Philip Shenon, een journalist van de New York Times, schreef een boek over het ontstaan en de werking van de 9/11 Commissie. Shenon is geen complotdenker en dus ziet hij overal alleen maar toevalligheden en wijt hij 9/11 enkel aan fouten en falen. Maar Shenon is ook een uitstekende journalist en bijgevolg kan je in zijn boek hier en daar toch ook interessante zaken te weten komen.

• Co-voorzitter Kean heeft geen goede ervaringen met de "control freaks" van George W. Bush:
  Kean had certainly heard all about the “message discipline” of the White House of George W. Bush. The president had surrounded himself with a small circle of aides—Card, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, press secretary Ari Fleischer, communications director Karen Hughes—who demonstrated unquestioned loyalty to Bush and his family. This White House seemed unwilling to tolerate public dissent, so it was almost never heard, even if Kean thought it left Bush’s aides sounding robotic and unthinking in their public appearances. After he came to know them better, Kean would later refer to Bush’s White House aides as “the control freaks.”
• Shenon speelt de Saudische kaart uit:
  Jacobson had found the most important evidence about the Saudi connection to the hijackers buried in the files of the FBI’s field office in San Diego and at FBI headquarters in Washington. Two of the Saudi-born 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, had lived in San Diego for more than a year before the attacks while seeking flight training. They had lived in the open—amazingly so. Hazmi’s name, address, and home phone number were listed in the San Diego phone book. The fact that they were in the United States at all reflected the most basic sort of incompetence by the nation’s spy and law enforcement agencies, since both Hazmi and Mihdhar had been identified as al-Qaeda terrorists before their arrival in the United States in January 2000. The CIA claimed that it had almost immediately alerted the FBI to the fact that at least one of them might be in the United States, although there was no record at the bureau to support that. What Jacobson found in searching through the FBI’s files was that Hazmi and Mihdhar had been befriended shortly after their arrival in California by a mysterious Saudi expatriate, Omar al-Bayoumi; Bayoumi seemed clearly to be working on behalf of some part of the Saudi government. Bayoumi was in his early forties at the time. He entered the United States as a business student and had lived in San Diego since 1996. He was on the payroll of an aviation contractor to the Saudi government, paid about $2,800 a month, but apparently did no work for the company. Bayoumi was described by another worker as one of several “ghost employees” on the payroll. He instead spent much of his day at a mosque in El Cajon, about fifteen miles outside San Diego.
  To Graham and several of his investigators, it seemed obvious that the amiable Bayoumi was a low-ranking Saudi intelligence agent. He was no James Bond, no cloak-and-dagger spy. But he was someone who had been put on the ground in San Diego by his government to keep an eye on the activities of the relatively large Saudi community in Southern California and to carry out whatever other tasks he was given from Riyadh.
  The source of Bassan’s money was an additional shock to the congressional investigators: Much of it had come in the form of cashier’s checks directed to his family by Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington. The princess had a charity fund that assisted Saudis in distress in the United States, and she had supposedly sent the money to help Bassan’s wife pay for thyroid surgery; Bassan’s wife had signed a number of the checks over to Bayoumi’s wife. There was one more alarming surprise in the FBI files: Hazmi and Mihdhar had been in close contact in San Diego with a longtime FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh; they had both lived in Shaikh’s home for a time. The FBI blocked the congressional investigators from interviewing the informant after Jacobson learned his identity. There was no evidence to show that Shaikh knew the two Saudis were terrorists, but Graham was astounded to discover that “terrorists were living under the nose of an FBI informant.” It was just more proof of the FBI’s incompetence, he thought.
  He imagined how the al-Qaeda middleman might have to put it to his contacts in the Saudi government shortly before Hazmi and Mihdhar landed in California: “We are going to be insinuating some of our people into the United States, and it’s very important to us that they be able to carry out the mission with the maximum amount of anonymity.” Graham knew that many of his colleagues on the congressional committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, shared his view that the material that had been gathered in San Diego was explosive; they, too, felt it should be made public. But in what seemed to many of them to be a breach of the Constitution’s separation of powers, they had been muzzled into silence by the White House and the FBI.
