Last week, 19 months after the original attacks in late Elul
5761 (9/11/01), the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States released a final, unanimous book-
length report that showed that much of what had been common
wisdom about the September 11 attacks was wrong.
The 567-page report of the bipartisan commission composed of
five Republicans and five Democrats rewrote the history of
Sept. 11, 2001, correcting the historical record in ways
large and small.
Up until the report was released, it was understood that all
of the hijackers had entered the country legally and done
nothing to draw attention to themselves before their great
crime; that Osama bin Laden had underwritten the plot with
his personal fortune but had left the details to others; that
American intelligence agencies never imagined that Al Qaeda
was considering suicide missions using planes; and that
President Bush had received a special intelligence briefing
weeks before Sept. 11 about Al Qaeda threats that focused on
past, but not current, threats.
The commission's report found, however, that the hijackers
had repeatedly broken the law in entering the United States,
that Mr. bin Laden may have closely supervised the attacks
but did not pay for them, that intelligence agencies had
considered the threat of suicide hijackings, and that Mr.
Bush received an August 2001 briefing on evidence of
continuing domestic terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.
Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey
said that he believes that the report provides closure. If
there are unanswered questions it is mostly because "the
people who were at the heart of the plot are dead."
What Really Happened
"Each of the hijackers, apparently purposely selected to
avoid notice, came easily and lawfully from abroad," Louis J.
Freeh, the former director of the FBI, testified to Congress
in October 2002. "While here, the hijackers effectively
operated without suspicion, triggering nothing that alerted
law enforcement." This assertion was repeated by several
other senior officials at various times.
But the commission found that as many as 13 of the hijackers
had entered the United States with passports that had been
fraudulently altered, using criminal methods previously
associated with Al Qaeda. The commission also found that the
visa applications of many of the hijackers had been filled
out improperly. The names of at least three of the terrorists
were found after Sept. 11 in the databases of American
intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
After entering the United States, several of the main
hijackers should have drawn the attention of law enforcement
agencies because of their behavior but they did not. Mohammed
Atta, the plot's Egyptian-born ringleader, overstayed his
tourist visa. One of the terrorist pilots, Ziad al-Jarrah,
attended school in 2000 in violation of his immigration
status, which should have been enough to block him from ever
reentering the United States. Nonetheless he left and re-
entered the US at least six more times before 9/11.
The leaders of the nation's law enforcement and intelligence
agencies insisted publicly that they never considered the
nightmare of passenger planes turned into guided missiles. "I
don't think anybody could have predicted that these people
would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade
Center," Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security
adviser, said in May 2002.
But in its investigation, the commission found that an attack
of the kind that took place had in fact been imagined, and in
fact considered repeatedly. The commission said that several
threat reports in the late 1990s raised the explicit
possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.
Moreover, someone walked into an American consulate in East
Asia and, "mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-
laden aircraft into a U.S. city." In the same year, it said,
an intelligence agency received information that a group of
Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade
Center.
American intelligence agencies had known for years that the
United States had much to fear from Osama bin Laden, but it
was based more on Mr. bin Laden's power as a global symbol of
Islamic fundamentalist rage than as a terrorist operations
mastermind.
But the commission found that Mr. bin Laden was described by
captured al Qaeda terrorists as being involved in almost
every detail of the September 11 plot. He was reported to
have been eager to hit the White House.
Mr. bin Laden was cut off from his family's wealth after the
early 1990s and he financed Al Qaeda's operations through a
core group of wealthy Muslim donors, mainly in the Persian
Gulf. The report said that from 1970 to 1994, Mr. bin Laden
received about $1 million a year from family funds -- a
sizable sum, but not enough to finance such an ambitious
terrorist network.
The Bush administration has long maintained that there was a
close working relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the
bipartisan commission found no evidence of close
collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
"Saudi Arabia has long been considered the principal source
of Al Qaeda financing," the commission wrote in its final
report. "But we have found no evidence that the Saudi
government as an institution or senior Saudi officials
individually funded the organization."
In the first hours after the Sept. 11 attacks and ever since,
the White House has consistently insisted that President Bush
and his deputies had no credible evidence before the attacks
to suggest that Al Qaeda was about to strike on American
soil.
