9/11 Report

If you have a lot of time on your hands, the full 950 page report is available here. For a pdf of the summary, click here.

AB

UPDATE: I’ve read the summary now. Some of the findings in the report are fairly disturbing. The report explicitly avoids saying that 9/11 was preventable, but other than that, the words are un-minced:

…On July 10, 2001, an FBI Phoenix field office agent sent an “Electronic Communication” to 4 individuals in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) and two people in the Usama Bin Ladin Unit (UBLU) at FBI headquarters, and to two agents on International Terrorism squads in the New York Field Office. In the communication, the agent expressed his concerns, based on his first-hand knowledge, that there was a coordinated effort underway by Bin Ladin to send students to the United States for civil aviation-related training. He noted that there was an “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” in this type of training in Arizona and expressed his suspicion that this was an effort to establish a cadre of individuals in civil aviation who would conduct future terrorist activity. The Phoenix EC requested that the FBI headquarters consider implementing four recommendations:

• accumulate a list of civil aviation university/colleges around the country;
• establish liaison with these schools
• discuss the theories contained in the Phoenix EC with the intelligence Community; and
• consider seeking authority to obtain visa information concerning individuals seeking to attend flight schools.

However, the FBI headquarters personnel did not take the action requested by the Phoenix agent prior to September 11, 2001. The communication generated little or no interest at either FBI Headquarters or the FBI’s New York field office.

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…Prior to September 11, the Intelligence Community had information linking Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM), now recognized by the Intelligence Community as the mastermind of the attacks, to Bin Ladin to terrorist plans to use aircraft as weapons, and to terrorist activity in the United States.

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…Despite intelligence reporting from 1998 through the summer of 2001 indicating that Usama Bin Ladin’s terrorist network intended to strike inside the United States, the United States government did not undertake a comprehensive effort to implement defensive measures in the United States.