• Over Philip Zelikow, de uitvoerend directeur van de Commissie, de man die alles in handen had, vooral over hoe hij een expert was in het duwen van commissierapporten in de richting die hij wilde:
  Gorton knew Zelikow from another federal commission—a blue-ribbon panel on electoral reform created in response to the 2000 recount fiasco in Florida. The commission was led by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; Zelikow was staff director. Gorton had been wowed by Zelikow’s intelligence, his writing skills, and his all-important ability to meet a deadline. Zelikow was known to be indefatigable, able to go without sleep for days, surviving off whatever was available from the nearest vending machine. Gorton was also impressed by Zelikow’s ability to quietly move the commission toward recommendations that he, Zelikow, supported. “He did a marvelous job of deferring to everyone but leading the commission in the direction that he wanted,” Gorton said.
• Zelikow had zelf in 1998 voor een zware terreuraanval op de V.S. gewaarschuwd:
  Zelikow provided Kean and Hamilton with a copy of his résumé. They found even more to like about Zelikow: author or editor of fourteen books, dozens of scholarly articles, an expertise in every sort of national security issue, including terrorism. They were both impressed with a remarkably prescient 1998 article that Zelikow and two coauthors had published in Foreign Affairs magazine. It was titled “Catastrophic Terrorism” and warned that the United States needed to ready itself for a massive domestic terrorist attack, possibly with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
• Zelikow's connecties met de Bush-regering werden verzwegen alsook dat hij een rapport had geschreven op een invasie van Irak te verantwoorden:
  The release was notable for what it did not say. It made no mention of the fact that Zelikow had worked on the NSC for the first President Bush. Nothing about the book with Rice. Nothing about Zelikow’s role on the Bush transition team. Nothing about the fact that he had just written a policy paper for the White House that was going to be used within months to justify the American invasion of Iraq. Aides to Hamilton at the Wilson Center said they wrote the press release, based on the background information that Zelikow had provided to Hamilton. Zelikow reviewed it before it was handed out to reporters.
• Zelikow was "running the show":
  But Kean and Hamilton—and Zelikow—did not want a formal division of responsibilities among the commissioners. Kean and Hamilton made it clear that while the commissioners were invited to visit the panel’s offices whenever they wished, they would not have a permanent presence there. Kean and Hamilton would not have separate offices at the commission, either. Everything would be run through Zelikow.
• De Commissie was nominaal "bipartisan" maar co-voorzitter Lee Hamilton was een goede vriend van de Bush familie en was George Sr. ter hulp geschoten tijdens de Iran-contra-affaire.
  The departure of both Kissinger and Mitchell alarmed Cleland. He knew their replacements did not have similar stature in Washington. Kean had never worked in the capital—he seemed to take pride in it, in fact—and had no experience at all in foreign policy and intelligence. “You darn well know that an ex-governor who has no basic background in these issues is not going to be the world’s greatest tiger in asking a difficult question,” Cleland said. He certainly respected Hamilton, but he knew that Hamilton had a well-deserved reputation for cooperating with Republicans, not confronting them.
• Een voorbeeld van de beperkte slagkracht en onvoorbereidheid van de Commissie:
  Things were even trickier with Mayor Bloomberg. When he was initially offered an invitation to appear at the hearing, he declined, saying he would instead issue a written statement to the commission and would not be present to read it. Then he informed Kean and Hamilton that he would testify but not answer questions. Then he agreed to answer questions but insisted that his police and fire commissioners would not appear for the hearing. When Bloomberg finally arrived at the Customs House the morning of the hearing, he was in the company of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta; and he announced that they were all ready to testify. It was clear to the commissioners and the staff that the mayor was trying to blindside them; the commission had not prepared itself to question the police and fire commissioners, who would be vital witnesses in discussing the emergency response on 9/11.
