9/11 Commission releases report

The United States could not protect its citizens from the September 11 terrorist attacks because it failed to appreciate the threat posed by al-Qaida operatives who exploited that failure to carry out the deadliest assault ever on American soil, the chairman of the Sept. 11 commission said today.

In issuing the panel’s 567-page final report, commission chairman Tom Kean said none of the government’s efforts to thwart a known threat from al-Qaida had “disturbed or even delayed” Osama bin Laden’s plot.

“(They) penetrated the defenses of the most powerful nation in the world,” Kean said. “They inflicted unbearable trauma on our people, and at the same time they turned the international order upside down.”

While faulting institutional shortcomings, the report did not blame President Bush or former President Clinton for mistakes contributing to the 2001 attack.

Kean and commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton presented Bush with a copy of the report Thursday morning. Bush thanked them for a “really good job” and said the panel makes “very solid, sound recommendations about how to move forward.”

“I assured them that where the government needs to act, we will,” Bush said.

Surviving Sept. 11 victims and the families of the dead vowed to continue to chip away at the bureaucratic rigidity they said is really to blame.

“The idea is to get past that resistance and move forward,” said Martha Sanders of Darien, Conn., whose daughter Stacey perished at the World Trade Center.

Added April Gallop, who was injured at the Pentagon with her infant son: “I came here pessimistic, but I leave here optimistic.”

The commission recommended creating a new intelligence center and high-level intelligence director to improve the nation’s ability to disrupt future terrorist attacks. An intelligence-gathering center would bring a unified command to the more than dozen agencies that now collect and analyze intelligence overseas and at home.

Running the center would be a new Senate-confirmed national intelligence director, reporting directly to the president at just below full Cabinet rank, with control over intelligence budgets and the ability to hire and fire deputies, including the CIA director and top intelligence officials at the FBI, Homeland Security Department and Defense Department.

The panel also determined the “most important failure” leading to the Sept. 11 attacks “was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”

The commission identified nine “specific points of vulnerability” in the Sept. 11 plot that might have led to its disruption had the government been better organized and more watchful. Despite these opportunities, “we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated” the 19 hijackers, the report concluded.

Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, appealed for political unity at the heights of America’s power. A “shift in mind-set and organization” within the U.S. intelligence apparatus and a smoother transition between presidencies are also necessary, he said, to ensure “that this nation does not lower its guard every four or eight years.”

“The U.S. government has access to vast amounts of information but it has a weak process, a weak system of processing and using that information,” Hamilton said. “Need to share must replace need to know.”

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