inferior to the chain of command's official approach, in which the pilots from Langley never received the vice president's order: "The ... commander told us he did not pass along the order because he was unaware of its ramifications. Both the mission commander and the senior weapons director indicated that they did not pass the order to the fighters circling Washington and New York because they were unsure how the pilots would, or should proceed with this guidance."
Much has been made of the president's decision to remain five to seven minutes hanging with kids at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, after being told of the attack. The Report paraphrases the president's explanation for his behavior:
"The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction in a moment of crisis. The press was standing behind the children; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."
Certainly, the Report presents evidence less than an hour later that Bush was already focused on avenging the attack. According to the notes taken by Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, in his first phone conversation with the vice president (upon reaching his plane from the school), Bush said he was aware of the attack on the Pentagon, also and concluded: "We're at war ... somebody's going to pay." Later that afternoon, too, Condoleezza Rice recalls the president opening a meeting with advisors in a video teleconference by stating: "We're at war."
A point made more emphatically by the fact that, at that time, it wasn't at all clear yet who we were at war with.
Yet suspicion was already focusing on al Qaeda and Bin Laden, who had declared war on the United States in 1998—though few in the defense, intelligence and especially the political establishment noticed at the time
It is, of course, impossible to track every little group and know every threat to the country. Even with a focus on domestic terrorism (like Oklahoma City) and extremists from the Middle East, there are still plenty of other groups.
In 1995, the cult Aum Shinrikyo launched a sarin nerve-gas attack in a Tokyo subway. Though the group had an office in New York and a doomsday philosophy, the CIA had no knowledge of the group at the time of the subway attack.
The Report goes into the all of the problems the CIA faced that interfered with its ability to focus on Bin Laden: staffing inadequacies, budget cuts and institutional limitations. But even had the money been there to hire experts, the expertise was hard to come by. Before September 11, Americans were by and large uninterested in the Arab world. One fascinating statistic the Report notes: "The total number of undergraduate degrees granted in Arabic in all U.S. colleges and universities in 2002 was six." That's fewer than would graduate from the French department at a small college, and it is a sad measure of how little we value understanding the culture, language and people in that part of the world.
But, despite the obstacles, the CIA got a surprisingly early start focusing on Bin Ladin. The Report tells how the CIA began to seriously track Bin Laden in 1996, almost by chance, when Directorate of Operations David Cohen wanted to test a new approach to investigations by creating a "virtual station" to track a target. In order to sell the idea, he picked terrorist financing as the target, knowing it appealed to National Security Advisor Anthony Lake. Though not his first choice, Cohen eventually turned to an analyst who "was especially knowledgeable about Afghanistan, had noticed a recent stream of reports about Bin Laden and something called al Qaeda, and suggested to Cohen that the station focus on this one individual. Cohen agreed. Thus was born the Bin Laden unit."
It turned out that, despite what has been widely reported and believed, Bin Laden's personal fortune was not the money behind al Qaeda. It was almost all donations from rich backers, particularly ones in Saudi Arabia. "The CIA now estimates that it cost al Qaeda about $30 million per year to sustain its activities before 9/11, and that this money was raised almost entirely through donations." The Report shows that the Saudi government froze Bin Laden's share of his family's millions in the early '90s, and the Sudanese government seized all his other assets when he fled that nation in 1996. Bin Laden was effectively broke, yet a year later the CIA still defined him as an "extremist financier."
(By the way, the 9/11 attack itself was surprisingly cheap. To support, train and coordinate the 19 hijackers for two years cost only $400,000-$500,000.)
By 1998 when Bin Laden declared war on the US, thanks to the Bin Laden unit the CIA was able to give Clarke, the national counterterrorism coordinator, a far better understanding of the threat al Qaeda posed. Clarke's frustrations have already been covered in his own book and by his many interviews in the media. But he, too, in the Report is often stymied about how to handle Bin Laden. On August 5, 1998, Clarke chaired a meeting on Bin Laden; the notes from the meeting indicate "there was a dearth of bright ideas around the table, despite a consensus that the [government] ought to pursue every avenue it can to address this problem." Two days later, al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Kenya.
