never forget …
i will forget 99% of this

When this Committee Report came across my library feed I decided to check it out for myself, even though I'd seen it on sale for $1. There are free copies of the entire report at https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/

The first observation that you will make is that it reads nothing like a "committee report" but more like a novel. I'm not surprised that it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004 and that a movie (based on the report) was made.

The report, in short, was quite thorough and should be required reading for all Americans interested in these question. Many of the agencies and changes in security that came about after the attacks are described in some detail.

The book itself is divided into 13 chapters that dramatize the events almost from the beginning. Chapter one is titled "WE HAVE SOME PLANES" and basically describes the 4 flights and the events of 9/11. Subsequent chapters outline the history of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and describe these episodes as the "foundation of the new terrorism" and efforts to "counter" said terrorism before going into a short history of previous attacks upon the homeland. Bios of each of the terrorists follows in a couple of chapters before ending on some policy solutions and global strategies for combating future threats.

As thorough and interesting as the report was, I think readers should read for themselves and also analyze the book reviews and critiques of the study, even on this page. Many are quite telling about all of the different and related issues that were either left out or not mentioned at all.

Given how contaminated our politics is today, one could not help note that this report also had a rather partisan edge to it when describing the role of Clinton and Bin Laden. The committee was kind to then President Bush, who apparently could not remember that Clinton had explicitly told him that Bin Laden should be his main concern...

As far as I can tell, this is a thoroughly researched narrative of the events leading up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Also, it is straight-forward and surprisingly readable. I am impressed that the commission was able to issue a unanimous report. Certainly there are holes in the research, but if you are interested in the full the story of 9/11, this is a good place to start.

Very interesting and infuriating at the same time. To read this while our Southern and Northern AND Western borders are all wide open is, again, infuriating.

And it's very interesting to hear the things that the hijackers, bin Laden, and their fellow terrorists were saying -- they are exactly the same things that are being said by the pro-Palestinian protestors on college campuses around America. They hate Israel, they hate America, and America's support for Israel drives them to insanity. We still have terrorists in our midst - and it's not parents at schoolboard meetings as injudicious Merrick Garland would say, or "right wing extremism" as Mucho Señor Biden likes to spout. It is terrifying to think what these psychos will try to do next and infuriating that our gov't leaders are not fulfilling their #1 responsibility of protecting the American people. Will we ever learn?

Not a great read for entertainment. Many of the chapters are a slog through the details of our Byzantine intelligence bureaucracy and the minute details of how with a better organizational structure, we MAYBE would have been able to put the hundreds of pieces together to see that an attack was coming.
Some chapters were gripping. The first chapter was the most dramatic describing what took place on the planes and the federal government and airlines scrambling to respond. The chapters describing the emergency response to the WTC were harrowing as well.
Many of the recommendations in this report I found uninspired. Possibly because I benefit from hindsight knowing how naive the “war on terror” has been. E.g. there seemed to be an optimism we could win the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide. Man, if we could just show them how GREAT America is! /s
Though to their credit, the authors were clear-eyed of what a tremendous institutional challenge it is to address the counterintelligence problem, and many of those recommendations were enacted with some success—and lots of funding.

Not that I want to accuse our government of lying to us or anything, but this book should in the Fiction section.

I don't know how one can even begin to rate such a document. A useful read if one wants to see how a body of bipartisan electeds encouraged the proliferation of the surveillance state under which we all now live; anticipate the arrival of Obama as a liberal President who championed defense; name the hot potato Israel and the U.S. played with regards to which nation might be Bin Laden's millennium attack(s); intimate that Clinton's feminine liaison did not supplement but distract the President from foreign policy and defense; and provide some rather banal statistics that jar the mind of one who was a child on September 11, 2001. For example: "The 9/11 attacks cost somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute."

An excellent (albeit incredibly dense) read that presents pre- 9/11 America leading up to the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. It delivers a tightly wound, incredibly detailed narrative on the political scene of the time: federal intelligence agencies and their work in anti-terrorism, the development of Al Qaeda under Bin Laden, growing tensions and sense of urgency as the alarm bells of imminent attacks begin to sound, and a generally under-equipped, under-prepared, outdated government response.

The last 2 chapters deal primarily with recommendations on restructuring and refocusing local, regional, and national efforts in counter-terrorism, which synthesize quite well some of the recurring ideas dotted throughout the book.

