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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
(http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm)
We present the narrative of this report
and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United
States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their
consideration. Ten
Commissioners-five Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected
leaders from our nation's capital at a time of great partisan
division-have come together to present this report without dissent.
We have come together with a unity of
purpose because our nation demands it. September 11, 2001, was a day of
unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States. The nation was unprepared.
A NATION TRANSFORMED
At 8:46 on the morning of September 11,
2001, the United States became a nation transformed.
An airliner traveling at hundreds of
miles per hour and carrying some 10,000 gallons of jet fuel plowed into
the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. At 9:03, a
second airliner hit the South Tower. Fire and smoke billowed upward.
Steel, glass, ash, and bodies fell below. The Twin Towers, where up to
50,000 people worked each day, both collapsed less than 90 minutes
later.
At 9:37 that same morning, a third
airliner slammed into the western face of the Pentagon. At 10:03, a
fourth airliner crashed in a field in southern Pennsylvania. It had been
aimed at the United States Capitol or the White House, and was forced
down by heroic passengers armed with the knowledge that America was
under attack.
More than 2,600 people died at
the World Trade Center; 125 died at the Pentagon; 256 died on the four
planes. The death toll surpassed that at Pearl Harbor in December
1941.
This immeasurable pain was
inflicted by 19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists
headquartered in distant Afghanistan. Some had been in the United
States for more than a year, mixing with the rest of the population.
Though four had training as pilots,
most were not well-educated.
Most spoke English poorly, some hardly at all.
In groups of four or five,
carrying with them only small knives, box cutters, and cans of Mace or
pepper spray, they had hijacked the four planes and turned them
into deadly guided missiles.
Why did they do this? How was the
attack planned and conceived? How did the U.S. government fail to
anticipate and prevent it? What can we do in the future to prevent
similar acts of terrorism?
A Shock, Not a Surprise
The 9/11 attacks were a shock,
but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamist extremists had
given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans
indiscriminately and in large numbers. Although Usama Bin Ladin
himself would not emerge as a signal threat until the late 1990s, the
threat of Islamist terrorism grew over the decade.
In February 1993, a group led by Ramzi Yousef tried to bring down the World Trade Center with a truck
bomb. They killed six
and wounded a thousand. Plans by Omar Abdel Rahman and others to blow up
the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and other New York City landmarks were
frustrated when the plotters were arrested.
In October 1993, Somali
tribesmen shot down U.S. helicopters, killing 18 and wounding
73 in an incident that came to be known as
"Black Hawk down." Years
later it would be learned that those Somali tribesmen had received help
from al Qaeda.
In early 1995, police in Manila
uncovered a plot by Ramzi Yousef to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners while
they were flying over the Pacific. [See
Operation Bojinka] In November 1995, a car bomb
exploded outside the office of the U.S. program manager for the
Saudi National Guard in Riyadh,
killing five Americans and two others.
In June 1996, a truck bomb
demolished the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, killing 19 U.S.
servicemen and wounding hundreds. The attack was carried out
primarily by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received help
from the government of Iran.
Until 1997, the U.S. intelligence
community viewed Bin Ladin as a financier of terrorism, not as a
terrorist leader. In February
1998, Usama Bin Ladin and four others issued a self-styled fatwa,
publicly declaring that it was God's decree that every Muslim should try
his utmost to kill any American, military or civilian, anywhere in the
world, because of American "occupation" of Islam's holy places and
aggression against Muslims.
In August 1998, Bin Ladin's
group, al Qaeda, carried out near-simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the
U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The attacks killed 224
people, including 12 Americans,
and wounded thousands more.
In December 1999, Jordanian police
foiled a plot to bomb hotels and other sites frequented by American
tourists, and a U.S. Customs agent arrested Ahmed Ressam at the U.S.
Canadian border as he was smuggling in explosives intended for an attack
on Los Angeles International Airport.
In October 2000, an al Qaeda
team in Aden, Yemen, used a motorboat filled with explosives to
blow a hole in the side of a destroyer, the USS Cole,
almost sinking the vessel and
killing 17 American sailors.
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Recap of
Americans killed allegedly by Islamic Extremists
|
Date |
Place |
Incident |
Killed |
Military? |
|
Feb '93 |
New York City |
WTC |
6 |
no |
|
Oct '93 |
Somalia |
"Black Hawk down" |
18 |
military |
|
Nov '95 |
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia |
car bomb |
5 |
? |
|
June '96 |
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia |
Khobar Towers |
19 |
military |
|
Aug '98 |
Nairobi, Kenya &
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania |
U.S. embassies |
12 |
? |
|
Oct '00 |
Aden, Yemen |
USS Cole |
17 |
military |
|
Totals |
|
|
77
(only 6 killed in the U.S.) |
54 military (at least) |
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The 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon were far more elaborate, precise, and
destructive than any of these earlier assaults. But by September
2001, the executive branch of the U.S. government, the Congress, the
news media, and the American public had received clear warning that
Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers.
Who Is the Enemy?
Who is this enemy that created an organization capable of inflicting
such horrific damage on the United States? We now know that these
attacks were carried out by various groups of Islamist extremists.
The 9/11 attack was driven by
Usama Bin Ladin.
In the 1980s, young Muslims from around
the world went to Afghanistan to join as volunteers in a jihad (or holy
struggle) against the Soviet Union. A wealthy Saudi, Usama Bin Ladin,
was one of them. Following the defeat of the Soviets
in the late 1980s, Bin Ladin and
others formed al Qaeda to mobilize jihads elsewhere.
