The 9/11 Commission Found a Failure of Imagination, Read Its Real Lessons

Here is a rare thing: a government report that became a bestseller. The 2004 report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission, sold hundreds of thousands of copies within weeks, and it is written in sentences that a human being can follow. Then, as with most things that sell well in Washington, it was quoted constantly and read almost never. People remember one phrase, a "failure of imagination," and treat it as the whole conclusion. It was a single finding in a book of several hundred pages, and it was not the most useful one.

My claim is simple. The report's real lessons are about structure: who was allowed to talk to whom, who owned a problem, and who answered when it was lost. Those lessons still answer today's arguments about surveillance, intelligence reform and homeland security. Let me explain the report, then the wall, then what Congress did and what it left on the table.

What the Commission was

Congress created it by statute, in the intelligence authorization law that President Bush signed in late November 2002, after the families of the victims pressed for an independent inquiry. It had ten members, five from each party. Former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, a Republican, chaired it, and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, was vice chair. It took testimony in public hearings, reviewed millions of pages of documents, and interviewed over a thousand people. It released its report on July 22, 2004.

Two facts about that structure matter for the argument. First, the Commission was unanimous, which is almost unheard of when a panel splits evenly between parties and is asked to judge two administrations. Second, it was designed not to be a prosecution. It was designed to tell the story in order and ask what to fix. Conservatives who dislike the tendency of Washington inquiries to become theatre ought to admire the format.

How the report is built

The report opens with a minute-by-minute account of the morning of the attacks, which it titles after a hijacker's radio call. It then goes backward: the roots of the new terrorism, the evolution of American counterterrorism in the 1990s, the responses to the first attacks, the plotting of the 2001 operation, the warnings of the summer, and the day itself. The last chapters turn to the future, with a global strategy and a proposed reorganization of the government.

That is the right structure for a conservative reader, because it puts the facts before the prescriptions. The first eleven chapters tell you what happened and what it meant. The last two tell you what the commissioners thought should change. You can disagree with the prescriptions and still rely on the narrative, and you should read the narrative first.

The timeline Bin Laden Declared War on America Twice Before Anyone Listened draws from the same record. Here we want the analysis.

"Failure of imagination," read in context

The phrase appears where the Commission discusses why the government did not anticipate the use of hijacked airliners as missiles. Its point was not that nobody had thought of it. There had been earlier plots, including a 1994 hijacking by an Algerian group that may have been meant to end over Paris, and a 1995 report that Ramzi Yousef had discussed flying a plane into CIA headquarters, and some officials had considered the possibility. The point was that the government had not turned the possibility into policy: it had not drilled for it, assigned an owner to it, or changed the way airports and airlines worked.

Imagination, the report argued, is something bureaucracies do not do naturally. It has to be institutionalized, meaning someone has to have the job of thinking about the unthinkable. The Commission listed four failures overall: of imagination, of policy, of capabilities and of management. The sentence conservatives remember is the first, but the last three are where the money and the law live.

The wall, defined

The most important structural finding is the one least discussed outside Washington. Let me define it.

The wall was a set of rules and habits that kept intelligence officers and criminal investigators from sharing information about the same targets. Its origin is legitimate. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, FISA, allowed wiretaps against foreign powers and their agents on a lower showing than ordinary criminal warrants require, because the purpose was gathering foreign intelligence and not building a prosecution. The Fourth Amendment's text speaks of warrants "upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Courts worried that if prosecutors could use the lower-standard FISA tool to build a criminal case, the government could dodge the constitutional standard by calling a criminal investigation an intelligence one. So the Justice Department developed procedures to separate the two.

By the mid-1990s those procedures, as interpreted and applied, hardened. The Commission found a great deal of confusion about what the rules actually allowed. Agents in one stream hesitated to pass information to agents in the other, lawyers at the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review became gatekeepers, and the culture treated sharing as a risk to be managed, not a duty. In the Mihdhar case, the Commission found, officials believed the rules barred sharing that they did not bar.