It was particularly compelling to read through the 2 chapters on the attacks themselves - how the hijackers moved, communicated, boarded, acted; how civilians and officials slowly came to realize what was happening throughout the morning of September 11; and how first responders and deputized civilians shifted into crisis management mode on that morning.

An excellent read. Although I would like to learn more about the historical development of networks like Al Qaeda and radicalism more generally, along with anti-American sentiments that seem pervasive in some parts of the world.

Not exactly a laugh riot, nor a comforting story. I took a deep dive into all things and adjacent to 9/11. Watched movies and specials that were about 9/11, and the aftermath. I'm ready to move on to other stories, fiction or non-fiction, that are more warm and fuzzy. Or at the very least, are not triggering too much

Random thoughts I had while reading the book.

There are parallels between Islamic extremism, and those of Judo-Christian. Anyone who is not like them is in the wrong.

For all the want to educate Muslim and foreign countries on the ways of the USA, the way the USA is going about educating its own needs to change. If there are book bans, and an educational system that holds back the ways to learn, we can hardly fault other countries on how and what they teach their children.

I found it funny that Al Qaeda hadhas a HR department. That possible terrorist and hijackers needed to fill out an application, and sit for an interview. I also found it funny that the "muscle hijackers" where all less than 5'8" in height.

I needed to be reminded that the events of 9/11 happened really fast. At 7:59 AM the first plane that was to be hijacked took off. At 10:28 the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. It's small wonder that people were crazed, and not able to process what was going on. And there were the conspiracy theories that persist to this day.

I didn't realize what awful things may have happened on Y2K. I partied and got drunk that night. If the terrorist had gone through with something, I don't know how I would have survived. I'm going to start taking seriously any threat warnings the media sends out for now on.

Without researching a lot, I don't know what recommendations from the 9/11 Commission have come to pass. I know there is now TSA Precheck. And, that businesses now prepare their employees for emergencies and have yearly drills. Since I work for a bank, all employees have to learn about foreign financing, money laundering, and what countries are forbidden to trade with.

Although it wasn't a fun read, I'm glad I read the book.

Now I wonder how prepared the country is, now and in the future, for another catastrophe on the scalre of 9/11.

I thought the report was wonderful. The authors let you know that elements of the government disrupted them. Since its initial release additional classified portions have also been declassified due to citizen and government request. This book is very important for people to understand the buildup of terrorism and how our government prepared and reacted, and why we have the national security structure we have today.

An in-depth study of the 9/11 tragedy and the state of affairs within the nation's various security apparatuses leading up to it. The recommendations of this commission, while seeking to absolve any of the political leadership, still have managed to provide at least a beginning to workable solutions to our various problems regarding the prevention of terrorism. As the commission states, no defense can be perfect, but it should be cooperative, layered, focused, and able to respond both before and after attacks by Islamist fundamentalists are perpetrated against the American people.

The writing style takes the form of a narrative throughout the majority of the book, making it surprisingly easy to follow. Recommended if you want to understand the terrorist threat and the inter-agency developments that have followed 9/11.

What did the commission get right about interagency operations?

The most obvious answer to this question is that the commission report exposed shortcomings within the IC which were already common knowledge, but that had not been acted upon due to a self-serving environment which provided little incentive to engage in activities carrying inherent political risk. There were a host of assumptions in play during the decade prior to 9/11, but the IC had chosen to focus on the wrong things, the old threats, while largely ignoring the developing threats like Al Qaeda that defied convention. It was not only the IC, however, which suffered from these conditions. Every aspect of US bureaucratic infrastructure seems to have been stricken with this short-sighted malaise.

Early on, the commission points out that protocols in place just prior to 9/11 for interagency collaboration between FAA and NORAD for hijacking events were “unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen” (9/11 Commission, 17). This was due to popular presumptions that hijackings would continue to assume their traditional form and would not become suicide missions. A similar presumption, that terrorism would remain a foreign threat best suited to the domain of the CIA, was correctly identified as having prevented the FBI from responding to the several Al-Qaeda miscues in hijacker travel to the United States and their activities within US borders. The Wall of regulation between the intelligence and domestic agencies was erected on the common belief that securing sensitive information from prying eyes was far more beneficial than widely sharing it within the appropriate communities. This attitude only served to maintain an overly cautious attitude of interagency turf warfare, “blocked the arteries of information sharing”, and did little to augment collective anti-terrorism capabilities beyond that of each particular organization (9/11 Commission, 79).