The history, culture, and body of
beliefs from which Bin Ladin shapes and spreads his message are largely
unknown to many Americans. Seizing on symbols of Islam's past greatness,
he promises to restore pride to people who consider themselves the
victims of successive foreign masters. He uses cultural and religious
allusions to the holy Qur'an and some of its interpreters. He appeals to
people disoriented by cyclonic change as they confront modernity and
globalization. His rhetoric selectively draws from multiple
sources-Islam, history, and the region's political and economic malaise.
Bin Ladin also stresses
grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world.
He inveighed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia,
which is the home of Islam's holiest sites, and against other
U.S. policies in the Middle East.
Upon this political and ideological
foundation, Bin Ladin built over the course of a decade a dynamic and
lethal organization. He built an infrastructure and organization in
Afghanistan that could attract, train, and use recruits against ever
more ambitious targets. He rallied new zealots and new money with each
demonstration of al Qaeda's capability. He had forged a close alliance
with the Taliban, a regime providing sanctuary for al Qaeda.
By September 11, 2001, al Qaeda
possessed
- leaders able to evaluate, approve,
and supervise the planning and direction of a major operation;
- a personnel system that could
recruit candidates, indoctrinate them, vet them, and give them the
necessary training;
- communications sufficient to enable
planning and direction of operatives and those who would be helping
them;
- an intelligence effort to gather
required information and form assessments of enemy strengths and
weaknesses;
- the ability to move people great
distances; and
- the ability to raise and move the
money necessary to finance an attack.
1998 to September 11, 2001
The August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
established al Qaeda as a potent adversary of the United States.
After launching cruise missile
strikes against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation
for the embassy bombings, the Clinton administration applied
diplomatic pressure to try to persuade the Taliban regime in Afghanistan
to expel Bin Ladin.
The administration also devised
covert operations to use CIA-paid foreign agents to capture or kill Bin
Ladin and his chief lieutenants. These actions did not stop Bin Ladin or dislodge al
Qaeda from its sanctuary.
By late 1998 or early 1999, Bin
Ladin and his advisers had agreed on an idea brought to them by Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) called the "planes operation." It would eventually
culminate in the 9/11 attacks. Bin Ladin and his chief of
operations, Mohammed Atef, occupied undisputed leadership positions atop
al Qaeda. Within al Qaeda, they relied heavily on the ideas and
enterprise of strong-willed field commanders, such as KSM, to carry out
worldwide terrorist operations.
KSM claims that his original
plot was even grander than those carried out on 9/11-ten planes would
attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States.
This plan was modified by Bin Ladin, KSM said, owing to its scale and
complexity. Bin Ladin provided KSM with four initial operatives for
suicide plane attacks within the United States, and in the
fall of 1999
training for the attacks began.
New recruits included four from a cell of expatriate Muslim extremists
who had clustered together in Hamburg, Germany. One became the tactical
commander of the operation in the United States: Mohamed Atta.
U.S. intelligence frequently
picked up reports of attacks planned by al Qaeda. Working with
foreign security services, the CIA broke up some al Qaeda cells. The
core of Bin Ladin's organization nevertheless remained intact. In
December 1999, news about the arrests of the terrorist cell in Jordan
and the arrest of a terrorist at the U.S.-Canadian border became part of
a "millennium alert." The government was galvanized, and the public was
on alert for any possible attack.
In January 2000, the intense
intelligence effort glimpsed and then lost sight of two operatives
destined for the "planes operation." Spotted in Kuala Lumpur, the pair
were lost passing through Bangkok. On January 15, 2000, they arrived in
Los Angeles.
Because these
two al Qaeda operatives
had spent little time in the West and spoke little, if any, English, it
is plausible that they or KSM would have tried to identify, in advance,
a friendly contact in the United States. We explored suspicions
about whether these two operatives had a support network of accomplices
in the United States.
The evidence is thin-simply not
there for some cases,
more worrisome in others.
We do know that soon after arriving in
California, the two al Qaeda operatives sought out and found a group of
ideologically like-minded Muslims with roots in Yemen and Saudi Arabia,
individuals mainly associated with a young Yemeni and others who
attended a mosque in San Diego. After a brief stay in Los Angeles about
which we know little, the
al Qaeda operatives lived openly in San Diego under their true names.
They managed to avoid attracting much attention.
By the summer of 2000, three of the
four Hamburg cell members had arrived on the East Coast of the United
States and had begun pilot training.
In early 2001, a fourth future
hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, journeyed to Arizona with another
operative, Nawaf al Hazmi, and conducted his refresher pilot training
there. A number of al Qaeda operatives had spent time in Arizona during
the 1980s and early 1990s.
During 2000, President Bill
Clinton and his advisers renewed diplomatic efforts to get Bin Ladin
expelled from Afghanistan. They also renewed secret efforts with some of
the Taliban's opponents-the Northern Alliance-to get enough intelligence
to attack Bin Ladin directly. Diplomatic efforts centered on the
new military government in Pakistan, and they did not succeed. The
efforts with the Northern Alliance revived an inconclusive and secret
debate about whether the United States should take sides in
Afghanistan's civil war and support the Taliban's enemies.
The CIA also produced a plan to
improve intelligence collection on al Qaeda, including the use of a
small, unmanned airplane with a video camera, known as the Predator.
