Bob Kerrey Reviews “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation” by Philip Shenon

Mr. Shenon makes it very clear that he believes the final report accurately describes the essence of the conspiracy itself. That it began long ago as a political and religious movement among radical Islamists who regard the United States of America as an enemy. That this movement was given focus, training and experience in the 1979 to 1989 war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That it became a military organization in the early 1990s, declared war on the United States and carried out a series of attacks against us.

He also makes it clear why so many people have come to believe alternative conspiracy theories. Most important were a series of decisions and statements following September 11 which seemed to suggest something was going on other than what we were being told. Mr. Shenon tells this story very well. He begins with the remarkable decision to allow Saudi Arabian nationals, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, to leave the United States shortly after September 11 on special planes without being interviewed by the FBI. The idea that we let them leave because the Saudis were concerned for their safety is offensive. Sixteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. We had reason to fear them, not the other way around.

Mr. Shenon follows the details of the Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration decision not to tell the truth for nearly two years following the attacks. These lies generated many of the alternative conspiracy theories. It is painful to read Mr. Shenon’s very good account of this. One thing he left out that makes matters worse, not better: the official Air Force history originally included a very favorable account of what they did on that day. When the commission uncovered what had actually happened, the Air Force was forced to rewrite its own history.

Among this book’s most important scenes is the description of a presentation to the commission in 2004 made by a former CIA analyst who was a part of the team responsible for investigating the plot itself. He showed us PowerPoint slides that he said were part of a 1997 CIA briefing. The brief made clear that Osama bin Laden was the leader of a military organization called al-Qaida; that he had already carried out a number of military successes, including training Somali insurgents that contributed to the deaths of U.S. Army Rangers in the October 1993 battle of Mogadishu; that he had declared war on the United States; and that the threat was growing. This briefing connected the dots and, in so doing, made clear that the United States was at considerable risk from a relatively small non-nation-state organization that was using suicide terrorism as a tactic.

Unfortunately, the 1997 briefing never took place because no one connected those dots beforehand. The former CIA analyst was trying to make the point of what might have happened if the president and Congress had seen the complete picture, let’s say, after August 7, 1998, when al-Qaida simultaneously attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Every significant national security witness in the Clinton and Bush administrations testified that it wasn’t possible to do more to stop al-Qaida until September 11, 2001. I believe strongly that would have changed if the facts contained in this hypothetical briefing—which could have been declassified without compromising sources and methods—had been presented to the American people and the international community.

To be clear, it wasn’t as if the CIA wasn’t doing something; they were. They had formed a special unit to track al-Qaida, were including the danger of terrorism in their reports to the president and Congress, and were mobilizing as many resources as they could against this new enemy. They had declared war on bin Laden. But the CIA doesn’t declare war; Congress does. If either President Clinton or President Bush had requested such a declaration and had included the details of this briefing, Congress would have voted in the affirmative.

Our system of classifying and compartmentalizing knowledge as secrets does make us safer, but there are times when secrecy makes us less safe. The full story of al-Qaida, which was only told after September 11, is an instance where secrecy increased the danger to the American people. This same system also made it much more difficult for this commission to do its work. Most of the documents we had to read were highly classified and stored in and around the Washington, D.C., area. We were asked to read as much as possible. We could take notes as we read. However, the notes remained in each location and could only be reviewed if we had time for a return visit. It was simply too time-consuming for part-time service. Congress should have specified that no appointment could be made unless an individual could devote all their waking hours to the effort.

Mr. Shenon spends a great deal of his book examining the commission’s recommendations. He appears to believe that Mr. Zelikow’s strongly held views influenced some of our conclusions. The problem with this is that most of us on this commission brought strongly held views about what should or shouldn’t be done to protect us in the future. Mr. Shenon says that Mr. Zelikow wanted to create a powerful director of national intelligence from the beginning. Perhaps that's true, but so did I. In fact, I tried without success to get the Senate Select Committee to do the same in 1997 following the Aldridge Ames scandal. Likewise, Mr. Shenon leaves the impression that FBI Director Robert Mueller sweet-talked the commission into not recommending that Congress create a domestic intelligence agency like Britain’s MI5. I would never have signed off on this no matter how incompetent the FBI had been. Director Mueller didn't talk me out of this as Mr. Shenon suggests. I began and ended with the same opinion.

Mr. Shenon also suggests that there was work left undone. On this I couldn’t agree more with him. The most important area of concern is the involvement of Iran in supporting the hijackers. The commission discovered this involvement too late to examine the details. It was one of our mistakes, which should be corrected with extensive Congressional investigation. We made it clear in the report that there were a number of things that Congress needed to follow up on. The Iranian al-Qaida connection is only one of them. Congress should demand direct access to those who organized the attacks; our indirect interviews were at best inadequate. And Congress should pursue question of whether the Saudi government aided the conspiracy.

Congress has all the subpoena power it needs to do these things and more. They can summon any witness and secure any document. The 535 members of Congress are not part-time volunteers as all of us were. They are paid (poorly in my view) to pursue many things we uncovered but did not have time to examine closely enough. The examination of this conspiracy should go on, though not by the 9/11 Commission, which was given an appropriate but arbitrary time limit during which we were given subpoena powers.

There are others things that Congress and the president should do. Congress watered down the powers of the director of national intelligence. It failed to reduce the number of oversight committees for Homeland Security from 88 to four. And it did not strengthen the current weak oversight of intelligence by giving the House and Senate authorizing committees the power to appropriate. In short, they were much more enthusiastic about reforming the executive branch than they were the legislative.

I was in New York City when we were attacked and remember how unified we all were in the aftermath. We came together as a country. We came together as a free world against an enemy that views our freedom as an evil perversion. The 9/11 Commission tried to recapture that same unity of purpose. The unity did not last long. In short order Congress returned to the view that holding onto committee chairmanships (or getting them back) was more important than keeping the country safe.

I have always believed that too much attention was focused on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and too little on the story itself. My hope is that Mr. Shenon’s book becomes a bestseller and that enough individuals will reread the story of this conspiracy that we do not forget either the source of the danger or what we must do to defeat it.

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