The 9/11 Commission also correctly recognized the problem of stove-piping in intelligence organizations and the inadequacy of the DCI to oversee all of the functions and budgeting of the IC, while still maintaining the objectivity needed to excel in the role of the lead national intelligence analyst. As a whole, “the agencies and the rules surrounding the intelligence community have accumulated to a depth that practically defies public comprehension” (9/11 Commission, 410). The commission rightly called for an overarching intelligence framework, the Director of National Intelligence, which sought to operate free of the systemic failures of the DCI arrangement and exert the control necessary to direct the IC on an aggregate level.

tMost critical of all, the commission firmly grasped the underlying cause of the US’s inability to act in a collectively forceful manner in the years leading up to 9/11. It is not additional resources or personnel which are needed to defeat the current terrorist threats. Rather, “the government should combine them more effectively, achieving unity of effort” (9/11 Commission, 399). Unity of effort has both structural and spiritual components. In terms of information sharing, these two sides must complement each other. Need-to-know can no longer be anticipated, and the commission calls for a “culture in which the agencies instead feel they have a duty to the information—to repay the taxpayers’ investment by making that information available” (9/11 Commission, 417). The same sense of duty and cultural grit that propelled America through WWII has the potential to be reborn in a successful interagency fight against Islamist terrorism.

What did the commission get wrong about interagency operations?

The most obvious answer to this question is that the commission focused primarily on the symptoms and not the disease. In other words, the political developments leading up to 9/11 were not meaningfully questioned. This is, however, quite understandable. The commission’s efficacy to affect any type of interagency restructuring was largely dependent on its being viewed as an impartial, bipartisan effort. Due to these limitations, no significant degree of responsibility was assigned to policy makers within the Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, or George W. Bush administrations. A truly objective assessment, above and beyond the political entanglements the commission found itself immersed in could not have afforded to ignore this other critical side of the interagency equation. As the commission states, “while we now know that al Qaeda was formed in 1988…the intelligence community did not describe this organization…until 1999” (9/11 Commission, 341).

The Reagan administration successfully countered the Soviet threat by allying itself with Saudi Arabia and the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan but apparently gave little thought to the long-term consequences of empowering their “Arab” allies once the politically satiating objective of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was completed (Clarke, 52). The Bush Sr. administration moved strongly in a conventional military manner against Saddam Hussein’s incursion into Kuwait, and utilized the US’s budding relationship with Saudi Arabia to this end. They did not perceive, however, that the presence of US troops in the most sacred of Muslim nations, even though protecting the House of Saud from Iraq’s aggression, also served to further inflame the religious sensibilities of Islamist Wahhabi extremists such as Osama bin Laden, propelling al Qaeda forward in terms of resonance with the Muslim population.

The Clinton administration, with Richard Clarke’s ascendance as the counter-terrorism czar, finally began to confront elements of al Qaeda militarily, but failed to respond to direct provocations such as the U.S.S. Cole bombing, sending mixed messages and further emboldening bin Laden. Despite a 1995 NIE stressing the potential for Islamist terrorist attacks, Clinton did not make any significant moves against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, constrained as he was by the political implications of his actions in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Despite intelligence reporting pointing to al Qaeda as the primary threat to the US, the George W. Bush administration had a myopic focus on Iraq as a conventional military threat (9/11 Commission, 333) and seemed to dismiss terrorism as a priority until after 9/11 had already taken place.

Finally, the 9/11 commission’s fixation with developing unity of effort through joint operations and bureaucratic restructuring misses the mark in understanding that it is the very diversity of disciplines and ways of thinking found interspersed throughout the IC as a whole which should be leveraged and preserved. While joint structures have served the military generally well, intelligence is a far more esoteric endeavor. This is a case where the catch-phrase “strength through diversity” really has substance, not referring to ethnicity, but to discipline and experience. Standardization should be devoted to high payoff targets of the moment, such as Arabic name standardization for travel documents. Instead, the commission has suggested standardizing education and training, trying to develop generalized rule-based systems to fight terrorism. We don’t need everyone to think the same way; we need tools everyone has the potential to use. 
References

9/11 Commission. 2004. The 9/11 Commission report: Final report of the national commission on terrorist attacks upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Clarke, Richard. 2004. Against all enemies: Inside America’s war on terror. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.

Unbelievable account of what has happend.