After the October 2000 attack on the
USS Cole, evidence accumulated that it had been launched
by al
Qaeda operatives, but without confirmation that Bin Ladin had given the
order. The Taliban had earlier
been warned that it would be held responsible for another Bin Ladin
attack on the United States. The CIA described its findings as a
"preliminary judgment"; President Clinton and his chief advisers told us
they were waiting for a conclusion before deciding whether to take
military action. The military alternatives remained unappealing to them.
The transition to the new Bush
administration in late 2000 and early 2001 took place with the Cole
issue still pending.
President George W. Bush and his chief advisers accepted that al Qaeda
was responsible for the attack on the Cole, but did not like
the options available for a response.
Bin Ladin's inference may well have
been that attacks, at least at the level of the Cole, were risk
free.
The Bush administration began
developing a new strategy with the stated goal of eliminating the al
Qaeda threat within three to five years.
During the spring and summer of
2001, U.S. intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings that al
Qaeda planned, as one report put it, "something very, very, very big."
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told us, "The system was
blinking red."
Although Bin Ladin was
determined to strike in the United States, as President Clinton had been
told and President Bush was reminded in a Presidential Daily Brief
article briefed to him in August 2001, the specific threat information
pointed overseas. Numerous precautions were taken overseas.
Domestic agencies were not effectively mobilized.
The threat did not
receive national media attention comparable to the millennium alert.
While the United States continued
disruption efforts around the world, its emerging strategy to eliminate
the al Qaeda threat was to include an enlarged covert action program in
Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic strategies for Afghanistan and
Pakistan. The process culminated
during the summer of 2001 in a draft presidential directive and
arguments about the Predator aircraft, which was soon to be
deployed with a missile of its own,
so that it might be used to attempt to kill Bin Ladin or his chief
lieutenants. At a September 4 meeting, President Bush's chief advisers
approved the draft directive of the strategy and endorsed the
concept of arming the Predator.
This directive on the al Qaeda strategy was awaiting President Bush's
signature on September 11, 2001.
Though the "planes operation" was
progressing, the plotters had problems of their own in 2001. Several
possible participants dropped out; others could not gain entry into the
United States (including one denial at a port of entry and visa denials
not related to terrorism). One
of the eventual pilots may have considered abandoning the planes
operation. Zacarias Moussaoui, who showed up at a flight training school
in Minnesota, may have been a candidate to replace him.
Some of the vulnerabilities of the
plotters become clear in retrospect. Moussaoui aroused suspicion for
seeking fast-track training on how to pilot large jet airliners. He was
arrested on August 16, 2001, for violations of immigration regulations.
In late August, officials in the intelligence community realized that
the terrorists spotted in Southeast Asia in January 2000 had arrived in
the United States.
These cases did not prompt
urgent action. No one working on these late leads in the summer of 2001
connected them to the high level of threat reporting. In the words of
one official, no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect
the thundercloud to the ground.
As final preparations were under way during the summer of 2001, dissent
emerged among al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan over whether to proceed.
The Taliban's chief, Mullah
Omar, opposed attacking the United States. Although facing opposition
from many of his senior lieutenants, Bin Ladin effectively overruled
their objections, and the attacks went forward.
September 11, 2001
The day began with the 19
hijackers getting through a security checkpoint system that they had
evidently analyzed and knew how to defeat. Their success rate in
penetrating the system was 19 for 19.
They took over the four flights,
taking advantage of air crews and cockpits that were not prepared
for the contingency of a suicide hijacking.
On 9/11, the defense of U.S. air
space depended on close interaction between two federal agencies: the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORAD). Existing protocols on 9/11 were unsuited
in every respect for an attack in which hijacked planes were used as
weapons.
What ensued was a hurried
attempt to improvise a defense by civilians who had never handled a
hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military
unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of
mass destruction.
A shootdown authorization was
not communicated to the NORAD air defense sector until 28 minutes after
United 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania. Planes were scrambled, but
ineffectively, as they did not know where to go or what targets they
were to intercept. And once the shootdown order was given, it was not
communicated to the pilots. In short, while leaders in Washington
believed that the fighters circling above them had been instructed to
"take out" hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the
pilots were to "ID type and tail."
Like the national defense, the
emergency response on 9/11 was necessarily improvised.
In New York City, the Fire Department
of New York, the New York Police Department, the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey, the building employees, and the occupants of the
buildings did their best to cope with the effects of almost unimaginable
events-unfolding furiously over 102 minutes. Casualties were nearly 100
percent at and above the impact zones and were very high among first
responders who stayed in danger as they tried to save lives. Despite
weaknesses in preparations for disaster, failure to achieve unified
incident command, and inadequate communications among responding
agencies, all but approximately
one hundred of the thousands of civilians who worked below the impact
zone escaped, often with help from the emergency responders.
At the Pentagon, while there were also
problems of command and control, the emergency response was generally
effective. The Incident Command System, a formalized management
structure for emergency response in place in the National Capital
Region, overcame the inherent complications of a response across local,
state, and federal jurisdictions.
Operational Opportunities
We write with the benefit and handicap of hindsight. We are mindful of
the danger of being unjust to men and women who made choices in
conditions of uncertainty and in circumstances over which they often had
little control.
Nonetheless, there were specific points
of vulnerability in the plot and opportunities to disrupt it.
