9/11 Commission

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, more commonly known as the 9/11 Commission, was one of the most influential bipartisan study groups in modern American history. The commission was composed of five Republicans and five Democrats. Their report served as the basis for a major reform of the United States intelligence community, marking the most far-reaching changes since the creation of the modern national security bureaucracy at the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s.

A commission was widely called for by the public and many in Congress in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Virginia by al Qaeda terrorists. At first the Bush administration was hesitant about such a review, but President George W. Bush and the Congress created the Commission with Public Law 107–306 on November 27, 2002. The Commission was initially to be chaired by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former U.S. senator George Mitchell, but each of them declined. Former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton subsequently agreed to chair and vice chair the study. A staff of experts led by Philip Zelikow prepared the report after interviewing 1,200 individuals and studying thousands of classified and unclassified reports. Nineteen days of public hearings were held. The commission's report, titled The 9/11 Commission Report: The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was delivered in July 2004.

The report details the planning and execution of the al Qaeda attacks, the response of the intelligence and policy communities to the intelligence warnings of an attack in the months preceding them, and the response of the national security system to the attacks when they occurred. The Commission concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had inadequately assessed the threat posed by al Qaeda and had not taken sufficient steps to disrupt its planning. The report says the most important failure in both the intelligence and policy communities was one of imagination, in understanding the depth of the threat al Qaeda posed.

The 9/11 Commission Report narrates in detail the development of al Qaeda, its evolution into the organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks, and the central leadership role played by Osama bin Laden. The report discusses al Qaeda's attacks on American targets before September 11, 2001, with a special focus on August 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in September 2000. The Commission also studied foiled al Qaeda attacks like the so-called Millennium Plot to attack Los Angeles in 1999. Much of the data on al Qaeda's planning and execution of the 9/11 and other attacks derives from the statements of captured al Qaeda operatives detained after 9/11.

The Commission also carefully assessed the role of foreign states in the plot and the attack. Significantly, it concluded that Iraq had no role in the events of September 11, 2001, and was not involved in the al Qaeda plot. It noted that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens but found no evidence of Saudi government participation in the attack. The Commission assessed that Pakistan plays a central role in the development of Islamist extremism and urged the administration to take steps to strengthen democracy there. It applauded the administration for its intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11 and urged a fully resourced effort to build a stable government in that country. The Commission reviewed evidence of Iran's involvement with al Qaeda and suggested more intelligence collection and analysis were needed in this area.

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