America responded with a missile strike in the Sudan and one in Afghanistan that missed Bin Laden by a few hours. The Report includes speculation that the al Qaeda leader had been tipped off about the strike by his allies in Pakistan's intelligence service. Though the CIA knew about the risk of leaks, informing Pakistan was still essential as the missile had to travel through that nation's airspace. The U.S. needed to make sure that Pakistan did not think the missile was an attack from India—the greatest concern in the region at the time was another war between these two nuclear powers. The Report is at its best at moments like this, reminding us of the realities of the pre-9/11 world, instead of just pointing fingers by looking at the attacks in a vacuum.
Still, the much admired, nonpartisan nature of the Report seems almost inevitable because there is so little difference between Bush and Clinton on the policy and approach to terrorism before 9/11. In fact, both administrations relied on the same basic group. Both administrations shared Richard Clarke, George Tenet remained in charge of the CIA, Louis Freeh remained head of the FBI and Hugh Shelton stayed on as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. As a result, no new ideas arrived with the change in administrations. So, while it was clear that CIA operations and missile strikes would not stop Bin Laden, no other approach emerged. Certainly, no further military actions were planned.
"Officials in both the Clinton and Bush administration regarded a full U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as practically inconceivable before 9/11. It was never the subject of formal interagency deliberation."
In retrospect, "boots on the ground" was clearly what it would have taken to get Bin Laden out of Afghanistan. Bush says he realized this right away.
The Report is not perfect. There is a lot that is still unknown. For example, little is said about all the trips the hijackers made to Las Vegas:
"Beyond Las Vegas' reputation for welcoming tourists, we have seen no credible evidence explaining why on this occasion and others, the operatives flew to and met in Las Vegas."
This is disconcerting, but has no real relevance to our overall picture of 9/11. More importantly, for a sense of completion, I expected to see an official list of the names of all the victims of the attack. It wasn't just buildings we lost that day. It is a glaring omission.
On the more substantive front, the president's "axis of evil" speech is not examined at all. Of course, the Report's references to Iraq have been endlessly debated, and its surprising assertions about Iran are now getting noticed. But the third member of the axis, North Korea, goes almost unmentioned. It would be interesting to know if details merited its inclusion on the list, such as any known contacts between the communist dictatorship and radical Islamic factions.
Also, the commission seems to have met with less than full cooperation when it came to questioning detainees and their interrogators, even thirdhand:
"We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process."
I am no expert in intelligence-gathering, but it's hard to believe that getting testimony from some of the interrogators could disrupt the process, or at least not so much as to make depriving the American people and our elected representatives of this information a necessary sacrifice. After all, everyone from the CIA director to the president found time to speak with the commission. But when it came to the detainees, the commission was "limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place."
Yet this information is the main source for crucial parts of the Report. In particular, many of the details about the hijackers selection, training and mission come from the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is in U.S. custody. Checking the dates cited in the end notes, much of the information obtained from Mohammed came from interrogations that took place June-November 2003. The only interrogation of Mohammed mentioned from 2004 took place on February 19. So it is hard to imagine that there was a large risk of "disruption" that made it impossible for just one of his interrogators to appear before the commission in 2004.
Still, whatever history will judge to be its weaknesses and drawbacks, the 9/11 Commission Report is something for Americans to be amazed by and even proud of. Certainly our government failed us on 9/11 in nearly every way imaginable, yet the United States is now the only nation in the world that has ever undertaken to provide its citizens with such a full explanation for its massive mistakes. This is not a small thing. Look at how the president and Congress are being pressured by the public to swallow the commission's recommendations in total and at once. I'll offer no position on that; rather, I urge everyone to read the 9/11 Commission Report and then make your own decision.