• Voorbeeld van de manier waarop het Pentagon de Commissie om de tuin leidde:
  It seemed obvious that Myers, of all people at the Pentagon, would want to know—would demand to know—how jet fighters under NORAD’s control had responded on the morning of September 11 to the threat in the skies. But in his testimony, Myers offered the first of what would be several contradictory—and flatly inaccurate—statements from the Pentagon about the military response on September 11. He asserted that military fighters were not scrambled to respond to the hijackings until after the Pentagon had been hit at 9:37 a.m. That was wrong; it would later be demonstrated that the first fighters had been scrambled almost an hour earlier than Myers suggested. Farmer could not understand why it was so difficult to establish an accurate timeline—surely the military and FAA had logs and computer records that documented what had gone on. It seemed all the more remarkable to him that the Pentagon could not establish a clear chronology of how it responded to an attack on the Pentagon building itself. Wouldn’t the generals and admirals want to know why their own offices—their own lives—had been put at risk that morning? He was pleased that the commission scheduled its second set of hearings, in May 2003, to take testimony from NORAD commanders. Surely by then, a year and eight months after the attacks, the Pentagon would have figured out what happened...
• Ander voorbeeld:
  The retired two-star general was suggesting that there had been time to shoot down United 93 and that the shoot-down was made unnecessary because of the sacrifice of passengers who had stormed the cockpit and provoked the hijackers to crash the plane. “The brave men and women who took over that aircraft prevented us from making the awful decision,” Arnold testified somberly. When Farmer and his team of investigators looked back at Arnold’s testimony later, they were astonished; Farmer believed the testimony from Arnold and other NORAD generals should have been referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. It would later be determined that almost every one of those assertions by General Arnold in May 2003 was flat wrong, most startlingly his claim that the military had close-tracked United 93 and was prepared to intercept it. In fact, it was later shown, NORAD knew nothing about the hijacking of the United plane until after it had crashed into that lonely rural field in western Pennsylvania. Luckily for Arnold, the commission had not put him under oath on the first day he testified. Farmer would make sure that did not happen again.
• Commissie ontdekt de rol van Zelikow in de voorbereiding van de Irak-oorlog maar doet ondanks het duidelijke belangenconflict niets:
  MOST OF the commissioners and the staff did not know it until much later, but Philip Zelikow had an important role at the White House in developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq war. His thirty-one-page “preemptive war” doctrine, written anonymously and at Condoleezza Rice’s request, was released by the White House in September 2002 under George W. Bush’s signature. It had the simple, magisterial title “The National Security Strategy of the United States.” “In an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle,” it declared. “The United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.” It was a remarkable document, a reversal of generations of American military doctrine, which had previously held that the United States would launch a military strike against an enemy only after it had been struck or if American lives were in immediate jeopardy. When commission staffers learned that Zelikow was the principal author, many were astounded. It was arguably his most serious conflict of interest in running the investigation. It was in his interest, they could see, to use the commission to try to bolster the administration’s arguments for war—a war that he had helped make possible.
• Zelikow probeert de schuld voor 9/11 in de schoenen van Irak te schuiven:
  THE COMMISSION scheduled a third set of public hearings in July 2003. The subject this time was al-Qaeda, its history and its relationship with other terrorist groups and governments. And to the surprise of some of the commission’s staff who knew something about Laurie Mylroie of the American Enterprise Institute, Zelikow made sure that she had a prominent place at the witness table. Mylroie was considered the intellectual godmother of the Iraq invasion. She and her theories about Iraq and al-Qaeda had been embraced by the Bush administration. Mylroie argued that Iraq had played a role in every major terrorist attack against the United States since the early 1990s, including September 11 and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. She even saw a link between Iraq and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. She was certain, she believed, that Baghdad was working with al-Qaeda to plan new terrorist strikes on the United States.
