9/11 commission report
Updated on 10 September 2006
These are the key findings of the US 9/11 commission's report into the terror attacks:
The report found that the government had failed to protect American people and urged changes in how the intelligence services operate.
The report stated that al-Qaeda was left to develop into a threat and concluded: "While the attacks were a shock... they should not have come as a surprise."
"The 9/11 attack was driven by Osama Bin Laden [who] built, over the course of a decade, a dynamic and lethal organisation".
It also concluded that there was no operational link between al-Qaeda and the ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It said that no single individual was to blame, but both individuals and institutions had to take responsibility for failing to stop the attacks.
Key quotes from the report:
- "The terrorist danger from Bin Laden and al-Qaeda was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media or in the Congress. Indeed, it barely came up during the 2000 presidential campaign."
- "At no point before 9/11 was the Department of Defense fully engaged in the mission of countering al-Qaeda, even though it was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy threatening the United States."
- "The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities."
The report accuses the "organisations and systems of that time" of:
- Allowing two hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi, to enter and move about the US without proper surveillance despite their known links to al-Qaeda.
- "Not linking the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, described as interested in flight training for the purpose of using an airplane in a terrorist act, to the heightened indications of attack."
- Not expanding no-fly lists to include names from terrorist watch lists and not searching airline passengers identified by computer-based screening.
- Not hardening aircraft cockpit doors or taking other measures to prepare for the possibility of suicide hijackings.
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Its key recommendations included:
- To establish a better dialogue between the West and the Islamic world.
- A national counter-terrorism centre "unifying strategic intelligence and operational planning against Islamist terrorists across the foreign and the domestic divide."
- A new Senate-confirmed national intelligence director to unify the intelligence community of more than dozen agencies.
- A "network-based information sharing system that transcends traditional governmental boundaries."
- A specialised and integrated national security unit within the FBI; the report did not support creation of a new domestic intelligence agency.
- A global strategy of diplomacy and public relations to dismantle Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network and defeat its militant Islamic ideology.
