AMERICA’S PAIN & PROGRESS
20 years later, 9/11 Commission chairmen
Every American alive 20 years ago remembers where they were on Sept. 11. They remember the airplane hijackings, the attacks and the collapse of the twin towers. They remember the nearly 3,000 who perished that day. They remember the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the long war, and now its end.
In response to 9/11, Congress authorized the creation of a commission to provide a “full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the attacks.” The families of 9/11 were powerful advocates for the commission’s creation. Their persistence and dedication helped bring it to life.
We were honored to serve as the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission. Over 18 months, we reviewed more than 2.5 million pages of documents and conducted 1,200 interviews. We sought to be independent, impartial, thorough and nonpartisan. Our efforts had strong support from Congress, the president and the American people. The families, too, were with us each step of the way, as partners and witnesses. We joined our commission colleagues, equal in number from both sides of the aisle, in issuing a bipartisan, unanimous report.
WHAT WE LEARNED
We learned many lessons from our experience on the 9/11 Commission that we believe are still valid today.
We learned the importance of good process and a clear legislative mandate. Our charge was simple, the task hard: to find the facts of 9/11, and to make recommendations to make the country safer. In the swirl of politics, we stuck to this mantra: Get the facts, and make recommendations based on the facts.
We learned that there’s a thirst for accountability in this country. Americans expect their country to work and they’re disappointed when it does not. They react negatively to the bureaucratic tendency to say, “trust us.”
We pursued our inquiry in an open manner, not behind closed doors. Transparency helped the public gain confidence in our work.
We thought that key documents should be declassified for discussion. We wanted the public to understand in detail what happened and how the government responded.
We learned the importance of having an extraordinarily capable staff when conducting investigations — a unified staff selected on merit, not political affiliation.
We learned the necessity of pursuing consensus. If we did not have a unanimous report, our effort would have failed. Ordinary Americans appreciated us getting together across partisan lines to tell the story of 9/11.
We learned that you get much more done with a cooperative effort rather than a confrontational approach. We had subpoena power, but seldom actually invoked it.
We learned how important it is to work together as a team. We always appeared in the media together, departing from the usual Washington practice.
We undertook seriously the necessity to report to the American people in plain English so that all Americans could understand the 9/11 story.
WHAT WE DID
Turning to the report itself, we told the story of an enemy that was, and to some degree still is, sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal. The institutions charged with protecting our borders, civil aviation and national security did not understand how grave this threat could be. They failed to adjust their policies, plans and practices to deter or defeat it.
We told about fault lines within our government — between foreign and domestic intelligence, and between and within agencies.
We told of the pervasive problems of managing and sharing information across a large and unwieldy government that had been built in a different era to confront different dangers.
Based on those findings, our foremost recommendation was information sharing, to create unity of effort across the government.
The commission recommended the creation of a director of national intelligence, to pull together the work of the country’s 16 intelligence agencies, and the creation of a National Counter Terrorism Center, to ensure that analysts worked together to connect the dots and prevent future attacks.
Every expert in the country predicted more terrorist mass attacks after 9/11. The record of the past 20 years is far from perfect. It includes the tragedies of the Fort Hood, Boston Marathon and San Bernardino attacks.
Yet the reforms we recommended also made a difference. Intelligence and law enforcement disrupted scores of plots. Our aircraft and borders are more secure. Our military eliminated the leadership of Al Qaeda and ISIS and decimated their capabilities. The institutions created after 9/11 have made us more secure.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE
In the aftermath of the collapse in Afghanistan, the question before us is whether these same institutions will still keep us safe.
They protect us today from terrorist threats worldwide. Will they do the same against future threats from Afghanistan? With proper funding and commitment, we believe they can. Time will tell.
An unfinished recommendation from the 9/11 Commission is congressional reform. Because the commission recommended the creation of powerful executive branch institutions, it also recommended powerful committees in Congress to serve as watchdogs over them.
Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security continues to report to dozens of oversight committees. Agency leaders spend precious time before them and receive muddled guidance. When everybody is in charge, nobody is in charge. Congress has yet to pass an authorization bill for the Department of Homeland Security since its creation in 2003.
The challenge of domestic terrorism also requires strong government powers checked by rigorous oversight. The Justice Department and the FBI must lead the effort against domestic terrorism, carefully monitored by watchdogs, including the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and above all by Congress and the courts. We can and must preserve, protect and defend both our institutions of government and individual citizens’ rights.
The United States has also fallen short in addressing the upstream causes of terrorism. In the 9/11 Commission Report, we noted that “offensive operations to counter terrorism” must be “accompanied by a preventive strategy that is as much, or more, political as it is military.”
Our military and intelligence services are superb at finding, tracking and eliminating terrorists. Yet it is easier to destroy threats than it is to rebuild societies, as Afghanistan shows.
We joined together in 2019 to issue a report on extremism in fragile states, proposing a new non-military approach focused on preventing new terrorist threats from emerging. Our goal should be to strengthen vulnerable societies in the Middle East and Africa, so they can become resilient and resist the spread of extremism. Prevention is less costly than military intervention. It also requires time and patience.
Finally, we want to close with what we believe is the most important lesson of the 9/11 Commission: To address the multitude of problems before our country, we must work together.
Our greatest challenges are internal. They require us to overcome our divisions if, as Abraham Lincoln said, our nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality is to long endure. Can we summon unity of purpose? Can we achieve the mutual understanding needed to share power, solve problems and coexist across this vast, diverse continental nation? Can we heal wounds inherited from our history, while unifying around the shared ideals of that define us as Americans?
Our experience on the 9/11 Commission, and the nation’s experience rallying together after the attacks, shows that we can. Americans and their leaders will determine whether we will. We remain optimistic that our system of self-government can rise to meet the challenges before us.
Kean, former governor of New Jersey, and Hamilton, former congressman from Indiana, were chair and vice-chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.