9/11 Commission Report

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The cover of the final 9/11 report, which can be purchased in bookstores across the United States and around the world

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The 9/11 Commission Report, formally titled Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is the official report on the events leading up to the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was prepared by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States at the request of the President and Congress, and it is available to the public for sale or free download.

The report was convened 441 days after the attack [link] and was issued on July 22, 2004. The report was originally scheduled for release on May 27, 2004, but a compromise agreed to by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert allowed sixty days of extension, until July 26.

Contents

1 Findings
2 Criticism
3 See also
4 External links

4.1 Notable articles regarding the report
4.2 Essays critical of the report

Findings

The commission interviewed over 1,200 people in 10 countries and reviewed over two and a half million pages of documents, including some closely-guarded classified national security documents. The commission also relied heavily on the FBI's PENTTBOM investigation. Before it was released by the commission, the final public report was screened for any potentially classified information and edited as necessary.

After releasing the report, Commission Chair Thomas Kean declared that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been "not well served" by the FBI and CIA [link].

In addition to identifying intelligence failures occurring before the attacks, the report claimed to provide evidence of the following:

Airport security footage of the hijackers as they passed through airport security
Cockpit voice recordings of the terrorists as they hijacked and sabotaged the airliners
Eyewitness testimony of passengers as they described their own final moments to family members and authorities on airphones and cellphones from the cabins of doomed airliners

The commission also concluded 15 of the 19 hijackers that carried out the attacks were from Saudi Arabia, but found no evidence the government of Saudi Arabia conspired in the attacks, nor that it funded the attackers [link]. According to the commission, all 19 hijackers were members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, based in Afghanistan, and led by Osama bin Laden. In addition, while meetings between al-Qaeda representatives and Iraqi government officials had taken place, the panel had no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had assisted al-Qaeda in preparing for or carrying out the 9/11 attacks. The Report notes in Chapter 2 that "Bin Laden had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army."

The commission's final report also offered new evidence of increased contact between Iran and al-Qaeda. The report contains information about how several of the 9/11 hijackers passed through Iran and indicates that officials in Iran did not place entry stamps in their passports. However, according to the report (Chapter 7), there is no evidence that Iran was aware of the actual 9/11 plot. Iran has since implemented several widely-publicized efforts to shut down al-Qaeda cells operating within the country.

In addition to its findings, the report made extensive recommendations for changes that can be made to help prevent a similar attack. These include the creation of a National Intelligence Director over both the CIA and the FBI, and many changes in border security and immigration policy.

The report is available to be purchased in paperback (ISBN 0393326713). In addition, Barnes and Noble has independently published a hard-bound version of the report in hardcover with an index (ISBN 0760768064). The report rose to the top of several bestseller lists and was praised by reviewers for its readability and the strength of its narrative. In 2004 it was nominated for the prestigious National Book Award.

Criticism

In a July of 2006 interview[link], 9/11 family member Bill Doyle, father of Joey Doyle, described his experience with the Commission: "The 9/11 commission is probably the worst representation of the 9/11 families, or for that matter the American public, because it is a sham, it really is. We had tons of questions that we asked them to ask, they wouldn't do it, and the continuing coverup is just beyond belief."
Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, said "There are not many editors eager for writers to explore the glaring defects of the 9/11 Commission Report. One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations. We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11."^{[#endnote_roberts]}
The Report omits the total collapse of 7 World Trade Center, a 47 floor steel-frame building, across the street and to the north of the rest of the World Trade Center site later the same day.
In a 2004 article entitled, 'Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation,' Harpers Magazine writer Benjamin DeMott stated, "The plain, sad reality — I report this following four full days studying the work — is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation . . . At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness of earnest, well-informed public debate."[link]
A Pakistani weekly paper wrote in March of 2006 that the Pakistan foreign office spent "tens of thousands of dollars" lobbying to get anti-Pakistan findings omitted from the final version of the Commission Report. [link] The Pakistani newspaper also wrote, "Insiders . . . say the US Congress does not know about the fact that money was paid to the inquiry commission to silence it."
In a 2004 interview, Bernard Gwertzman, of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated of the Report, "Again, one of the great problems in the commission report is that it looked at exactly one issue— counterterrorism— and none of the others. But [U.S.] intelligence users consist of more than 1 million people, many of them in uniform, and when you talk about budgeting and programming authority, you have to consider that. . . Many of these conclusions are probably very valuable. But this is a 13-chapter report. Eleven chapters are a masterful description of what happened and what went wrong that led to the 9/11 attack. There is no chapter that explains what people did after 9/11. There is no chapter that qualifies that this is only one of many problems in intelligence and intelligence reform."[link]
Theologian and 9/11 researcher David Ray Griffin has also presented many criticisms of the Commission Report.^{[#endnote_griffin]}^{[#endnote_griffin-571]}
The Report did not include the testimony of FAA counter-terrorism expert Bogdan Dzakovic, who stated to the Commission, "We breached security up to 90 percent of the time. The FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead, we were ordered not to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities, to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be 'checking.' . . . What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system. Our airports are not safer now than before 9/11. The main difference between then and now is that life is now more miserable for passengers." He also described later, in an interview, the same situation which occurred for virtually all government officials following the 9/11 attacks: "Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration." [link]
The Report contains 28 blanked-out pages that the Village Voice speculated on the contents of in a [Dec 2005 article.]
The Report did not include key testimony by secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta which describes the situation in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center with vice president Cheney as American Airlines flight 77 approached the Pentagon on 9/11/01: "There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't kno w what all that meant. And--" Yet despite such a detailed description of the events that day, the only mention of Mineta in the Commission Report is on p. 326, that Mineta was part of a group that met with Bush at the end of September 11 to review the events of the day.[link]

External links

Notable articles regarding the report

[9/11 panel report: 'We must act'] - from CNN
[The 9/11 Report Raises More Serious Questions About The White House Statements On Intelligence] - by John Dean
[9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable] - from CBS
[Bush vows to heed 9/11 report advice] - from MSNBC
[Pinning the Blame] - from the New York Review of Books

Essays critical of the report

↑ [Who Will Save America? My Epiphany, By Paul Craig Roberts]

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9/11 Commission Report

Findings

Criticism

See also

External links

Notable articles regarding the report

Essays critical of the report