OPINION:
Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have absorbed the reforms that followed that terrible day: intelligence sharing, biometric borders and aviation security.
What most have forgotten is that the 9/11 Commission closed its work with an explicit instruction to the United States government, and that instruction was never carried out. It concerned Iran.
What the commission found
On Pages 240 and 241 of its final report, the commission documented substantial, specific evidence that Iran and its proxy Hezbollah facilitated the travel of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers.
Eight to 10 of the 14 “muscle” hijackers moved through Iran from October 2000 through February 2001, and Iranian inspectors were instructed not to stamp their passports, keeping their documents clean for U.S. visas.
A senior Hezbollah operative accompanied several on flights out of Saudi Arabia.
The evidence surfaced late, from National Security Agency intercepts found roughly two weeks before the commission’s statutory deadline. There was no time to run it to ground, so the commissioners put it in writing: “We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.”
Neither the George W. Bush administration nor subsequent administrations conducted that investigation. For more than two decades, the one lead flagged by the commission as unfinished has sat untouched.
The record and what it meant
I know this record firsthand. As the 9/11 Commission’s border counsel, a principal author of its staff monograph “9/11 and Terrorist Travel” and a contributor to its recommendations, I traced how the hijackers acquired their identities and travel documents.
I established that the government’s own records tied the men on the flight manifests to lawful entries through U.S. airports. What I concluded (and named) was terrorist travel — because to terrorists, documents are as important as weapons.
Years later, I carried that record further in a sworn expert affidavit for Havlish v. Iran. Iran’s facilitation of at least eight hijackers was not passive; it was essential material support that directly enabled the attacks. The terrorists’ transit through Iran required the complicity of Iranian officials.
Two of my commission colleagues also joined the case.
A federal court’s verdict
In December 2011, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found Iran, its Ministry of Intelligence, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah jointly liable for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The record named what the commission had not: The “senior Hezbollah operative” who traveled with the hijackers was Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s operational chief and Iran’s liaison to al Qaeda, who had killed more Americans than any other terrorist before Sept. 11 and remained among the world’s most wanted until he was killed in Damascus in 2008.
The court traced the enterprise to a 1993 meeting in Khartoum that bridged the Shiite-Sunni divide by uniting them against a common enemy. Among the witnesses was Abolghasem Mesbahi, a former senior Iranian intelligence officer who had warned German intelligence in advance that Iran had activated a long-planned operation to crash civilian aircraft into American cities.
The court credited Mesbahi’s testimony that an Iranian intelligence front company installed a flight simulator loaded with Boeing aircraft software at the Doshan Tappeh Air Base in Tehran. The purpose was to train the hijackers on the aircraft they would later fly.
I wrote about that judgment in these pages when it came down, in “What Now? Court: Iran, Hezbollah Partly Responsible for 9/11.”
Still, Washington moved on.
A federal court reached a finding of state responsibility for the worst attack on American soil. Yet Congress has still never held a formal, dedicated hearing on the Iran-9/11 nexus.
A pattern, not an isolated act
The alliance the court traced to Khartoum was not built for Sept. 11 alone. It was the operational foundation for the attacks that came before: Khobar Towers, the USS Cole and the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa. Each was carried out with Iranian and Hezbollah support.
For 20 years, American policy treated al Qaeda as the primary actor, never fully accounting for the state sponsor behind it.
The unfinished question
This year, for the first time since 2004, there is a formal congressional vehicle to address this. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Homeland Security Committee are conducting a bipartisan review of where the commission’s recommendations stand a quarter of a century on.
This belongs on that list: the recommendation the commission expressly marked unfinished and referred for further investigation, still unaddressed.
This is not a call to relitigate foreign policy or wade into today’s headlines. It is a call to finish one sentence on page 241: Establish, on the record, a clear and accountable understanding of Iran’s role in Sept. 11.
That understanding would leave the U.S. and our allies better informed about the regime’s intent and its long practice of hiding behind al Qaeda and Hezbollah to mask its own ambitions against us.
The world needs that data point to see what Iran’s leadership actually seeks, past the hyperbole it uses to divert attention.
We were told, in the commission’s own words, that this topic required further investigation. Twenty-five years is too long to leave that instruction unanswered.
• Janice Kephart served as border counsel to the 9/11 Commission and as a principal author of “9/11 and Terrorist Travel.” She was an expert witness in Havlish v. Iran and has testified before Congress 19 times on the nexus among identity, national security and borders.
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