American history is full of bravado and righteousness. The country is also a nation of marketers so often truth and authenticity are lost in the mix. Add the country's penchant for entertainment and second acts, and it often strays to the absurd. A final ingredient is the media which is now not only 24/7 but hyper and divided. This is a recipe for, at the very least confusion, at most, division and conspiracy theories.

When you take historic events, the muddled often gets more muddled. Hoover played up the Anarchists to build his empire, America recruited Nazis, CIA led and backed regime changes, Bay of Pigs, The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the 60's assassinations, The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Iran-Contra, First Gulf War, and, of course, 9/11. Now America is in the age of character attack, zero civility or normal discourse, and rampant disinformation.

It was with this background, that I reread The 9/11 Commission Report. In the first reading, I was surprised at the narrative style. The opening chapter reads like a Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy novel. If you remember Clancy's "Debt of Honor", in the novel, a Japanese pilot flies an empty Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and other government leaders. At the time, it was panned as, implausible.

The commission report came out in 2004. In many ways, that was quite the feat. It is backed by tons of investigations, interviews and research, carrying the hope of finding recommendations that would make such an event never happen again. When you think to that period, America was reeling much like from Pearl Harbour, and going on a war footing. It was fighting in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And there just wasn't enough time to arrive at absolutes. The whole effort seems rushed now.

Perhaps there should be a followup, a second edition, that would benefit from time and more information. Or perhaps that would just muddle this examination more.

Gripping and horrifying; it's impossible to read this without constantly hoping for something different to happen; for some savior to come in to stop the 9/11 plot in its tracks. The outcome of that tragic morning is all the more painful with the knowledge of the various moments in the years leading up to that day when the prospect of discovering and thwarting the attack was a tangible possibility. That being said, the authors do a good job of continually insisting that it's frankly unfair to revisit the intelligence that had been amassed as of 9/10/01 and ask whether someone "should have known" due to hindsight bias and they make every effort to truly appreciate how hard it would have been to imagine this specific scenario prior to its occurrence.

One minor quibble - while it would probably have been beyond the scope of this book, I was left trying to guess at just how much noise there was around the signals of 9/11; i.e., how many baseless claims the FBI and others had to chase down - I suspect that also contributes substantially to the challenges of managing investigations in a resource-constrained environment.

I am adding this long after having read it, perhaps obviously. I did read it as soon as it was released and it still sits on my bookshelf, which I just noticed and so I'm adding it to my lists.
I worked in the airline industry, in air cargo operations, to include safety, training, security, QA, airline and government policy and procedure, enforcement, negotiations, mitigation, etc... really just a big blob of a job with many hats that wouldn't fit on a business card. When the events of 9/11 took place, I shut down operations and sent my people home, leaving only managers or supervisors at each base, as I waited to know what next. It was madness, hindsight now shows, clearly. My experiences and knowledge certainly affected my understanding and opinions on this report.
Way back then, having had a security clearance, I had a slightly more enlightened understanding of what followed, specifically in how airlines changed policy, in the creation and operations of the TSA, and the assignment of duties under new and changing government Agencies and their Departments. My experiences and opinions of the actions in the government, in airline safety, and in airport operations, left me with a darker view of what was happening, behind the scenes always being a curtain behind which most cannot look. So, when travel returned to the skies, I watched the ensuing madness with some additional knowledge, most of which, now, is known by all who look back on the tragedy with more information than was shared in this report.
What the government did behind closed doors will never be fully released to the public. But this is an extensive piece of information to help people who want to better understand what happened in the response with regard to some of what our government knew, some of what was not known, some of what was learned, some of what was done, and some of why. This clearly won't provide any great observations on what people in power and people in the know were doing in the months following the attacks. In this fact, information will, of course, always remain classified. There is much that will never be unredacted, but which might, someday, be released by a whistle blower, through a leak, due to a hacking operation, who knows... as those are only a few examples of how difficult it is to keep a secret with the power of technology today. And the government is so big that no one person has all of the information and never will.
So, if you want to know, what is provided is certainly a start. Being that it is now 2024 and information has been trickling out for two decades, you may not want to bother...

I picked up The 9/11 Commission Report in light of the 20th anniversary of the attacks and the reflection it prompted for many of us. I’ll go ahead and say unequivocally at the top that this report leaves no room for the consideration of conspiracies about whether Al Qaeda might not be responsible for the 9/11 attacks. There is a wealth of evidence that the attacks were being planned for years by the wide-reaching terrorist network and that Bin Laden was directly involved in the planning, down to personally approving the hijackers. But what does become tragically clear in the report is that the United States had ample opportunities to stop Bin Laden throughout the Clinton Administration. It seems that President Clinton and his team understood the gravity of the terrorism threat, but they were playing by old rules. For them, the risks of opportunities to strike Bin Laden or Al Qaeda just seemed to outweigh the perceived threat without the hindsight afforded to us now.  The same can be said of our diplomatic efforts to nudge Pakistan toward ostracizing the Taliban. They could have done more and we could have pushed them with a heavier hand — but 20th-century thinking did not merit a change in approach. The lack of preparedness for the new threats facing us extended to everything from the intelligence community, to the FAA, to the communications equipment of the NYPD. The book was not without inspiration though — the Commission does an excellent job of highlighting the incredible heroism displayed by first responders. 343 FDNY firefighters died that day — more than any emergency response agency in history. But their sacrifice was key to enabling the vast majority of civilians below the point of impact in the towers to evacuate (16,400 - 18,800 were in the towers at the time of impact). I appreciate the care the authors put into crafting a report that read with objectivity while adding just enough editorialization to make the report readable (although as a report, naturally, it could still be a slog at times). This book is a big commitment — but it’s worthwhile for anyone seeking to learn more about a day that changed all of our lives forever.