Operational failures-opportunities that were not or could not be
exploited by the organizations and systems of that time-included
-
not watchlisting future
hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar, not trailing them after they traveled to
Bangkok, and not informing the FBI about one future hijacker's U.S.
visa or his companion's travel to the United States;
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not sharing information
linking individuals in the Cole attack to Mihdhar;
-
not taking adequate steps in
time to find Mihdhar or Hazmi in the United States;
-
not linking the arrest of
Zacarias Moussaoui, described as interested in flight training for the
purpose of using an airplane in a terrorist act, to the heightened
indications of attack;
-
not discovering false
statements on visa applications;
-
not recognizing passports
manipulated in a fraudulent manner;
-
not expanding no-fly lists to
include names from terrorist watchlists;
-
not searching airline
passengers identified by the computer-based CAPPS screening system;
and
-
not hardening aircraft cockpit
doors or taking other measures to prepare for the possibility of
suicide hijackings.
GENERAL FINDINGS
Since the plotters were flexible and
resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps
would have defeated them. What
we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the
U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress
of the al Qaeda plot. Across the government, there were failures
of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.
Imagination
The most important failure was
one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the
gravity of the threat. The
terrorist danger from Bin Ladin and al Qaeda was not a major topic for
policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress. Indeed,
it barely came up during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Al Qaeda's new brand of terrorism
presented challenges to U.S. governmental institutions that they were
not well-designed to meet. Though top officials all told us that they
understood the danger, we believe there was uncertainty among them as to
whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the
ordinary terrorist threat the United States had lived with for decades,
or it was indeed radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet
experienced.
As late as September 4, 2001,
Richard Clarke, the White House staffer long responsible for
counterterrorism policy coordination,
asserted that the government had
not yet made up its mind how to answer the question: "Is al Qida a big
deal?"
A week later came the answer.
Policy
Terrorism was not the overriding
national security concern for the U.S. government under either the
Clinton or the pre-9/11 Bush administration.
The policy challenges were linked to
this failure of imagination.
Officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations regarded a full
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as practically inconceivable before 9/11.
Capabilities
Before 9/11, the United States tried to solve the al Qaeda problem with
the capabilities it had used in the last stages of the Cold War and its
immediate aftermath. These capabilities were insufficient. Little was
done to expand or reform them.
The CIA had minimal capacity to conduct
paramilitary operations with its own personnel, and it did not seek a
large-scale expansion of these capabilities before 9/11. The CIA also
needed to improve its capability to collect intelligence from human
agents.
At no point before 9/11 was the
Department of Defense fully engaged in the mission of countering al
Qaeda, even though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign
enemy threatening the United States.
America's homeland defenders
faced outward. NORAD itself was barely able to retain any alert bases at
all. Its planning scenarios occasionally considered the danger of
hijacked aircraft being guided to American targets, but only aircraft
that were coming from overseas.
The most serious weaknesses in agency
capabilities were in the domestic arena. The FBI did not have the
capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to
national priorities. Other domestic agencies deferred to the FBI.
FAA capabilities were weak.
Any serious examination of the possibility of a suicide hijacking could
have suggested changes to fix glaring vulnerabilities-expanding no-fly
lists, searching passengers identified by the CAPPS screening system,
deploying federal air marshals domestically, hardening cockpit doors,
alerting air crews to a different kind of hijacking possibility than
they had been trained to expect.
Yet the FAA did not adjust either its own training or training with
NORAD to take account of threats other than those experienced in the
past.
Management
The missed opportunities to thwart the 9/11 plot were also symptoms of a
broader inability to adapt the way government manages problems to the
new challenges of the twenty-first century. Action officers should have
been able to draw on all available knowledge about al Qaeda in the
government. Management should have ensured that information was shared
and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the
foreign-domestic divide.
There were also broader management
issues with respect to how top leaders set priorities and allocated
resources. For instance, on December 4, 1998, DCI Tenet issued a
directive to several CIA officials and the DDCI for Community
Management, stating: "We are at war. I want no resources or people
spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community." The
memorandum had little overall effect on mobilizing the CIA or the
intelligence community. This episode indicates the limitations of the
DCI's authority over the direction of the intelligence community,
including agencies within the Department of Defense.
The U.S. government did not find a way
of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the planning and
assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving entities
as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military,
and the agencies involved in homeland security.
SPECIFIC FINDINGS
Unsuccessful Diplomacy
Beginning in February 1997, and
through September 11, 2001, the U.S. government tried to use diplomatic
pressure to persuade the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to stop being a
sanctuary for al Qaeda, and to expel Bin Ladin to a country where he
could face justice. These efforts included warnings and
sanctions, but they all failed.
The U.S. government also pressed two
successive Pakistani governments to demand that the Taliban cease
providing a sanctuary for Bin Ladin and his organization and, failing
that, to cut off their support for the Taliban.
Before 9/11, the United States
could not find a mix of incentives and pressure that would persuade
Pakistan to reconsider its fundamental relationship with the Taliban.
From 1999 through early 2001, the
United States pressed the United Arab Emirates, one of the Taliban's
only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off
ties and enforce sanctions, especially those related to air travel to
Afghanistan. These efforts achieved little before 9/11.
Saudi Arabia has been a
problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. Before 9/11, the
Saudi and U.S. governments did not fully share intelligence information
or develop an adequate joint effort to track and disrupt the finances of
the al Qaeda organization. On the other hand, government officials of
Saudi Arabia at the highest levels worked closely with top U.S.
officials in major initiatives to solve the Bin Ladin problem with
diplomacy.
Lack of Military Options
In response to the request of policymakers, the military prepared an
array of limited strike options for attacking Bin Ladin and his
organization from May 1998 onward. When they briefed policymakers, the
military presented both the pros and cons of those strike options and
the associated risks. Policymakers expressed frustration with the range
of options presented.
