The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edit

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edit The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States Date: 31 August, 2004   —   $13.96   —   Book product page Rating:

I slogged through it so you don't have to. I gave the book five stars for its importance to understanding what happened, and its recommendations on moving forward in our fight against terrorism. If I were to rate it on how interesting it was to read, it would have done much worse. Large parts of the report are eye-glazingly boring.

The report starts out with an anatomy of the attacks. It covers how the hijackers got on the planes and everything they know about what happened until the crashes. That part's a creepy read, especially the transcripts of the phone calls and the cockpit recorders. You can't help wondering what the passengers were feeling and what you'd do if you were in that situation.

After that, the narrative becomes more like what you'd expect from a government report: Dry and tedious. There's a lot on how the different government agencies operated before 9/11, as well as how al Qaeda is structured, what they believe, and why they are determined to attack the United States. If you still believe Bush's line about how they "hate us for our freedoms," you need to read that part.

The commission takes a very hard stance on the Republican controlled Congress over the last decade, stating they neglected their responsibilities to the American people by focusing on "personal investigations, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media attention." An obvious reference to the "Wag the dog" charges Republicans would level at Clinton every time he attacked al Qaeda. Clinton begged the Republicans, "We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue," and they responded by calling it a "phony issue" that distracted us from the real danger: Hanky panky in the Oval Office.

Then there are four long chapters on the escalation of terrorist activity and the Clinton administration's ramping up of military, law enforcement, economic, governmental, and diplomatic responses to meet the growing threat. The report exposes as a lie the GOP's attempts to downplay Clinton's counter-terrorism efforts. From bombing the bin Laden-owned chemical weapons factory in Sudan (which the GOP dismissed as an aspirin factory) to training Pakistani special operations forces to capture or kill bin Laden; it's all here in black and white.

Those four chapters are followed by a few pages of the Bush administration's response to the threat, which consists entirely of excuses and rationalizations for doing nothing. It's agonizing to find that Clinton was ready to invade Afghanistan in 2000, as soon as the CIA confirmed bin Laden's role in the USS Cole bombing, while Bush's response was to ignore it because getting bin Laden was a Clinton thing.

The most important part of the report is the recommendations for action. The commission takes the Bush administration to task for having only a vague notion of the nature of the terrorist threat that confronts us to the extent they felt it necessary to present a blueprint for winning the war. It's great that they did this, but it's a shame it didn't emanate from the office of the President instead. The commission presents "a broad political-military strategy that rests on a firm tripod of policies to

• attack terrorists and their organizations;
• prevent the continued growth of Islamist terrorism; and
• protect against and prepare for terrorist attacks."

If you want to browse all the commission's recommendations (and you should), there's a list of them on the commission's web site. They're all common sense recommendations and I can see why Kerry has embraced them whole-heartedly. I can't understand why the Bush administration has not. It would be interesting to use them as a checklist for gauging how much our government really wants to win this war.