(The Center Square) – In 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a truck filled with explosives at the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Five years later, a related group, al Qaeda, bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Despite the ominous signs, “none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot” that culminated in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,977 Americans.
The grim conclusion comes from “The 9/11 Commission Report,” the product of nearly two years of investigation into how the government had failed to stop the attacks. Its 567-page final report was both a sweeping narrative of one of the deadliest days on American soil and a blueprint for preventing another one.
"A failure of imagination"
The report identified a central weakness: government institutions failed to share information, coordinate their efforts, and imagine how an enemy might exploit their divisions. Its recommendations were ambitious: strengthen homeland security, create a National Intelligence Director, and move toward a “mission-driven” government.
The report was widely hailed for being bipartisan and authoritative, and its recommendations helped drive reforms that "largely succeeded in their most fundamental purpose: helping prevent another terrorist attack of the magnitude of 9/11 on American soil,” according to U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, an Arkansas Republican, who is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. On Aug. 31, the committee released a 52-page report that evaluated the commission’s reforms.
Today, institutions act more in concert, according to U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican and member of the House Intelligence Committee.
“Things are way better because of the reforms,” he told The Center Square.
The commission's solution to institutional failure was largely institutional: make agencies coordinate, share information and operate under a unified mission. By most accounts, that strategy worked. But it didn't solve the harder problem of deciding which threats deserve attention or how to force institutions to confront failures that threaten their own interests.
The commission, a 10-member panel with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, faced opposition from the George W. Bush administration and some members of Congress from the outset. The Bush administration initially opposed creating the commission, saying ongoing congressional investigations were sufficient.
"Stonewalled by the CIA"
One resistant agency was the CIA, according to admissions made in 2008 by the commission’s chairman, Thomas Kean, a former GOP governor of New Jersey, and the late Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic U.S. representative.
In chapters 5 and 7, the report cited testimony from captured al Qaeda members, who were held at CIA-operated so-called “black sites.”
“We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked,” the report said. “Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the ability of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting.”
Four years later, Kean and Hamilton said that the CIA had done more than restrict information from the commission. They had destroyed it.
In 2002, the agency videotaped interrogations with two suspected terrorists, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who testified after being subjected to simulated drowning, a technique known as waterboarding.
“Those who knew about those videotapes and did not tell us about them obstructed our investigation,” they wrote, noting that the CIA admitted it destroyed the videotapes in 2005.
The report avoided criticism of federal officials or agencies. Instead of seeking to hold them accountable, it blamed the federal government as a whole.
U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, emphasized a similar imperative for institutional unity to The Center Square.
“We should all be pulling with the same oar,” he said of the CIA’s handling of the tapes.
Beyond spy vs. spy
The agency’s strategy was a harsh reminder that institutions served their interests ahead of the larger mission of fighting terrorism. Getting institutions to share information and coordinate plans remains an issue with biometric data such as eye and face recognition technology, according to U.S. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
The Department of Homeland Security said it can match 97% of departing aliens to their arrival records. Still, it acknowledges it has not carried out a fully biometric entry-exit system, which the 9/11 Commission called necessary to protect the homeland.
“We’re almost there, but not quite,” Himes said, noting that the shortfall hurts the nation’s counter-intelligence efforts.
“We’re talking not just Aldrich Ames getting our agents killed (a CIA agent who spied for the Soviet Union) and spy-vs-spy stuff, but counterespionage," he said in an interview with The Center Square. "We’re talking China hacking into corporate and government accounts and getting millions of people’s personal data,” Himes said.
Chinese espionage is an example of a broader challenge facing government officials. While there is wide agreement that they work better together, political leaders often disagree on what is the next great threat. Al Qaeda has been degraded, while policymakers disagree over which ones deserve the greatest attention.
Threats new and old
Perry said that Islamic fanatics remain a problem.
“They’re on our streets chanting ‘Death to America,’” he told The Center Square. “They’re doing that here, and not just in their countries like before 9/11. And yet they have come into this country by the millions.”
Informed of Perry’s remarks, Himes disagreed.
“They can say what they want,” he told The Center Square. “They have First Amendment rights,” too.”
Crenshaw described a different enemy: drones.
When the 19 hijackers commandeered three U.S. airplanes, they checked through airport security with box cutters and small pocketknives, which were not explicitly banned under federal rules. They used them to threaten the flight crew and open the cockpit doors.
Today, a terrorist could pack explosives onto drones and detonate them at a sports stadium or other place where thousands of people gather. Except for the New York Police Department, no other local or state agency has been authorized by the federal government to shoot down such a threat.
The bureaucratic hangup is one that the 9/11 Commission sought to fix. That it remains an issue is not lost on Crenshaw, who lost the use of his right eye after an improvised explosive device blew up while he was serving as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan in 2012.
“This is a serious problem,” he said. “It could happen all over.”
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at Georgetown University, cautioned that disagreements are not necessarily a failure. No country, he said, has the luxury of focusing on a single enemy. The challenge is to prioritize threats and maintain a strategy flexible enough to shift resources as threats change.
“Al Qaeda, for instance, was never treated as the single greatest threat facing the U.S.," he said. "Otherwise, we would have never invaded Iraq."
After the 9/11 reforms, government officials face a different test: whether they can recognize which threats matter most and shift institutional priorities as they change.
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