Following the August 20, 1998,
missile strikes on al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan,
both senior military officials and policymakers placed great emphasis on
actionable intelligence as the key factor in recommending or deciding to
launch military action against Bin Ladin and his organization. They did
not want to risk significant collateral damage, and they did not want to
miss Bin Ladin and thus make the United States look weak while making
Bin Ladin look strong. On three
specific occasions in 1998-1999, intelligence was deemed credible enough
to warrant planning for possible strikes to kill Bin Ladin. But
in each case the strikes did not go forward, because senior policymakers
did not regard the intelligence as sufficiently actionable to offset
their assessment of the risks.
The Director of Central Intelligence,
policymakers, and military officials expressed frustration with the lack
of actionable intelligence. Some officials inside the Pentagon,
including those in the special forces and the counterterrorism policy
office, also expressed frustration with the lack of military action.
The Bush administration began to
develop new policies toward al Qaeda in 2001, but military plans did not
change until after 9/11.
Problems within the
Intelligence Community
The intelligence community struggled throughout the 1990s and up to 9/11
to collect intelligence on and analyze the phenomenon of transnational
terrorism. The combination of an overwhelming number of priorities, flat
budgets, an outmoded structure, and bureaucratic rivalries resulted in
an insufficient response to this new challenge.
Many dedicated officers worked day and
night for years to piece together the growing body of evidence on al
Qaeda and to understand the threats. Yet, while there were many reports
on Bin Laden and his growing al Qaeda organization, there was no
comprehensive review of what the intelligence community knew and what it
did not know, and what that meant. There was no National Intelligence
Estimate on terrorism between 1995 and 9/11.
Before 9/11, no agency did more to
attack al Qaeda than the CIA. But there were limits to what the CIA was
able to achieve by disrupting terrorist activities abroad and by using
proxies to try to capture Bin Ladin and his lieutenants in Afghanistan.
CIA officers were aware of those limitations.
To put it simply, covert action was not
a silver bullet. It was important to engage proxies in Afghanistan and
to build various capabilities so that if an opportunity presented
itself, the CIA could act on it. But for more than three years, through
both the late Clinton and early Bush administrations, the CIA relied on
proxy forces, and there was growing frustration within the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center and in the National Security Council staff with
the lack of results. The development of the Predator and the push to aid
the Northern Alliance were products of this frustration.
Problems in the FBI
From the time of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, FBI and
Department of Justice leadership in Washington and New York became
increasingly concerned about the terrorist threat from Islamist
extremists to U.S. interests, both at home and abroad. Throughout the
1990s, the FBI's counterterrorism efforts against international
terrorist organizations included both intelligence and criminal
investigations. The FBI's approach to investigations was case-specific,
decentralized, and geared toward prosecution. Significant FBI resources
were devoted to after-the-fact investigations of major terrorist
attacks, resulting in several prosecutions.
The FBI attempted several reform
efforts aimed at strengthening its ability to prevent such attacks, but
these reform efforts failed to implement organization-wide institutional
change. On September 11, 2001, the FBI was limited in several areas
critical to an effective preventive counterterrorism strategy. Those
working counterterrorism matters did so despite limited intelligence
collection and strategic analysis capabilities, a limited capacity to
share information both internally and externally, insufficient training,
perceived legal barriers to sharing information, and inadequate
resources.
Permeable Borders and
Immigration Controls
There were opportunities for intelligence and law enforcement to exploit
al Qaeda's travel vulnerabilities. Considered collectively, the 9/11
hijackers
-
included known al Qaeda
operatives who could have been watchlisted;
-
presented passports
manipulated in a fraudulent manner;
-
presented passports with
suspicious indicators of extremism;
-
made detectable false
statements on visa applications;
-
made false statements to
border officials to gain entry into the United States; and
-
violated immigration laws
while in the United States.
Neither the State Department's consular
officers nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service's inspectors and
agents were ever considered full partners in a national counterterrorism
effort. Protecting borders was
not a national security issue before 9/11.
Permeable Aviation Security
Hijackers studied publicly available materials on the aviation security
system and used items that had less metal content than a handgun and
were most likely permissible. Though two of the hijackers were on the
U.S.TIPOFF terrorist watchlist, the FAA did not use TIPOFF data. The
hijackers had to beat only one layer of security-the security checkpoint
process. Even though several hijackers were selected for extra screening
by the CAPPS system, this led only to greater scrutiny of their checked
baggage. Once on board, the hijackers were faced with aircraft personnel
who were trained to be nonconfrontational in the event of a hijacking.
Financing
The 9/11 attacks cost somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to
execute. The operatives spent more than $270,000 in the United States.
Additional expenses included travel to obtain passports and visas,
travel to the United States, expenses incurred by the plot leader and
facilitators outside the United States, and expenses incurred by the
people selected to be hijackers who ultimately did not participate.
The conspiracy made extensive use of
banks in the United States. The hijackers opened accounts in their own
names, using passports and other identification documents. Their
transactions were unremarkable and essentially invisible amid the
billions of dollars flowing around the world every day.
To date, we have not been able to
determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda
had many sources of funding and a pre-9/11 annual budget estimated at
$30 million. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda
could easily have found enough money elsewhere to fund the attack.
An Improvised Homeland Defense
The civilian and military defenders of the nation's airspace-FAA and
NORAD-were unprepared for the attacks launched against them. Given that
lack of preparedness, they attempted and failed to improvise an
effective homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge.
