The esteemed co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission had an unenviable task. Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, understood that everyone was angry with them, perhaps even afraid. The White House was stonewalling them, the 9/11 families were furious at what they perceived to be the commission’s passivity, and the FBI and CIA were jumpy at the prospect of what they might uncover.
Somehow Kean and Hamilton managed to mine their considerable talent, intelligence and experience by blending cool logic and channeled anger in order to lead their commission in the pursuit of truth about the events leading up to and following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Both men seemed to understand from the get-go that their ability to access information from all branches of government would rely on their ability to negotiate and compromise and juggle; a series of delicate maneuverings that often relied on their ability to hold their fire, which was always the threat of subpoena, until every other avenue had been explored.
They met with a tremendous amount of success and this book chronicles their efforts to present a cohesive report on 9/11 to the still enraged and shocked American citizenry. They managed to push the envelope over and over again, producing a report that was hailed by nearly everyone for its comprehensiveness.
Most people feared that the bipartisan Commission of five Democrats and five Republicans would merely collapse along party lines. Kean and Hamilton, and their staff of historians, academics, lawyers and government workers, were determined to prevent this.
Their mission was clear: “Was 9/11 preventable? Who was the enemy who had perpetrated this attack? Why did they hate us? What had our government done to fight terrorism before 9/11? How did one assign accountability for 9/11? Were we safer than we were on Sept. 11, 2001? What could we do to make the American people safer and more secure?”
Their work would explore in depth every angle of the tragedy: our intelligence community, al- Qaeda, counterterrorism policy, terrorist financing, border security, transportation security, foreign policy and public diplomacy, civil liberties and executive power, and the national response on 9/11 in New York and Virginia.
Many of the facts they uncover will startle the reader. For example, six of the 19 hijackers had violated immigration laws while living in the United States. Nothing was done. Before Sept. 11, there were 20 names on the Federal Aviation Administration’s list of potential terrorists but the State Department had a list of more than 60,000 names, including two of the hijackers. Nine of the hijackers were actually selected by the Federal Aviation Administration’s computer assisted passenger pre-screening program, which checks the list of passengers against certain risk factors in order to identify potential terrorists. But all that was done was an extra screening of their baggage. They all walked onto the planes with undetected box cutters, knives and pepper spray.
Repeatedly, and with terrific thoroughness, Kean and Hamilton show us how their commission attempted to examine how the systems in place failed to protect us. Their book provides us with an incisive overview about how our country makes national security policy, how the president is advised and the dangerous lack of entanglement between some of our competing bureaucracies.
But it also tells a personal story about the heroic members of the 9/11 Commission, who seemed to understand the magnitude of the task put before them and figured out a way not to fail us.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
Without Precedent
The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission
By Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton
Knopf, 336 pages, $25.95
