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The 9/11 Commission Report

Address by

The Honorable

Slade Gorton & Richard Ben-Vineste

Members, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

August 9, 2004

Richard Ben-Veniste

Thank you very much and good evening.  On July 22, 2004, something happened that shocked the political establishment and national media.  The 9/11 Commission issued a unanimous final report.  With political partisanship approaching its zenith in this election year, how was it that a commission comprised of five Democrats and five Republicans selected by the president and the Congressional leaders of each party were able to reach agreement on a 567-page report without a single word of dissent? 

Early on in our discussions we recognized that unless the Commission could insulate itself from the partisan rhetoric that has for so long dominated the national political environment, our efforts would count for little.  We took note of a palpable hunger in the nation for restoration of the unity of purpose that brought us together in the aftermath of September 11.  Thus, while we were obliged to perform our work in the run-up to a national election, we knew that the responsibilities that we had accepted were of such essential importance that they transcended the temporal concerns of the next election.  In this, we were ably led by our chair, Tom Kean, and vice chair, Lee Hamilton, who helped guide us through treacherous shoals, roiled by elements in the media poised to report partisan rifts within the Commission with or without supporting evidence.

We have charted the course of events that led to the September 11 terrorist attacks.  Now we must push forward to implement the Commissions recommendations for safeguarding the nation against future attacks. 

Two principal goals guided our work during the last twenty months—conducting an exhaustive examination of the facts, and, based on those facts, providing a series of recommendations to the president and Congress to better combat the threat of Islamist terrorists.  To achieve the former we chose a path of transparency, providing the public with as much information and in as timely a fashion as possible through open hearings, coupled with extensive factual statements prepared by our excellent staff. In doing this we, at times, had to overcome objections by the White House regarding access to critical documents and individuals.  We were delayed but not deterred.  Ultimately, we reviewed more than 2.5 million pages of documents, a significant number of which were highly classified and interviewed more than 1200 individuals in the United States and ten other countries.  These individuals included nearly every senior official from the current and prior administrations who had responsibility for the topics covered by our mandate, including both presidents and both vice presidents.  We held 19 days of hearings and took public testimony from 160 witnesses. 

We recognized that secrecy has often acted as the handmaiden of complacency, arrogance and incompetence.  By conducting open hearings in the bright sunshine of public view rather than behind closed doors, and through open discussion of what we had learned, we earned the confidence of our fellow Americans and established our credibility as a commission willing to ask hard questions of public officials and go the extra mile when requiring production of essential documents.  One can hardly think of any other country in the world with the strength of democracy that so characterized our efforts to self-examine ourselves in this public way.  A recent poll conducted by the PEW Research Center for people in the press before our report was published found that a substantial majority of Americans believed that the 9/11 Commission was doing a good job.  Significantly, this support was virtually identical among Democrats and Republicans. 

Our report provides a penetrating account of missed opportunities, failures of communication, lack of focus and the failure of imagination, all of which contributed to our government’s failure to prevent the 9/11 catastrophe.  According to a front-page article in the July 25 issue of the New York Times, headlined “Correcting the Record on September 11 in Great Detail”, the Commission’s report shows that much of what had been common wisdom before the September 11 attacks at the start of the panel’s investigation was wrong.  The Times went on to note that our report “rewrote the history of September 11, 2001, correcting the historical record in ways both large and small and shattering myths that might otherwise have been accepted as truth for decades.”

Building upon the extensive factual record that we had compiled, the Commission made a number of significant interlocking and interdependent recommendations.  They are aimed at changing the way our government agencies organize the collection and dissemination of both foreign and domestic intelligence, as well as modifying and streamlining the critical role of Congress in providing oversight of these agencies.  In making our judgments, we were mindful that any measures we recommended must be accompanied by a commitment to preserving our open society, our personal and civil liberties, and our system of checks and balances, which requires meaningful review of executive actions by the courts and Congress.

The next stage of our work—implementation of our recommendations—may prove the most challenging.  Change never comes quickly for bureaucracies.  There are many vested interests in maintaining the status quo.  The members of the 9/11 Commission are not so naive as to believe that change will happen just because it makes sense.  Too many past commissions’ recommendations are gathering dust in Washington archives to permit the luxury of such thinking.  Although the Commission’s life will end on August 31, we, as committed private citizens, have agreed to work together to see that our recommendations are enacted and implemented.  We continue to draw inspiration from the courage and determination of the family members of 9/11 victims who worked so tirelessly for the creation of our Commission. 

We must be weary of half-way measures, which would seem to give lip-service to our recommendations without providing for the significant reallocation of authority and control that we have concluded are necessitated by the failure of the intelligence community to utilize its resources efficiently and effectively to combat a highly entrepreneurial and nimble transnational threat.  One such example is our recommendation for a National Intelligence Director who would have authority to direct and coordinate the 15 different organizations that comprise the intelligence community.  We have concluded unanimously that the National Intelligence Director must have budget authority to ensure that he or she has the clout necessary to do the job we envision.