That matters because the information that might have caught the plot lived on both sides. Intelligence agencies held what they had learned about the operatives overseas. The FBI held what it could learn through domestic criminal investigation. Neither could see the other's picture.

The missed opportunities, in order

The Commission was careful to say it was not claiming that any one of these would certainly have stopped the attacks. It said that the government had several operational opportunities that could have been used differently. I will describe three, in the language of the record.

The Kuala Lumpur meeting, January 2000. American intelligence learned that al-Qaeda operatives were gathering in Malaysia. Two of them, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were identified as being linked to al-Qaeda. Mihdhar had a visa that allowed him to enter the United States, and the two flew to Los Angeles that month. The CIA learned of Mihdhar's visa and of the travel, but did not put them on the State Department's watch list until August 2001, and no one outside its counterterrorist center was told that one of them had flown to Los Angeles.

The Phoenix memorandum, July 2001. An FBI agent wrote to headquarters raising the possibility that Islamist extremists were enrolling in American flight schools, and recommended a broader review. It did not lead to action at the national level.

The Moussaoui case, August 2001. FBI agents in Minnesota investigated Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained on an immigration charge, after he sought Boeing 747 simulator training without the usual qualifications. Agents wanted a warrant to search his laptop. Headquarters judged that they could not show a link to a "foreign power" as FISA required, and the request stalled.

Read together, the three cases show the same fact: pieces of the picture were in different hands, and the system had no mechanism to put them together. That was the diagnosis. Nobody was in charge of the whole.

Why this answers today's arguments

I said these lessons answer present debates, so let me show how.

On surveillance. When people say that expanded government surveillance is unnecessary, they should reckon with what the wall cost. When people say that it is always justified, they should reckon with why the wall existed, which was to protect the Fourth Amendment from a government that blurs the line between spying and prosecuting. Both sides have a case, and the Commission's real lesson is that the answer is not to remove all barriers but to build clear rules that let information move to those who need it while keeping the courts in the loop. The USA PATRIOT Act of October 2001 changed the FISA standard from requiring that gathering foreign intelligence be "the purpose" to "a significant purpose," and added provisions that let criminal and intelligence officials share information. In November 2002 the special appeals court that handles FISA cases held that the amended statute permitted that coordination. For a fuller treatment, see The Patriot Act After Two Decades, Two Conservative Verdicts Compared.

On the claim that agencies simply failed to try. The Commission did not find laziness. It found conscientious people working inside a design that kept them apart. The fix is therefore structural. Replacing the people would not have fixed it; changing the design would.

On the claim that one president or one party is to blame. The Commission refused to name a single culprit. It documented decisions across two administrations, one of each party, and it said that officials of both had been given warnings and had struggled to act on them. That is, in my view, more accurate than the story either side prefers to tell.

What Congress did: the Director of National Intelligence

The Commission's headline structural recommendation was to create a position that could see across the whole intelligence community and had the authority to direct it. Congress acted that year. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which President Bush signed in December, created the Director of National Intelligence, who replaced the Director of Central Intelligence as the President's principal intelligence adviser and head of the intelligence community, and it created the National Counterterrorism Center, a place where analysts from different agencies could sit together and look at the same information. It also created a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

Those were real changes. The National Counterterrorism Center in particular is a direct answer to the "no one owns the whole picture" problem.

The strongest objection to the reforms

Let me state the critique at full strength, because many conservatives hold it. Adding a Director of National Intelligence added a layer. The office has grown, with its own staff and its own budget, and critics argue that it became another bureaucracy sitting on top of existing ones, without the clear authority over budgets and personnel that would let it truly direct them. A reform meant to unify was, on this view, partly absorbed into the thing it was meant to fix. Washington's reliable answer to a problem of too many offices is one more office.

That objection has merit, and a conservative should say so. Any new layer in a government must prove it earns its cost. But I would answer it in two steps. One, the failure that the Commission described was a lack of integration, and the proper test for the new office is whether it improves integration, not whether it is small. Two, the right response to an office whose authority is too weak is to clarify its authority, not to abolish it and go back to a system where nobody could see the whole. The question deserves a reform of the reform. It does not deserve repeal of the lesson.