Very readable and gripping. Good details on the deep roots of terrorism, the preparation for the attacks, and their execution. Very disturbing. The great weakness of the project is the apparent felt need to say that the government made tons of mistakes in the pursuit of Al-Qaeda before the attacks, but this doesn’t actually square with the rest of the story. The govt was doing a pretty good job tracking and opposing these people, and it mostly just seems like bad luck that they failed to find out about 9/11.

I expected this to be unbearably soulless and sycophantic and badly written, and so was surprised to find that most of it (the first nine chapters) wasn't just 'good enough for government work' but was really well crafted and successfully balanced a ton of sources (as in, like, a thousand) and respected the somber subject that occasioned its writing by not sentimentalizing the victims or even really vilifying the perpetrators. Then the last four chapters - offering justification for the wars and the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and extraordinary renditions - just sucked the life right out of it. (Seriously, the difference in voice and tone and style here makes me think that the whole thing wasn't written by the same person (and that the first nine chapters were ghostwritten (probably by Michael Crichton)).) So, with incredible detail, the Report offers a narrative about what happened on 9/11, a pretty robust effort at contextualization to help explain why 9/11 happened, and a series of recommendations specifying what the commission thinks should be done about it. As someone who is, apparently, way more naive and way less cynical than I thought I was, there was a lot I found surprising here, stuff I never knew or don't remember or wasn't told about when I was thirteen. Like, for instance: half the hijackers (in four groups at three airports) were flagged for addition screening, were additionally screened, and were then let onto the planes; the Clinton administration was considering killing bin Ladin in the late nineties only to balk at each opportunity (on one occasion, it seems, because Clinton couldn't afford to risk the public scrutiny that would have surely come had he engaged in a military action immediately following the Lewinsky furor and thus recreate the premise of the movie Wag the Dog which had just come out); and, tragically, there was so much confusion on the ground on the day of the attacks that it seems some people walking down from their offices after the planes struck were instructed to go back up. But maybe the most surprising (impressive?) part about the Report was its awareness of itself as a narrative. I don't mean this in the postmodern sense of self-awareness, but rather in the way Adam Curtis refers to the story his documentaries tell as a narrative. It's an awareness of the Schrodinger's paradox nature of reportage - by which I mean that the act of reporting collapses reality into the interpretation the report offers. If you're of a conspiratorial bent this probably sounds pretty juicy (as in, the Government is, by writing this, inventing the reality it wants us to believe (also, if you think that 9/11 was a conspiracy perpetrated by the Government, then you need to go lie down)), but I only mean to remark on the self-awareness thing because it seems especially generous and objective in such a report to allow for the possibility of parallel truth and to recognize the inherent weakness of narrative (although, I'll add, that's all we've got). It seems dumb to me to end by saying that 'every American should read this.' On a list of things every American should read this Report ranks pretty low. But the sentiment behind that statement - that this is an important historical document about a era-defining event that more people should know more about - bears out. Stick to the first nine chapters and try not to cry.

The hottest thing a girl can do is read this book.

A tough read to say the least of this horrible event. This book provides a complete report, a good reference if needed, for research or a term paper.

340-ish pages of white-knuckle intrigue (for me at least) followed by 80+ pages of boring recs and finger-pointing tsk-tsking etc. Rec’d for all interested and curious citizens, tho.

It took me until the 20th anniversary before I was ready to read this but I feel that it’s a document that every American—particularly those who witnessed the events of September 11th—needs to read. Even after 20 years, reading of fire fighters, police officers and others scrambling to evacuate the twin towers mixed with a description of what was going on in each airliner made me feel emotional. Most of this doesn’t read like a government report. It reads like a thriller which, unfortunately, is all true.

Most of this information was not previously published openly because (to most Americans) terrorism was something that happened overseas. There wasn't much interest in reading about Islamic terrorism. As reported in this book, most Americans didn’t care much about events in Afghanistan or heard of the term “Al Qaeda” even after the 1998 East Africa US Embassy bombings. The events of the day are told from one perspective in Chapter 1 and another perspective in Chapter 9. To jump right to the Commission’s recommendations for US government agencies, see Chapters 12 and 13.

And may we never forget…

This book is an incredibly good read considering the genre (committee report). Keeping track of all the names is harder than reading War and Peace and I hope that one day they'll publish and indexed version so that it would be easier to go back and link up people with their various roles in the plot and its aftermath. Compelling, scary, instructive, but also makes you wonder what isn't in there that we also ought to know.

Reading this while I was also watching 24 on DVD was an interesting study in contrast. In real life the American government seems bungling at best when it comes to counter terrorism surveilance and technology and the terrorists seem to be functioning at the most basic level (yet they succeed). On 24, the government has every necessary tool to surveil and track terrorists (and they have a ready, willing, and able torturer on hand to get anything that the satellites fail to disclose), and the terrorists are all high tech super stars (who rarely succeed). Huh.

Even if I scanned not read (official documentation of national defense and prevention plans, quite boring to read) some of the chapters of this book, i gave 4 stars, for the story of the each terrorist participated on 9/11 catastrophe, especially love story of Said Jarrah and Asli, it made me also watch “Copilot” movie to understand Said’s motives for this horrible act.

The book itself starts as if you’re watching a movie, as it describes everything happened on hijacked planes and i so appreciate for such kind of deep narratives.