The events of that morning do not
reflect discredit on operational personnel. NORAD's Northeast Air
Defense Sector personnel reached out for information and made the best
judgments they could based on the information they received. Individual
FAA controllers, facility managers, and command center managers were
creative and agile in recommending a nationwide alert, ground-stopping
local traffic, ordering all aircraft nationwide to land, and executing
that unprecedented order flawlessly.
At more senior levels, communication
was poor. Senior military and FAA leaders had no effective communication
with each other. The chain of command did not function well. The
President could not reach some senior officials.
The Secretary of
Defense did not enter the chain of command until the morning's key
events were over. Air National Guard units with different rules of
engagement were scrambled without the knowledge of the President, NORAD,
or the National Military Command Center.
Emergency Response
The civilians, firefighters, police officers, emergency medical
technicians, and emergency management professionals exhibited steady
determination and resolve under horrifying, overwhelming conditions on
9/11.Their actions saved lives and inspired a nation.
Effective decisionmaking in New York
was hampered by problems in command and control and in internal
communications. Within the Fire Department of New York, this was true
for several reasons: the magnitude of the incident was unforeseen;
commanders had difficulty communicating with their units; more units
were actually dispatched than were ordered by the chiefs; some units
self-dispatched; and once units arrived at the World Trade Center, they
were neither comprehensively accounted for nor coordinated. The Port
Authority's response was hampered by the lack both of standard operating
procedures and of radios capable of enabling multiple commands to
respond to an incident in unified fashion. The New York Police
Department, because of its history of mobilizing thousands of officers
for major events requiring crowd control, had a technical radio
capability and protocols more easily adapted to an incident of the
magnitude of 9/11.
Congress
The Congress, like the executive branch, responded slowly to the rise of
transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. The
legislative branch adjusted little and did not restructure itself to
address changing threats. Its attention to terrorism was episodic and
splintered across several committees. The Congress gave little guidance
to executive branch agencies on terrorism, did not reform them in any
significant way to meet the threat, and did not systematically perform
robust oversight to identify, address, and attempt to resolve the many
problems in national security and domestic agencies that became apparent
in the aftermath of 9/11.
So long as oversight is undermined by
current congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American
people will not get the security they want and need. The United States
needs a strong, stable, and capable congressional committee structure to
give America's national intelligence agencies oversight, support, and
leadership.
Are We Safer?
Since 9/11, the United States and its allies have killed or captured a
majority of al Qaeda's leadership; toppled the Taliban, which gave al
Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan; and severely damaged the organization.
Yet terrorist attacks continue. Even as we have thwarted attacks, nearly
everyone expects they will come. How can this be?
The problem is that al Qaeda represents
an ideological movement, not a finite group of people. It initiates and
inspires, even if it no longer directs. In this way it has transformed
itself into a decentralized force. Bin Ladin may be limited in his
ability to organize major attacks from his hideouts. Yet killing or
capturing him, while extremely important, would not end terror. His
message of inspiration to a new generation of terrorists would continue.
Because of offensive actions against al
Qaeda since 9/11, and defensive actions to improve homeland security, we
believe we are safer today. But we are not safe. We therefore make the
following recommendations that we believe can make America safer and
more secure.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Three years after 9/11, the national
debate continues about how to protect our nation in this new era. We
divide our recommendations into two basic parts: What to do, and how to
do it.
WHAT TO DO? A GLOBAL STRATEGY
The enemy is not just "terrorism." It
is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism, by Bin Ladin and
others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a
minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from
religion, and distorts both.
The enemy is not Islam, the great world
faith, but a perversion of Islam. The enemy goes beyond al Qaeda to
include the radical ideological movement, inspired in part by al Qaeda,
that has spawned other terrorist groups and violence. Thus our strategy
must match our means to two ends: dismantling the al Qaeda network and,
in the long term, prevailing over the ideology that contributes to
Islamist terrorism.
The first phase of our post-9/11
efforts rightly included military action to topple the Taliban and
pursue al Qaeda. This work continues. But long-term success demands the
use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert
action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy,
and homeland defense. If we favor one tool while neglecting others, we
leave ourselves vulnerable and weaken our national effort.
What should Americans expect from their
government? The goal seems unlimited: Defeat terrorism anywhere in the
world. But Americans have also been told to expect the worst: An attack
is probably coming; it may be more devastating still.
Vague goals match an amorphous picture
of the enemy. Al Qaeda and other groups are popularly described as being
all over the world, adaptable, resilient, needing little higher-level
organization, and capable of anything. It is an image of an omnipotent
hydra of destruction. That image lowers expectations of government
effectiveness.
It lowers them too far. Our report
shows a determined and capable group of plotters. Yet the group was
fragile and occasionally left vulnerable by the marginal, unstable
people often attracted to such causes. The enemy made mistakes. The U.S.
government was not able to capitalize on them.
No president can promise that a
catastrophic attack like that of 9/11 will not happen again. But the
American people are entitled to expect that officials will have
realistic objectives, clear guidance, and effective organization. They
are entitled to see standards for performance so they can judge, with
the help of their elected representatives, whether the objectives are
being met.
We propose a strategy with three
dimensions: (1) attack terrorists and their organizations, (2) prevent
the continued growth of Islamist terrorism, and (3) protect against and
prepare for terrorist attacks.
Why
didn't they propose a 4th strategy of stopping U.S. foreign policies
that cause resentment to the U.S.?
Attack Terrorists and Their
Organizations
- Root out sanctuaries. The U.S.
government should identify and prioritize actual or potential
terrorist sanctuaries and have realistic country or regional
strategies for each, utilizing every element of national power and
reaching out to countries that can help us.