But a special intelligence briefing had been presented to the
president at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before
the attacks. The name of the two-page briefing paper: "Bin
Laden Determined to Attack in U.S."
The document was not released by the White House for a long
time, but eventually the commission forced it out. It
contained passages referring to FBI reports of "suspicious
activity in this country consistent with preparations for
hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent
surveillance of federal buildings in New York." The
commission's final report also revealed that two CIA analysts
involved in preparing the brief had wanted to make clear to
Mr. Bush that, far from being only a historical threat, the
threat that Al Qaeda would strike on American soil was "both
current and serious."
The Jewish Angle
In the summer of 2001, shortly before the September 11
attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the terrorist
plot against the US, suggested to Osama bin Laden that al
Qaida recruit a Saudi pilot "to commandeer a Saudi fighter
jet and attack the Israeli city of Eilat," the final report
says. Bin Laden reportedly "liked this proposal" but urged
Mohammed to focus on the 9/11 operation first.
Earlier in 2001, at Bin Laden's direction, Mohammed had also
dispatched an al-Qaida operative "to case potential economic
and `Jewish targets' in New York City." Scattered through the
report are references to al Qaida's desire to strike at
Israeli and Jewish targets as well as at American ones. Bin
Laden urged Mohammed to advance the date of the attacks so
they could coincide with the anniversary of Ariel Sharon's
visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000.
Bin Laden was keeping a close eye on the intifadah in Israel.
"One senior al Qaida operative claims to recall Bin Laden
arguing that attacks against the United States needed to be
carried out immediately to support insurgency in the Israeli-
occupied territories and protest the presence of US forces in
Saudi Arabia," the report says.
The report also says that Mullah Omar, the ousted and now
fugitive Taliban leader, pressed al Qaida to attack Jews,
"not necessarily the United States," perhaps out of fear of
retaliation.
The report speculates that Daniel Lewin, a former IDF officer
who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first to be
hijacked and subsequently piloted into the World Trade
Center, may have been the first to try to stop the
hijackers.
As Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and Abdul Aziz al Omari
moved toward the cockpit, "passenger Daniel Lewin, who was
seated in the row just behind Atta and Omari, was stabbed by
one of the hijackers -- probably Satam al Suqami, who was
seated directly behind Lewin," the report says. "Lewin had
served four years as an officer in the Israeli military. He
may have made an attempt to stop the hijackers in front of
him, not realizing that another was sitting behind him," it
adds. Lewin, 31, had served in the elite General Staff
Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal), and was a hi-tech
entrepreneur. Lewin was severely wounded or possibly murdered
by the stabbing.
Other Israeli victims of the attack were Hagai Shefi, 34, who
had moved to New Jersey in 1992 along with his wife Sigal. He
was director-general of the GoldTier Technologies Inc. The
other Israeli victims who died in the crash were Leon Lebor,
51, Alona Abraham, 30, and Shay Levinhar, 29.
Recommendations
Overall, the commission blamed institutional failures and "a
failure of imagination" rather than individuals.
"[On] that September day, we were unprepared. We did not
grasp the magnitude of a threat that had been gathering over
a considerable period of time. As we detail in our report,
this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and
above all, a failure of imagination," Kean told reporters.
"[Since] the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we
cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would
have defeated them.
Among the report's key recommendations is a call for the
creation of a national intelligence chief to coordinate all
intelligence gathering, and that a joint congressional
committee be created to oversee homeland security.
Summing up the substance of the reports conclusions, New York
Times columnist David Brooks wrote that the commission
maintains that the US is in the midst of an ideological
conflict. It faces a loose confederation of people who
believe in a perverted stream of Islam. Terrorism is the
means they use to win converts to their cause.
The enemies are thus primarily an intellectual movement, not
a terrorist army. They are laying the groundwork for decades
of struggle. There is no territory they must protect. The
struggle is really fought in mass media, and they are very
skilled in using them.
There is apparently a long struggle ahead.
Beyond the Commission
The Commission did not address the nonhuman factors that
contributed to the effectiveness of the attacks. For example,
no one could or would have predicted that the attacks would
bring down both towers. Though the commission has apparently
done an admirable job of assessing the social and material
factors that led to the horrible attack, those who want to
can see how clearly the hand of Hashem showed itself.