In conclusion, the need for change strikes us as both obvious and immediate.  Perhaps the unanimous voice of ten strong-willed, opinionated individuals who comprised the 9/11 Commission will inspire our nation’s leaders to act in unison with all deliberate speed to enact our recommendations.  The citizens of our nation have every right to demand as much.

Thank you very much.

Slade Gorton

On September 4, 2001, Richard Clarke, the head of the Counter-terrorism Security Group in the White House during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, handed a note to Condoleeza Rice, the head of the National Security Council, that read like this:  “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping an Al Qaeda attack, and hundreds of Americans lie dead in several countries, including the United States.”  Earlier that year, in the first week of the Bush administration, Clark had pressed Rice with a blue-sky plan developed in the last months of the Clinton administration and designed to, and I quote, “roll back Al Qaeda over a period of three to five years.”  It was to this plan that I referred when I asked Richard Clark at our hearing whether, had all his recommendations been adopted by the new administration on the day on which he presented them, would 9/11 have been prevented?”, to which his honest answer was “no.” 

Now, this is in no way to criticize Richard Clarke.  He was the most alarmist and most aggressive White House aide on counter-terrorism in both administrations.  He was the highest-ranking official in the White House, in both administrations, whose exclusive assignment was counter-terrorism and he was constantly frustrated.  Yet, even his imagination did not extend beyond another attack at roughly the level of the 1998 attacks on two of our embassies in Africa, and even he was content with a three to five year program to roll back Al Qaeda.  And so, with that marvelous clarity of 20-20 hindsight, the 9/11 Commission first concluded that our number one failure in the United States was the failure of imagination.  No one in authority inside our government imagined an attack of this nature or of this size, so no one prepared for it.  Neither candidate for president in 2000 discussed Islamic terrorism in his campaign.  Vice President Gore chaired a prestigious commission on aircraft security whose report did not mention the possibility of suicidal hijackers and, I can say, reported to a committee of which I was subchairman which asked no questions on this subject.  And as recently as 1999 the New York Times sought to debunk claims that Usama bin Ladin was a terrorist leader.  Our federal agencies failed.  Personally, it may be that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would rank first on that dubious list.  Its no-fly list contained fewer than 20 individual names.  The FAA Director of Security first learned of the State Department’s list of thousands of suspected terrorists at one of our hearings early this year.

Second, the FAA’s protocol for hijackings based on those that took place in the 1970s was to cooperate with the hijackers and take them where they wished to go.  The security directives of the FAA were directed almost solely at explosives, and thus it checked luggage.  Four-inch knives were allowed as carry-on items and finally, on 9/11 itself, the first notice provided by the FAA to the Air Force took place nine minutes before the first hijacked airplane, Flight 11, impacted on World Trade Center number one.  But notice that the Air Force received of the second hijacking was zero minutes before impact, of the third hijacking, zero minutes before impact, and of the fourth hijacking, zero minutes before Flight 93 crashed in the fields in Pennsylvania. 

However, the Air Force was also at fault.  It looked outward only for attacks or threats coming from overseas and never contemplated the possibility of suicide hijackings.  It had only four fighters on stand-by alert at two bases on the East Coast and the president’s shoot-down order, itself communicated to the Air Force after all four impacts, never got to the scrambled fighters at all.  Only two Maryland International Guard fighters had such orders issued outside the normal chain of command. 

The CIA.  The CIA never developed intelligence precise enough to encourage either president to act decisively against Al Qaeda.  The FBI.  The FBI provided little information to the White House on counter-terrorism at all.  In fact, FBI Director Louie Freeh had such poor relations with the White House that he never met with President Clinton, nor did he provide useful information to President Bush.  The FBI regarded terrorism as a law enforcement challenge.  It went after terrorists after the fact, seeking to build cases that could be prosecuted successfully in court.  And so, after these spectacular failures, in which 19 individuals with a total budget of less than half a million dollars defeated every defense of the United States against terrorism and inflicted on us the most costly surprise attack in our history, we were faced with a new and different challenge.  We reacted decisively in Afghanistan and in the United States.  Congress and the president joined in ordering dramatic changes which, it is our conclusion, has made us safer but not safe. 

A joint committee of members of the intelligence committees from both the House and the Senate studied the attack and our defenses from most of the year 2002 with a deadline at the end of that Congress, and because the victims’ families organizations wanted an outside investigation, the Congress created the 9/11 Commission with the extremely reluctant consent of the president.  It would be difficult to imagine a more partisan birth for such a group designed to write the history of a national tragedy and to build constructively on its lessons.  One member, the chairman, was appointed by the president and the other nine by the four leaders of the two parties in the two houses of Congress.  And yet, as Richard has said, we completed our task 20 months later surprising not only the country but, I think we must confess, ourselves, by our unity down to the final footnote. 

