 Seal of the 9/11 Commission | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | November 27, 2002; 22 years ago (2002-11-27) |
| Dissolved | August 21, 2004; 21 years ago (2004-08-21) |
| Jurisdiction | U.S. government |
| Agency executives |
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| Key document |
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| Website | 9-11commission |
TheNational Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the9/11 Commission, was set up on November 27, 2002, to investigate all aspects of theSeptember 11 attacks, thedeadliest terrorist attack in world history. It was created byCongressional legislation, which charged it with preparing "a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks", including preparedness by theU.S. federal government for the attacks, the response following the attacks, and steps that can be taken to guard against a future terrorist attack.
The 9/11 Commission was chaired byThomas Kean, a two-term formergovernor of New Jersey from 1982 until 1990, and included fiveDemocrats and fiveRepublicans. The legislation creating the commission was signed into law byPresidentGeorge W. Bush.
The commission's final report, known as the9/11 Commission Report, was published on July 22, 2004.[1] It is 585 pages, including the findings of the commission's extensive interviews and testimony received during its investigation. The primary conclusion in the9/11 Report is that failures of the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) andFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) permitted the September 11 terrorist attacks to occur and that wiser and more aggressive actions by these agencies could potentially have prevented the attack.
After the publication of its final report, the commission closed on August 21, 2004. The commission's website was shut down, but has been archived.[2]
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was established on November 27, 2002, byPresidentGeorge W. Bush and theUnited States Congress, with former secretary of stateHenry Kissinger initially appointed to head the commission.[3] However, Kissinger resigned only weeks after being appointed, to avoid conflicts of interest.[4] Former U.S. senatorGeorge Mitchell was originally appointed as the vice chairman, but he stepped down on December 10, 2002, not wanting to sever ties to his law firm.[5] On December 15, 2002, Bush appointed formerNew Jersey governorTom Kean to head the commission.[6]
By the spring of 2003, the commission was off to a slow start, needing additional funding to help it meet its target day for the final report, of May 27, 2004.[7] In late March, the Bush administration agreed to provide an additional $9 million for the commission, though this was $2 million short of what the commission requested.[8] The first hearings were held from March 31 to April 1, 2003, in New York City.[9]
The members of the commission's staff included:
U.S. presidentGeorge W. Bush initially appointed formerU.S. secretary of state andnational security advisorHenry Kissinger as the commission's chairman. Following his appointment,Congress insisted that Kissinger disclose the names of his clients atKissinger Associates, aNew York City-based consulting firm he ran. The firm has long been discreet about its clientele. Kissinger refused to provide Congress with the names of his clients, and resigned as the commission's chairman. Bush then appointedThomas Kean, a two-termgovernor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990, as Kissinger's replacement.
PresentU.S. federal government officials who were called to testify before the 9/11 Commission included:
Former federal government officials who were called to testify before the 9/11 Commission included:
PresidentGeorge W. Bush, Vice PresidentDick Cheney, former presidentBill Clinton, and former vice presidentAl Gore all gave private testimony. President Bush and Vice President Cheney insisted on testifying together and not under oath, while Clinton and Gore met with the panel separately. As National Security Advisor,Condoleezza Rice claimed that she was not required to testify under oath because the position of national security advisor is an advisory role, independent of authority over a bureaucracy and does not require confirmation by theSenate. Legal scholars disagree on the legitimacy of her claim. Eventually, Rice testified publicly and under oath.[17]
The commission issued its final report, the9/11 Commission Report, on July 22, 2004. After its release, 9/11 Commission chairThomas Kean declared that bothpresidentsBill Clinton andGeorge W. Bush were "not well served" by theFederal Bureau of Investigation and theCentral Intelligence Agency.[18] The commission interviewed over 1,200 people in 10 countries and reviewed over two and a half million pages of documents, including some closely guardedclassified national security documents. Before it was released by the commission, the final public report was screened for any potentially classified information and edited as necessary.
The commission later released several supplemental reports on the terrorists' financing, travel, and other matters.
John Farmer Jr., senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, stated that the 9/11 Commission, "discovered that ... what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when — was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue." Farmer said, "At some level of the government, at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11 ... The [NORAD] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public."[19]Thomas Kean, the head of the 9/11 Commission, concurred, saying, "We to this day don't know why NORAD told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth."[20]
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) directorGeorge Tenet misled the commission and was "obviously not forthcoming" in his testimony to the commission, according to commission chairThomas Kean. AnFBI agent named Doug Miller had been working insideBin Laden Issue Station, a unit of the CIA dedicated to tracking the activities ofOsama bin Laden and his associates. By the spring of 2000, the Bin Laden Issue Station learned thatKhalid al-Mihdhar, aSaudi national who was anal-Qaeda member, andNawaf al-Hazmi, another Saudi who at that time was a suspected al-Qaeda operative, had entered the U.S. and were living under their own names insouthern California.
Miller wanted to inform the FBI of their entry and presence in the U.S., but the CIA blocked Miller's efforts to do so. Miller's contemporaneous draft cable to the FBI reporting on this, which the CIA prevented Miller from sending at the time, was found much later. Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were both hijackers ofAmerican Airlines Flight 77. The CIA then failed to reveal to the commission that over a year before the attack, it had been tracking the two hijackers' entry into and whereabouts inside the United States.[21][22] Co-chair Kean believes the CIA's failure to be forthcoming with this information to the commission was deliberate, not a mistake, saying: "Oh, it wasn't careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that in my mind ... In the DNA of these organizations was secrecy."[21]
The commission was criticized for alleged conflicts of interest on the part of commissioners and staff, including those ofPhilip D. Zelikow, the commission's executive director who co-authored a book withCondoleezza Rice.[23][24] The commission's final report, the9/11 Commission Report, has been the subject of criticism by both commissioners themselves and by others.[25][26]
Months after the commission had officially issued its report and ceased its functions,Thomas Kean, the commission's chair, and other commissioners toured the country to draw attention to the recommendations of the commission for reducing the terror risk, claiming that some of their recommendations were being ignored. Kean and vice-chairLee Hamilton wrote a book about the constraints they faced as commissioners, titledWithout Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.
The book was released on August 15, 2006, and chronicles the work of Kean and Hamilton on the commission. In the book, Kean and Hamilton charge that the 9/11 Commission was "set up to fail," and write that the commission was so frustrated with repeated misstatements by officials fromthe Pentagon and theFederal Aviation Administration during the investigation that it considered a separate investigation into possible obstruction of justice by Pentagon and FAA officials.[27]
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