The Commission – A Review

Shenon, Philip. The Commission: The Uncensored Story of the 9/11 Investigation. New York, Boston: Twelve, 2008.457 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

First, a note on the business of selling books through the encouragement of conspiratorial thinking. The subtitle of Philip Shenon’s The Commission might give the reader the impression that any other accounts of the 9/11 Commission’s activities have been censored. As far as I know, this is not true. In his bibliography, Mr. Shenon lists only one book which would fall into that category: Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton (with Benjamin Rhodes). Although Governor Kean and Chairman Hamilton may have selected their material somewhat differently than Mr. Shenon has done, I doubt that they would characterize their book as the censored story of the 9/11 investigation.

That aside, The Commission appears to have had the intention of showing that the findings of the 9/11 Commission were flawed or in some way misleading because of the relationship of the commission’s executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, with people inside the Bush administration, and his particular friendship with Condoleeza Rice, President Bush’s national security advisor. If that was Mr. Shenon’s intention, he has failed of its accomplishment.

Professor Zelikow did have a friendship of long standing with Condoleeza Rice, and when Professor Rice moved to the State Department in President Bush’s second term, she appointed Zelikow the Counselor of the Department. Zelikow apparently had something to do with the demotion and sidelining of Richard Clarke, the chief voice for anti-terrorist analysis and action in the National Security Council staff. According to evidence provided by Mr. Shenon, Zelikow did attempt to make it appear that President Bush and his staff were more attentive to al-Qaeda, and to terrorist threats in general, than was actually the case. In other words, Mr. Shenon makes a good showing that Professor Zelikow made some effort to slant the commission’s report in a direction favorable to the Bush White House.

Mr. Shenon also makes clear any such efforts on Professor Zelikow’s part had little or no effect on the final report. This was for several reasons. First, other members of the staff, working with some of the commissioners, were able to nullify Mr. Zelikow’s attempt to spin the testimony of CIA analysts about the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Second, the biggest single area in which the report was probably deficient was its failure to examine the wealth of material in the National Security Agency (NSA) files. This was not due to any fault of Mr. Zelikow, nor do we know if the NSA material would have laid blame on the White House or elsewhere. Time and resources constraints prevented the commission from examining all the material it might have wished to.

Third, the primary reason that the 9/11 Commission’s report does not point fingers at President Bush or Professor Rice is that the chairs of the commission, Governor Kean and former Congressman Hamilton, were determined to avoid blaming individuals or institutions, in favor of recommending future courses of action. Thus, as an analyst cited by Mr. Shenon said in a critique of the report, every negative comment on an institution was balanced by some positive remark, and this was even more true with regard to leading individuals. Mr. Zelikow didn’t need to divert the staff or censor the report to avoid the attribution of blame to Mr. Bush or Ms. Rice; the commissioners took care of that for him.

Why did the 9/11 Commission choose to take such an approach, when the 9/11 families and a great many other people wanted villains to blame? The co-chairs were determined to have a unanimous report, feeling that any lack of unanimity would vitiate the impact of the report. On a panel composed of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, some on each side quite partisan, anything more than the mildest criticism of President’s Clinton and Bush, of Democrats or Republicans in Congress, or other partisan figures would have made unanimity unattainable.

Mr. Zelikow’s undoubted talents as an historian and a staff director brought into the report a great deal of material which made clear the failings of various federal agencies and political leaders, even if the report was not always explicit in pointing out individual faults. Moreover, there is general agreement that the 9/11 Commission’s report is perhaps the best-written such document in the history of blue-ribbon commissions.

If Mr. Shenon fails to make the case that Philip Zelikow somehow subverted the commission’s investigation in order to protect the White House, what story does he tell? He tells what is in itself a fascinating story of a group of experts, some academics, some experienced military or civil servants, pulled out of their normal lives and drawn together into an investigation that all of them seem to have felt was the most important enterprise of their lives. Whatever Mr. Zelikow’s faults, the commission staff nonetheless performed brilliantly, putting in months of their time digging through stacks of paper, sorting out truth from lies, and arriving at a coherent account of what may be the most confusing event in American history: the 9/11 attack.

One point that is made early and often is that the people in charge on 9/11, including many of the military and police officials who testified before Congress and various commissions, were often lying. The whole matter of whether the Air Force could have shot down the last of the hijacked planes was based on a timeline which was wrong. Once people had presented false information in sworn testimony, they were often reluctant to have the record corrected. (There was much internal discussion about the advisability of bringing criminal charges against some of these officials.) The “fog of war” was exacerbated by some officers disinclination to tell the truth.

Another point is that the consequences for some individuals and agencies were determined by reasons, as Shenon describes them, that might or might not seem sufficient. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and its then-new director, Robert Mueller, came out unscathed and with recommendations for increased resources, despite a dismal record of inattention and incompetence. George Tenet at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), on the other hand, while cooperative and helpful to the commission, convinced the commissioners that he was lying, and led them to recommend that the CIA be weakened, and the Director be replaced in his interagency functions by a new Director of National Intelligence. As I read some of the material on Tenet, I felt a certain amount of sympathy for the man. He was obviously in over his head, promoted far beyond his level of competence, to the point that the commissioners found it impossible to believe that a man in such a position could have such a poor grasp of the facts. What may have been merely a poor memory came across as willful obfuscation.

I think Shenon’s book is worthwhile reading for a number of reasons. It does provide a good look inside the workings of an investigation into grave and important matters, and shows how difficult it can be for such an investigation to get it right. It reinforced my confidence in the 9/11 Commission’s findings, if not in all of their recommendations. And it made very clear that Richard Clarke and others were correct in their opinion that President Bush paid little or no attention to terrorism or terrorist threats prior to 9/11, and that his National Security Advisor did nothing to bring these matters to his attention.
I think a reader would do very well to compare and contrast Condoleeza Rice’s performance as National Security Advisor, as revealed in The Commission, with that of her successor, Stephen Hadley, as portrayed by Bob Woodward in The War Within. Rice conceived her role as telling the bureaucracy what the President wanted them to do, not telling the President what the bureaucracy thought he needed to know. Hadley took the initiative to lead the President to see that a change of strategy in Iraq was necessary, and to agree that such a change could be accomplished. Neither of these people was a second Henry Kissinger, or even a second Brent Scowcroft, but Hadley came far closer to the kind of advisor the President needs, if not the kind the President always wants.