All But Memory Holed: How the 9/11 Commission Failed America

Among the most important news stories eclipsed by our summer of political tumult is how the very basis of the so-called "War on Terror" has been a lie, the consequences of which will be with us for generations.

I was actually supposed to be at the Pentagon for a meeting on the day that Al Qaeda unleashed its unconventional aerial attacks on America over 20 years ago. A case of strep throat kept me home, and as I watched the attacks and related horrors unfold that day--including people jumping from the flaming buildings to their deaths rather than waiting to die from burns or smoke inhalation--I knew two very important things were going to happen next.

The first is that we were going to war with Osama bin Laden and his remaining murderous minions, with down-stream consequences none of us could predict. The second was that there would be a second war, one on the home front that would result in massive constitutional rights violations in the name of "national security."

We didn't have to wait long for either, though when it came to the trashing of the Bill of Rights much of that took place in secret and the scope of it would remain so for several years.

Just a week after the attacks and before any investigation into their origin began, the Congress gave then-President George W. Bush a veritable blank check to wage what would become known as the "War on Terror" and ultimately the legal justification for the capture and torture of those known or suspected to have been involved in 9/11 or prior terrorist attacks on American interests--all in violation of U.S. and international law.

The push for unprecedented mass electronic surveillance, so-called "sneak and peak" searches, and the ability to force companies to turn over data on Americans on demand became a reality via the PATRIOT Act in late October 2001. A law that was meant to deal with a temporary emergency has become a permanent fact of daily life for Americans.

These measures and others were based on a belief that the United States had been attacked solely by a stateless, transnational terrorist organization motivated by a particular religious and political ideology that required new, radical military and intelligence measures to meet the threat. They were implemented long before any investigation into the origins of the attacks had even begun, much less concluded.

The chief subsequent investigation into the attacks and why they succeeded was conducted by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which did not publish its final report until late July 2004. And as the Commission chairs, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton of Indiana noted in the preface to their report, it could not be considered truly comprehensive:

We have endeavored to provide the most complete account we can of the events of September 11, what happened and why. This final report is only a summary of what we have done, citing only a fraction of the sources we have consulted. But in an event of this scale, touching so many issues and organizations, we are conscious of our limits. We have not interviewed every knowledgeable person or found every relevant piece of paper. New information inevitably will come to light. We present this report as a foundation for a better understanding of a landmark in the history of our nation.

That statement should've been seen as a red flag by Congress, the press, and the public.

What we have learned in the two decades since the Commission published its report is the extent to which critical leads and information were not followed up, failures and omissions that helped misdirect American foreign and military policy away from the true puppet master behind the attacks: elements of the Saudi government.

As reported in the Atlantic in May, a long-running federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by a number of families of 9/11 attack victims has surfaced compelling evidence of direct Saudi government complicity in not only providing logistical support to a number of 9/11 hijackers, but also direct pre-attack intelligence collection and target casing operations as well. A key figure in the alleged conspiracy was Saudi national and de facto Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi.

The nearly 80-page motion in the case which was filed in May 2024 provides a wealth of details about Bayoumi's support for future 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar, as well as information on the involvement Saudi government personnel in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. The actual videos made by Bayoumi were released as the result of further court action and featured on CBS's 60 Minutes. Still more on this topic surfaced just last week.

And what was the 9/11 Commission's official take on Bayoumi? From p. 218 of the Commission's final report:

Bayoumi is a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious. He spent much of his spare time involved in religious study and helping run a mosque in El Cajon, about 15 miles from San Diego. It is certainly possible that he has dissembled about some aspects of his story, perhaps to counter suspicion. On the other hand, we have seen no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups. Our investigators who have dealt directly with him and studied his background find him to be an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.

But that statement was not written by Mike Jacobson and Raj De, the actual 9/11 Commission staff who investigated Bayoumi and the Saudi government's connection to Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar.

Less than five years after the Commission's report was published, journalist Phil Shenon revealed in The Commission: What We Didn't Know About 9/11 Jacobson and De's conclusions about Bayoumi's likely role and that of the Saudi government in the attack were excised by Commission staff director Philip Zelikow and Senior Counsel Dieter Snell, just days before the final report was to be printed.

Snell, a former federal prosecutor, felt the evidence against Bayoumi and the Saudi government "could not be backed up conclusively," according to Shenon's account. Jacobson, De, and other team members believed, in Shenon's words, that "the level of proof [Snell] was demanding on the 9/11 commission would exonerate the guilty." (p. 398).

The most recent revelations in the 9/11 families' court action against the Saudi government provide the most powerful public evidence yet that at least some Saudi government officials in D.C. and Los Angeles played a direct role in facilitating the 9/11 attacks.

Had Jacobson and De been allowed to put their evidence and conclusions in the final 9/11 Commission report, it almost certainly would've altered the course of history over the last two decades.

Their revelations might well have cut short by years the bogus and horrendously bloody and misguided war against Iraq by revealing the true foreign power that facilitated the attacks: Saudi Arabia. It might also have caused Congress to take a much harder and deeper look at the role of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the 9/11 debacle.

As Shenon noted in Chapter 52 of his book, at the same time Jacobson and De were trying to get their story about Saudi government involvement with the plot into the report, a separate Commission team had discovered, in Shenon's words, that "A huge archive of the intelligence community on al Qaeda and terrorist threats had not been adequately reviewed." (p. 373) This included NSA communications intelligence suggesting Iranian officials had facilitated the travel of a number of hijackers in the months prior to the attacks.

The failure of the 9/11 Commission's leadership to immediately brief senior Congressional leaders on these last-minute findings and request another time extension for the Commission to finish its work was inexcusable. Worse was the suppression of evidence of foreign government involvement in the attacks.

The entire episode should serve as a cautionary tale about the perils of relying on "official" inside-the-Beltway investigations conducted behind a cloak of needless secrecy. The families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks deserved far better. So did the rest of us.

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