- Strengthen long-term U.S. and
international commitments to the future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
-
Confront problems with Saudi Arabia
in the open and build a relationship beyond oil, a relationship that
both sides can defend to their citizens and includes a shared
commitment to reform.
Prevent the Continued Growth of
Islamist Terrorism
In October 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked if enough
was being done "to fashion a broad integrated plan to stop the next
generation of terrorists." As part of such a plan, the U.S. government
should
- Define the message and stand as an
example of moral leadership in the world. To Muslim parents,
terrorists like Bin Ladin have nothing to offer their children but
visions of violence and death. America and its friends have the
advantage-our vision can offer a better future.
- Where Muslim governments, even those
who are friends, do not offer opportunity, respect the rule of law, or
tolerate differences, then the United States needs to stand for a
better future.
- Communicate and defend American
ideals in the Islamic world, through much stronger public diplomacy to
reach more people, including students and leaders outside of
government. Our efforts here should be as strong as they were in
combating closed societies during the Cold War.
- Offer an agenda of opportunity that
includes support for public education and economic openness.
- Develop a comprehensive coalition
strategy against Islamist terrorism, using a flexible contact group of
leading coalition governments and fashioning a common coalition
approach on issues like the treatment of captured terrorists.
- Devote a maximum effort to the
parallel task of countering the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.
- Expect less from trying to dry up
terrorist money and more from following the money for intelligence, as
a tool to hunt terrorists, understand their networks, and disrupt
their operations.
Protect against and Prepare for
Terrorist Attacks
- Target terrorist travel, an
intelligence and security strategy that the 9/11 story showed could be
at least as powerful as the effort devoted to terrorist finance.
-
Address problems of screening people
with biometric identifiers across agencies and governments, including
our border and transportation systems, by designing a comprehensive
screening system that addresses common problems and sets common
standards. As standards spread, this necessary and ambitious effort
could dramatically strengthen the world's ability to intercept
individuals who could pose catastrophic threats.
-
Quickly complete a biometric
entry-exit screening system, one that also speeds qualified travelers.
- Set standards for the issuance of
birth certificates and sources of identification, such as driver's
licenses.
- Develop strategies for neglected
parts of our transportation security system. Since 9/11, about 90
percent of the nation's $5 billion annual investment in transportation
security has gone to aviation, to fight the last war.
- In aviation, prevent arguments about
a new computerized profiling system from delaying vital improvements
in the "no-fly" and "automatic selectee" lists. Also, give priority to
the improvement of checkpoint screening.
- Determine, with leadership from the
President, guidelines for gathering and sharing information in the new
security systems that are needed, guidelines that integrate safeguards
for privacy and other essential liberties.
- Underscore that as government power
necessarily expands in certain ways, the burden of retaining such
powers remains on the executive to demonstrate the value of such
powers and ensure adequate supervision of how they are used, including
a new board to oversee the implementation of the guidelines needed for
gathering and sharing information in these new security systems.
- Base federal funding for emergency
preparedness solely on risks and vulnerabilities, putting New York
City and Washington, D.C., at the top of the current list. Such
assistance should not remain a program for general revenue sharing or
pork-barrel spending.
- Make homeland security funding
contingent on the adoption of an incident command system to strengthen
teamwork in a crisis, including a regional approach. Allocate more
radio spectrum and improve connectivity for public safety
communications, and encourage widespread adoption of newly developed
standards for private-sector emergency preparedness-since the private
sector controls 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure.
HOW TO DO IT? A DIFFERENT WAY OF
ORGANIZING GOVERNMENT
The strategy we have recommended is
elaborate, even as presented here very briefly. To implement it will
require a government better organized than the one that exists today,
with its national security institutions designed half a century ago to
win the Cold War. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc
adjustments to a system created a generation ago for a world that no
longer exists.
Our detailed recommendations are
designed to fit together. Their purpose is clear: to build unity of
effort across the U.S. government. As one official now serving on the
front lines overseas put it to us: "One fight, one team."
We call for unity of effort in five
areas, beginning with unity of effort on the challenge of
counterterrorism itself:
- unifying strategic intelligence and
operational planning against Islamist terrorists across the
foreign-domestic divide with a National Counterterrorism Center;
- unifying the intelligence community
with a new National Intelligence Director;
- unifying the many participants in
the counterterrorism effort and their knowledge in a network-based
information sharing system that transcends traditional governmental
boundaries;
- unifying and strengthening
congressional oversight to improve quality and accountability; and
- strengthening the FBI and homeland
defenders.
Unity of Effort: A National
Counterterrorism Center
The 9/11 story teaches the value of integrating strategic intelligence
from all sources into joint operational planning-with both
dimensions spanning the foreign-domestic divide.
- In some ways, since 9/11, joint work
has gotten better. The effort of fighting terrorism has flooded over
many of the usual agency boundaries because of its sheer quantity and
energy. Attitudes have changed. But the problems of coordination have
multiplied. The Defense Department alone has three unified commands (SOCOM,
CENTCOM, and NORTHCOM) that deal with terrorism as one of their
principal concerns.
- Much of the public commentary about
the 9/11 attacks has focused on "lost opportunities." Though
characterized as problems of "watchlisting," "information sharing," or
"connecting the dots," each of these labels is too narrow. They
describe the symptoms, not the disease.
- Breaking the older mold of
organization stovepiped purely in executive agencies, we propose a
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) that would borrow the joint,
unified command concept adopted in the 1980s by the American military
in a civilian agency, combining the joint intelligence function
alongside the operations work.