  The records showed she had otherwise focused on al-Qaeda threats in detail only once that summer—and remarkably enough, it would involve the possibility of a suicide attack by al-Qaeda from the air. The threats centered on the G-8 summit in Genoa in July. Both the German and Russian intelligence agencies had warned of an al-Qaeda plot involving an aerial attack on the summit, and as a result, the Italians placed a battery of surface-to-air missiles near the seaport. The threats were taken so seriously that Bush’s nighttime whereabouts were kept secret; he was reported to have slept aboard an American aircraft carrier that was stationed nearby.
• Een voorbeeld van hoe NORAD probeerde de Commissie om de tuin de leiden:
  The tapes showed what Farmer had expected and feared—that NORAD’s public statements about its actions on 9/11 had been wrong, almost certainly intentionally. This was not the fog of war. This was the military trying to come up with a story that made its performance during 9/11 look reasonably competent, when in fact the military had effectively left the nation’s skies undefended that morning. A central element of the NORAD cover story, repeated over and over after 9/11, was that air force jet fighters had heroically chased United 93. Had it not crashed in Pennsylvania because of the struggle between the hijackers and passengers, the United plane would have been blown out of the sky before it reached its target in Washington, NORAD had wanted the public to believe. But the tapes made it clear that every element of the story was wrong. NORAD knew nothing about United 93 until after it had already plunged to the ground. The tapes showed that NORAD was not notified until 10:07 a.m. that United 93 had been hijacked; the plane crashed at 10:03. Farmer believed that it was “99 percent” certain that Defense Department officers knew they were lying when they made the statements to the commission, sometimes under oath.
• Gemiste opportuniteiten om de "terroristen" te vatten (wat sukkels toch daar bij FBI en CIA):
  Kean went through the list of bungled opportunities at the FBI and CIA: Moussaoui; the delays in putting Hazmi and Mihdhar on watch lists after they entered the United States; the decision to call off some of the CIA’s more promising capture-or-kill operations against bin Laden.
• Als een goede journalist ziet Shenon uiteaard alleen maar "fouten" en "falen", nooit kwade bedoelingen (dat is voor komplotdenkers), zelfs al zijn ze zo onwaarschijnlijk dat het bijna potsierlijk wordt:
  The investigators on Team 6 were always careful to point out that there were some extraordinary, dedicated people at the FBI—men and women who were as talented as any criminal investigators in the world. The honors list began with the Minneapolis agents who were rebuffed when they tried to warn FBI headquarters about Moussaoui in August 2001, and with Kenneth Williams, the agent in Phoenix who sent a memo to headquarters that July asking the bureau to study why so many young Muslim men were seeking flight training in the United States. The problem was mostly with the agency’s sclerotic, hierarchical bureaucracy in Washington—at its core, unchanged since the days of J. Edgar Hoover—as well as the FBI’s unmatched arrogance in dealing with other government agencies. Its failures were on display most clearly when it came to the threat posed to the United States by terrorist groups.
  In tracking down spies and terrorists, success could never be so clear. There was no simple way to quantify what the FBI’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents did for the bureau. The most talented counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents at the FBI might not make a single arrest in their careers. Spies tended to be kept under surveillance, not arrested. Foreign-born terrorists were not seen as much of a problem until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And the commission’s investigators were startled to discover that even after the 1993 attack, there was no grand rethinking of the FBI’s role on terrorism. In the eight years between the 1993 attempt to bring down the Twin Towers and the 2001 attacks that succeeded in that horrifying goal, FBI headquarters in Washington produced no analytical reports—not a single one—on the overall terrorist threat facing the United States. Before 9/11, if President Clinton or President Bush wanted a briefing from the FBI on domestic terrorism threats, there was no piece of paper to offer him. Even though the bureau functioned as the government’s domestic intelligence agency, FBI agents “literally didn’t write intelligence reports,” Zelikow said. Instead, when they completed an interview as part of an investigation, FBI agents prepared a “302,” the standard FBI form used to record interview results, and often deposited it in a file cabinet or desk drawer, never to be read again.