The report: what's known, what's needed
Only a matter of months before the attacks of September 11, a group of Saudi men gathered in a dusty Afghan camp outside Kandahar. Their curriculum in terror, which included everything from bodybuilding to subduing air marshals--was very hands-on. The plot's mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, later told his U.S. captors that the Saudi "muscle" hijackers slaughtered a sheep and a camel with a knife to train for their assault.
The butchering is one of the many new examples of al Qaeda's rigorous preparation, ingenuity, and, especially, its ruthlessness outlined in the sweeping 567-page final report released last week by the bipartisan 9/11 commission. Its portrayal of Osama bin Laden's terrorism network stands in razor-sharp contrast to the panel's conclusions about the performance of the U.S. government. "This was a failure of policy, management, capability, and, above all, a failure of imagination," declared commission Chairman Thomas Kean. The centerpiece is an ambitious and contentious set of recommendations to transform the sprawling U.S. intelligence community for the first time in a half century. "We believe we are safer today," the report concludes. "But we are not safe."
The report is a vital--and compellingly readable--document. Unlike most government commission reports, this one is just as lively a narrative as it is exhaustive and important. Spearheaded by 10 commissioners who have displayed an unusually unified sense of mission, the report is clearly calculated to make Americans want to read it and absorb its findings. The result--well beyond any Tom Clancy novel--rips the veil of secrecy off the operations of U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and the rest of the government, as well as the terrorist threat the nation still faces today.
Personal details. While many of the commission's findings have already been discussed in its 17 staff statements, the final report offers revealing details about the origins of 9/11--and the event itself. Its portraits of the hijackers are, at times, surprisingly human. Fifteen months before 9/11, Khalid Almihdar unexpectedly leaves fellow hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi in San Diego to return home to Yemen. "When news of the birth of his first child arrived, he could stand life in California no longer," the report says. A lonely Alhazmi turns to the Internet to search, in vain, for a wife.
The nine Saudis who acted as the muscle for the attacks found bin Laden only by accident, the report also shows. At first, a group of Saudi militants had tried to travel to the Russian province of Chechnya to fight alongside Muslim separatists there but were stopped at the Turkish border. Instead, they went to Afghanistan for training, where they ended up at al Qaeda camps and volunteered to be suicide attackers. Even this process was surprisingly bureaucratic. Al Qaeda trainees all filled out application forms that asked standard questions: "What brought you to Afghanistan? How did you travel here? How did you hear about us? What attracted you to the cause?"
Sadly, the report also makes clear that the warnings of such an attack were manifold. A newly released CIA President's Daily Brief from 1998 warned of bin Laden's interest in hijacking plans. The report also discloses a June 2001 report from the CIA that Mohammed was recruiting people to travel to America to meet with colleagues already there to help them stage attacks.
The report identifies 10 instances when the CIA and the FBI missed opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 plot. "The flaw was not recognizing the significance of the information that we did have and acting on it promptly," says a senior CIA official. But the broader failure the commission identifies is one of bureaucratic inertia. Commissioners were surprised at the lack of appreciation among top intelligence and law enforcement officials about how little information was really being shared. "People at the top thought they were talking," Commissioner Fred Fielding said, even though such sharing rarely occurred at the lower levels.
The report also notes that the rest of the nation was hardly mobilized for the fight. Very little domestic counterterrorism planning had been done. Congress is blasted for failing to carry out meaningful oversight of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Even the airlines get hit for their strategy of "decry, deny, and delay" in opposing stricter security measures.
Reforms. The FBI took expected fire for its many lapses, but it also escaped relatively unscathed when it came to the final recommendations. "One reason the commission was not harsher on the FBI was because of a guy named Bob Mueller," says commission staff director Philip Zelikow. FBI Director Mueller waged a relentless (and apparently successful) campaign to head off any call to create a new domestic intelligence agency.
When it came to the intelligence community, however, the proposed changes are much more radical. The biggest is the call to appoint a national intelligence director above the CIA director to oversee more than a dozen intelligence agencies. This would entail wresting budgetary and personnel control away from the Pentagon, which controls the bulk of the intelligence budget today. The commission would also create a new National Counterterrorism Center to direct the war on terror.
Similar proposals have been made before, but this time they're backed by the commission's uniquely powerful mandate. Still, opponents are already assembling. Many on Capitol Hill will resist calls to streamline oversight roles. And the intelligence agencies are sure to defend their turf against the notion of a national intelligence director. "The concern," says one intelligence official, "is that you're not going to make the counterterror apparatus more nimble by creating additional layers of bureaucracy."
The families of 9/11 victims are concerned about such responses. "I expect enormous resistance," says Stephen Push, whose wife at the time was a passenger on Flight 77. "These people enjoy the power they have." -Kevin Whitelaw and Chitra Ragavan
With Julian E. Barnes, Angie Cannon and Samantha Levine
This story appears in the August 2, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.