- The NCTC would build on the existing
Terrorist Threat Integration Center and would replace it and other
terrorism "fusion centers" within the government. The NCTC would
become the authoritative knowledge bank, bringing information to bear
on common plans. It should task collection requirements both inside
and outside the United States.
- The NCTC should perform joint
operational planning, assigning lead responsibilities to existing
agencies and letting them direct the actual execution of the plans.
- Placed in the Executive Office of
the President, headed by a Senate-confirmed official (with rank equal
to the deputy head of a cabinet department) who reports to the
National Intelligence Director, the NCTC would track implementation of
plans. It would be able to influence the leadership and the budgets of
the counterterrorism operating arms of the CIA, the FBI, and the
departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
- The NCTC should not be a
policymaking body. Its operations and planning should follow the
policy direction of the president and the National Security Council.
Unity of Effort: A National
Intelligence Director
Since long before 9/11-and continuing to this day-the intelligence
community is not organized well for joint intelligence work. It does not
employ common standards and practices in reporting intelligence or in
training experts overseas and at home. The expensive national
capabilities for collecting intelligence have divided management.
The
structures are too complex and too secret.
- The community's head-the Director of
Central Intelligence-has at least three jobs: running the CIA,
coordinating a 15-agency confederation, and being the intelligence
analyst-in-chief to the president. No one person can do all these
things.
- A new National Intelligence Director
should be established with two main jobs: (1) to oversee national
intelligence centers that combine experts from all the collection
disciplines against common targets- like counterterrorism or nuclear
proliferation; and (2) to oversee the agencies that contribute to the
national intelligence program, a task that includes setting common
standards for personnel and information technology.
- The national intelligence centers
would be the unified commands of the intelligence world-a long-overdue
reform for intelligence comparable to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols law
that reformed the organization of national defense. The home
services-such as the CIA, DIA, NSA, and FBI-would organize, train, and
equip the best intelligence professionals in the world, and would
handle the execution of intelligence operations in the field.
[Click image for Hi-Res]
- This National Intelligence Director
(NID) should be located in the Executive Office of the President and
report directly to the president, yet be confirmed by the Senate. In
addition to overseeing the National Counterterrorism Center described
above (which will include both the national intelligence center for
terrorism and the joint operations planning effort), the NID should
have three deputies:
- For foreign intelligence (a deputy
who also would be the head of the CIA)
- For defense intelligence (also the
under secretary of defense for intelligence)
- For homeland intelligence (also
the executive assistant director for intelligence at the FBI or the
under secretary of homeland security for information analysis and
infrastructure protection)
- The NID should receive a public
appropriation for national intelligence, should have authority to hire
and fire his or her intelligence deputies, and should be able to set
common personnel and information technology policies across the
intelligence community.
- The CIA should concentrate on
strengthening the collection capabilities of its clandestine service
and the talents of its analysts, building pride in its core expertise.
- Secrecy stifles oversight,
accountability, and information sharing. Unfortunately, all the
current organizational incentives encourage overclassification. This
balance should change; and as a start, open information should be
provided about the overall size of agency intelligence budgets.
Unity of Effort: Sharing
Information
The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. But it
has a weak system for processing and using what it has. The system of
"need to know" should be replaced by a system of "need to share."
- The President should lead a
government-wide effort to bring the major national security
institutions into the information revolution, turning a mainframe
system into a decentralized network. The obstacles are not
technological. Official after official has urged us to call attention
to problems with the unglamorous "back office" side of government
operations.
- But no agency can solve the problems
on its own-to build the network requires an effort that transcends old
divides, solving common legal and policy issues in ways that can help
officials know what they can and cannot do. Again, in tackling
information issues, America needs unity of effort.
Unity of Effort: Congress
Congress took too little action to adjust itself or to restructure the
executive branch to address the emerging terrorist threat. Congressional
oversight for intelligence-and counterterrorism-is dysfunctional. Both
Congress and the executive need to do more to minimize national security
risks during transitions between administrations.
- For intelligence oversight, we
propose two options: either a joint committee on the old model of the
Joint Committee on Atomic Energy or a single committee in each house
combining authorizing and appropriating committees. Our central
message is the same: the intelligence committees cannot carry out
their oversight function unless they are made stronger, and thereby
have both clear responsibility and accountability for that oversight.
- Congress should create a single,
principal point of oversight and review for homeland security. There
should be one permanent standing committee for homeland security in
each chamber.
- We propose reforms to speed up the
nomination, financial reporting, security clearance, and confirmation
process for national security officials at the start of an
administration, and suggest steps to make sure that incoming
administrations have the information they need.
Unity of Effort: Organizing
America's Defenses in the United States
We have considered several proposals relating to the future of the
domestic intelligence and counterterrorism mission. Adding a new
domestic intelligence agency will not solve America's problems in
collecting and analyzing intelligence within the United States. We do
not recommend creating one.
-
We propose the establishment of a
specialized and integrated national security workforce at the FBI,
consisting of agents, analysts, linguists, and surveillance
specialists who are recruited, trained, rewarded, and retained to
ensure the development of an institutional culture imbued with a deep
expertise in intelligence and national security.
At several points we asked: Who has
the responsibility for defending us at home? Responsibility for
America's national defense is shared by the Department of Defense,
with its new Northern Command, and by the Department of Homeland
Security. They must have a clear delineation of roles, missions, and
authority.
- The Department of Defense and its
oversight committees should regularly assess the adequacy of Northern
Command's strategies and planning to defend against military threats
to the homeland.
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