9/11 Commission Report - Criticism

Criticism

The report has been accused of not giving the whole story about the warnings the U.S. received prior to the attacks. While the report did describe that "the system was blinking red" and that an al Qaeda attack was imminent, it did not include the testimony of former CIA director George Tenet to the commission in January 2004, in which he claimed to have given a specific warning to the Administration in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice. Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton stated that they had not been told about the meeting. But the Boston Globe reported that "it turns out that the panel was, in fact, told about the meeting, according to the interview transcript and Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who sat in on the interview with Tenet."

FAA counter-terrorism expert Bogdan Dzakovic believes that the security failures at airports that allowed the hijackers to board the planes were not due to the failures in the system that the report identified. Furthermore, he stated that "Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration." The report did not mention his name, despite Dzakovic giving the following testimony to the commission regarding his undercover checks on airport security prior to 9/11:

We breached security up to 90 percent of the time. The FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead, we were ordered not to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities, to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be 'checking.' . . . What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system. Our airports are not safer now than before 9/11. The main difference between then and now is that life is now more miserable for passengers.

Other sources have criticized the commission for not digging deep enough to get to the core of the issues. In a 2004 interview, Bernard Gwertzman, of the Council on Foreign Relations, stated of the report:

Again, one of the great problems in the commission report is that it looked at exactly one issue — counterterrorism — and none of the others. But intelligence users consist of more than one million people, many of them in uniform, and when you talk about budgeting and programming authority, you have to consider that. . . . Many of these conclusions are probably very valuable. But this is a 13-chapter report. Eleven chapters are a masterful description of what happened and what went wrong that led to the 9/11 attack. There is no chapter that explains what people did after 9/11. There is no chapter that qualifies that this is only one of many problems in intelligence and intelligence reform."

In a 2004 article titled, 'Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation,' Harper's Magazine writer Benjamin DeMott stated that:

The plain, sad reality . . . is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. . . . At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness of earnest, well-informed public debate."