I can say in passing that we were fortunate, in my view, because at first the president named Henry Kissinger as Chairman, and Senator Deschle tapped George Mitchell, a former Senate Majority Leader, as Vice Chairman.  It would be difficult to find two more domineering or partisan leaders anywhere in the country.  Fortunately, both resigned promptly when they learned that business disclosure is required of all such appointees and they were succeeded by their opposites—Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.  Tom Kean, president of a small private university, was a two-term governor of New Jersey; Lee Hamilton, a former Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now runs the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.  Two less partisan partisans could never have been found.  They seemed to have agreed early on, perhaps in their first meeting, that they would never, never disagree.  They were joined by the two of us who are here before you today, and six others were chosen in the same fashion.  By and large we didn’t know one another either at all or well when we began our work.  The nature of the work, however, overcame any partisan differences.  The chairman and vice chairman chose a magnificent staff of men and women in mid-career with backgrounds in the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office as prosecutors, academia and the like.  I can certify that the two of us and the eight others worked very hard on the drafts, and the staffs that worked for us. The book, that many of you have, was read line-by-line four to seven times by all of the members.  I can assure you that Mr. Ben-Veniste read every single footnote, and criticized about half of them as I remember, and we came up with the report that you have before you.  It is important, however, in our own reactions to it as Americans, in my view, in determining how to respond.  First, determine the nature of the struggle in which we are involved and the nature of the enemy—and the enemy has told you what its goals are.  Here is what Usama bin Ladin said when he was asked what Americans could do to stop his attacks on us: abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and [abandon] the immorality and Godlessness of our society and culture.  He summarized it by saying, and I quote, “It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” 

And so in our recommendations we start with an examination of exactly that and say that our response must be based on three pillars.  The first one is to attack terrorists and their organizations.  With people with the attitudes that I’ve expressed, there is no compromise and no negotiation and we must rid the world of them.  In addition to that, we must try to prevent the continued growth of this form of Islamist terrorism. That requires one of the most difficult challenges – the separation of this particular strain of absolute, death-inviting opposition, from the great majority of people in Muslim countries who desire, as we do, that their children grow up with freedom and opportunity and life affirmation rather than death affirmation.  Third, to protect this country and to prepare for terrorist attacks.  In doing that, we have made specific recommendations with respect to border security.  [These include] A wide-range of general recommendations with respect to our foreign policy with emphasis on three countries—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan—and very specific reorganization goals for our national security itself. 

One that is quite important and has received too little attention is the creation of a National Counter-Terrorism Center, with an appointee by the president of the United States.  President Bush has created a terrorist threat integration center to try to get communication going between agencies that simply did not talk to one another before 9/11 and redistribute that terrorist information to those who need it.  Now it is headed by a mid-level bureaucrat on loan from the CIA.  You can imagine how much authority he has over the head of the CIA and how much mistrust there may be from other agencies for which he doesn’t work.  We believe that position should be headed by a presidential appointee with the power not only to compel all of the 15 intelligence agencies in the United States to share information but to task them to find additional information when he or she finds holes. That is connected with the National Intelligence Director about which Richard has already spoken—the necessity to institutionalize positive changes that have taken place in the FBI and significant reforms in the Congress.  Four of the ten of us have served in the Congress of the United States and it is very difficult to overestimate the difficulty of persuading Congress to reform itself. 

Reactions to our report in Congress have been first rate in one respect—hearings are being held all over the country.  Richard and I attended one on Friday here in Los Angeles to consider our recommendations about changes in the Executive Branch.  No hearing has been held yet about changes in the Congressional branch, and it is a major shortcoming.

Perhaps the example we have set is the most important element of our report.  We, as Americans, shared a unity of purpose on September 12, 2001, which has certainly to a considerable extent unraveled.  The partisan group appointed to study and make recommendations on this matter, thinking about it over 20 months, came to a united set of recommendations-not Republican, not Democrat, but American recommendations.  It is vitally important that they be heeded, not necessarily in every detail, but heeded to the extent that there is a recognition of the problem and positive action taken to deal with it.  The status quo is simply unacceptable and the reason that all ten of us are now engaged in presentations like this is that we are convinced that that will only happen if thoughtful, and concerned, and informed public opinion causes it to happen.  This organization is a vitally important part of that.  Demand of your members of Congress and of the Senate, of your candidates for Congress and the Senate, their specific responses on the 9/11 report and what they’re going to do about it.  Demand the same of presidential candidates.  We must have learned the lesson of 9/11.  I believe we have learned the lesson of 9/11 and I believe we can do something to make the United States of America safer than it is today for ourselves and for those who come after us.

Thank you.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the World Affairs Council, which pays neither honoraria or expenses to its speakers.