What was ignored

A report is only as good as the follow-through. Several of the Commission's recommendations were not adopted, or were adopted only in part and years late.

Congressional oversight of intelligence. The Commission said that Congress's own structure was part of the problem. Intelligence oversight was split among committees whose jurisdictions overlapped and whose authority over money was divided, and the commissioners recommended a more unified arrangement, either a single committee in each chamber with real authority or a joint committee. The commissioners' own follow-up group, formed after they left office, flagged it as unfinished in its December 2005 report card. It is an easy recommendation to ignore, because the people who must adopt it are the people it would constrain.

Emergency communications. The report documented how firefighters and police on the morning of the attacks could not communicate with each other because their radios used different systems. It recommended giving first responders dedicated spectrum. It took until 2012 for Congress to create a national public-safety network to answer that need, years behind the schedule the Commission urged.

Funding by risk. The Commission recommended that homeland security money be distributed on the basis of the risk to a place, not the political weight of its delegation. The commissioners' follow-up group graded this recommendation too, and the temptation to spread the money to every district is the oldest in Washington.

Standards for identification. The Commission urged national standards for the issuance of drivers' licenses and birth certificates, noting that hijackers had used fraudulently obtained IDs. Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005, and the states took years to comply, and the debate over its burdens and its privacy implications continues.

A note on credit: the Department of Homeland Security, which many Americans credit to the Commission, had been created by Congress in 2002, before the Commission reported. The Commission's recommendations were about the structure beneath and around it.

The deeper lesson, for people who distrust government

I have been writing as someone who thinks government's first duty is to protect its citizens. The report is, among other things, a case study in what that duty requires, and it carries a warning for both temperaments in the conservative family.

To the hawk, it says: the problem was not a lack of will or of money. It was an architecture in which good people could not use what they knew. Spending more on the same design would not have helped.

To the skeptic of big government, it says: the failure was institutional, and it reflects a risk that conservatives already understand. Large organizations optimize for their own rules and protect their own turf. A government that grows more departments without clear lines of responsibility is exactly the sort of government in which a warning can pass through six offices and be acted on by none. That is the Founders' point about accountability. Federalist No. 70, Hamilton's essay on the executive, argues that responsibility is diluted when authority is divided: it is hard to say who is at fault when many hands share the task. The Commission's remedy, someone who is accountable for the whole, is the same insight in modern dress.

It is also, as a historian would say, a very American story. After Pearl Harbor, intelligence coordination failures were among the problems identified, and the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, was in part an answer. We tend to reform after disasters, and to forget the reforms once the memory fades. For the budget side of that forgetting, see Peace Dividends Always Come Due, the 1990s Drawdown Reconsidered.

How to read the report yourself

You do not have to take my word for any of this. The Commission's report is available online, free, and it is organized so that you can read a chapter at a time. Start with the executive summary. Read the chapter on the summer of 2001, which is gripping, then the chapter on reorganizing the government, and then ask yourself what you would have recommended. Compare its authors' choices with the arguments in How Congress Ended a War with the Purse, the Case-Church Story of 1973, which shows how Congress uses its power over money when it wants to change how the government behaves.

The case in brief

1. The 9/11 Commission, five Republicans and five Democrats, reported unanimously on July 22, 2004, and named four failures: of imagination, policy, capabilities and management.
2. Its central structural finding was the wall between intelligence and law enforcement, a set of rules and habits, widely misunderstood, that kept agencies from sharing what they knew.
3. The missed opportunities, including the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur lead, the July 2001 Phoenix memorandum and the August 2001 Moussaoui case, show pieces of the picture held in separate hands.
4. Congress created the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center in December 2004, and the commissioners' follow-up group flagged unified intelligence oversight among recommendations left unfinished.
5. Conservatives should read the report as an argument for accountable structure, which is a founding principle, and judge each reform by whether it improves integration at a defensible cost.

What you can do: read the executive summary of the 9/11 Commission Report, then write your senators asking where Congress stands on the Commission's recommendation to consolidate intelligence oversight.