The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Depuis les attaques terroristes du 11 septembre 2001 beaucoup de livres ont vu le jour dans le but d'exploiter de l'interet public dans l'incident. La meilleur voie a suivre est de lire ce livre qui constitue la versions officielle. Le but de l'auteur n'est pas de profiter financièrement d'une tragédie mais de convaincre le public que la commission sur le 9/11 a fait un travail de recherché tres poussé et que le lecteur puisse etre satisfait que les recommendations de la commission sont bien fondé sur tant sur le profondeur de la recherché que sur le rigueur de l'analyse.

Le premier avantage, c'est qu'il est tres bien écrit surtout les 50 premières pages qui décrivent les evenements du jour de l'attaque et qui lisent comme un bon polar. Il y a des lenteurs surtout à la fin ou la commission présente ses recommendations mais en general le narratif se déroule bien et les portraits des acteurs dans le drame sont bien dresses.

Le deuxieme point fort de cet ouvrage est qu'il est bourré des informations qui se pretent a diverses interpretations. Peu importe votre parti pris, vous serez satisfait que vous avez appris des choses en lisant cette volume.

Je suis tres content d'avoir lu ce livre qui ne devrait pas decevoir grand monde.

It is often said (though researchers dispute it) that we always remember where we were when a historical event occurred. Well, I was only ten years old on September 11, 2001, so my memories are necessarily hazy.
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My mom had dropped me off at school before heading to her job in Manhattan. My dad was on his way there, too. This was one of my first days of fifth grade. Yet class was immediately derailed. Teachers went in and out of classrooms, whispering to one another. I was confused. No explanation was given to me except that “a plane crashed into a building.” It did not even occur to me that my parents might be in any danger. (They were fine.) The drama and significance of the moment were completely beyond me.
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So it was only many years later, when I finally visited the memorial and museum at Ground Zero, that I started to understand, really understand, the trauma inflicted upon the American psyche that day. Much like the pandemic, the attack created a rupture in history, marking everything else as either “before” or “after.” Yet as American forces withdraw from Afghanistan, and the 20th anniversary of the attack looms, the historical significance of the event is still rather unclear. This was why I decided to read this report.
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The 9/11 commission was established by an act of congress in order to investigate the attacks, with the aim of increasing the country’s preparedness in the future. The commissioners—career politicians, from both parties—conducted well over 1,000 interviews to produce an authoritative explanation of how this came about. However, as the Chairman and Vice Chairman said in a later book, though the commission was created by an act of Congress, the White House and the intelligence community were anything but cooperative during their investigation.
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Be that as it may, the commissioners managed to create an impressive document. It begins with a genuinely gripping narrative of the attacks. The rest of the book is, unfortunately, not nearly so riveting, but the reader is rewarded by a thorough analysis of the attack from a multitude of perspectives. The commissioners recount the history of Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, and several of the hijackers, and examine the actions of the military, FAA, and emergency response personnel that day. The lion’s share of analysis is, however, given over to determining what the intelligence community knew, when they knew it, and what they tried to do to stop the attacks.
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The report’s major conclusion is that a lack of cooperation between the CIA and the FBI (among other failures) allowed the terrorists to evade the grasp of the US government. They end with a series of proposals aimed to bolster the country’s capacity for counter-terrorism. These recommendations range from the specific (related to the organization of our intelligence apparatus) to the vague (broad statements of values, etc.), and I would be lying if I said I knew how many have been implemented. Notably lacking was any attempt at a broader historical contextualization of these attacks—any serious consideration of why the United States was chosen as a target in the first place.
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What struck me most of all, however, was how much the mood of the country has changed since this commission was written. Nowadays, most of the criticism aimed at Biden concerns the how—and not the if—of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Twenty short years later, our overpowering concern with Islamic terrorism has substantially receded (though I am sure it could easily be reignited). The spirit of the commission is also a reminder of our deteriorating political culture. Though the Bush years were hardly a paradise of bipartisan harmony, it is difficult to imagine anything like the degree of consensus on display in this report, about any topic, being held by professional politicians nowadays.
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In any case, this document remains a surprisingly readable account of one of the most significant turning points of this century. Not bad for a government report.

Had this on the shelf for a long time. Had it actually read the full text until now. Much of its contents are known, analyzed and a part of history. A worthy reference document for research and professional insight. Of course, it is interesting to see what worked as far as recommendations, what didn’t, and what could still apply today. Not totally dull, but it is more a work for reference vs. straight reading. Recommend a soft copy on any student/government employee, but hard copy is just as well.

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.

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…

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.

This is an exceptional piece of investigative journalism. Whichever government pages actually wrote this thing for the committee should all be doing articles for The New Yorker. There isn’t a single element of the 9/11 story which isn’t covered here. And if it’s not in the text it’s for sure in the 116 pages of notes post-text. Just an incredibly impressive collection of information thoroughly detailing an incredible tragedy we never saw coming.

There are many books now on 9/11, but I would recommend this as thee starting place for anyone interested in really understanding the immense scope of the attack, from inception to execution, from the origin of Al-Qaeda to the start of the war in Afghanistan, from the financing of 20 terrorists traveling in and out and all around this country to their final movements into motels the night before the attacks.

For sure the account is dense and some of the information appears in a seesaw sequence which feels disjointed. There’s probably too much detail about the radios emergency personnel had the day of and who heard what transmission when; and, there’s probably not enough detail about the individual experiences of ordinary Americans whose whole way of living was suddenly, permanently incinerated (for that I highly recommend Garrett Graff’s “The Only Plane in the Sky”). But really is there any truly perfect way to capture a story which defies imagination, a cruelty which saw our bravest men and women go up into burning towers as they were preparing to come down, and a sinister plot five years in the making which evaded detection or exposure at the dawn of the new age of information? In my opinion, the 9/11 Commission Report is about as well constructed as we could ask or expect. And it is a searing reminder/warning of what can happen when our security agencies don’t work together and when the hubris of our leadership doesn’t measure up against the imagination and determination of our foes.

This is a fascinating read; there are three major things I learned from it.



First, I started reading it about a week before the “Christmas-Day-Panty-Bomber” incident, and it appears that most of the “intelligence failures” that surrounded the 9/11 attacks are still a huge problem, because many of the same things happened (or, more importantly, didn’t happen) with that incident ... five years later.



Second, a huge part of what we know about the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks we learned from Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi BinAlshibh. And (this is my personal observation here, not the commission’s) - does anyone really think we would have learned anything from them without “enhanced interrogation techniques”?



Third, for anyone who has tried (or is still trying) to blame the 9/11 attacks on any particular group, cause, political party, person or factor other than the people who actually carried it out ... give it up. There is plenty of blame to be shared by all.



This book was actually easier to read than I thought it would be. It’s dry in spots, but basically it reads like a novel. It is heavily footnoted (which, of course, is a GOOD thing), and I did read the footnotes as well as the main text, so that made it a bit more cumbersome than just reading the “story” would have been.



Next, I want to research the recommendations made by the commission at the end of the report, to figure out what, if anything, has been done about them. In many cases I think I already know the answer ... “we have a committee working on that.” I know for certain that we’ve made no progress on one of them ... one which the commission stated was of vital importance: standardizing the transliteration of Arabic names so that potential terrorists can’t slip through the cracks due to a misspelling of or typographical error in the English version of their name. Of course, this is exactly what happened with the panty bomber ... five years later. That committee must not be working hard enough. Sigh.