After a decade of fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Islamist movement began to take shape at Afghan-Arab training cams operated by notable warlords, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Camps that were run by Saudi millionaire, Osama Bin Laden. Many of these mujahadeen fighters would come under the leadership of Bin Laden and swear loyalty to him which would begin the journey of a singular arab organization called, "Al Qaeda". After relocating to Sudan in 1990, Bin Laden continued to build Al Qaeda with the assistance from members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad led by Dr. Ayman a-Zawahiri.

In February 1993, a new wave of islandic fundamentalism was about to victimized the citizens of New York City, in ways they have never seen. Those who trained at terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan would now take what they have learned and applied it to making bombs that would be used to where maximum causalities can be reached. Ramzi Yousef was the initial symptom of a virus that would soon effect not just the United States, but the world over. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Three: Part 3: From The Old Terrorism To The New-The First World Trade Center Bombing

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) within the Department of Transportation had been vested by Congress with the sometimes conflicting mandate of regulating the safety and security of U.S civil aviation while also promoting the civil aviation industry. The FAA also had a security mission to protect the users of commercial air transportation against terrorism and other criminal acts. The 9/11 Commission Report Chapter Three: Part 3.3 And In the Federal Aviation Administration

By June 1996, The CIA's Directorate of Operations, David Cohen, wanted to test the idea of having a virtual station that would collect and operate against a subject much in the way CIA stations in the field focus on a country. This station would be known as the Bin Laden Issue Station. It would also employ a handful of analysts that would also employ other agenices working alongside it. As Bin Laden left Afghanistan in May 1996, US intelligence and the CIA began constructing ideas to have Bin Laden captured using Afghan tribals, bribed with money, to hold him while being later handed over to the CIA. However the plan was not approved, and some people within the National Security Group led by Richard Clarke and the National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, were those who thought the plan was too "risky". The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Four: Part 4.1 Before The Bombings In Kenya And Tanzania

On August 7th 1998, two truck bombs detonated at US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. Later, Al Qaeda would be suspected of the dual attacks which promoted the Clinton administration to retaliate by sending missile strikes on an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical warehouse called "al-Shifa" in Khartoum, Sudan. However, the media criticize the attack as being "too aggressive" and also questioned the intelligence reports lacking any actionable information regarding who Osama Bin Laden was or the organization, Al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report Chapter Four: Part 4.2 Crisis-August 1998

According to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, he began thinking of ways to attack the United States after his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, returned to Pakistan following the 1993 WTC Bombing. Like Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad reasoned he could best influence US policy by targeting the country's economy. He would propose the idea of hijacking ten airplanes and having them crash into various US targets to Osama Bin Laden in 1998 where it was put on hold for Al Qaeda leadership to mull over. By spring 1999, Bin Laden approved of the operation but selected the pilot hijackers himself. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Five: Part 5.2 The Planes Operation

A phone call heard by Jordanian authorities, investigating extremists in the country, heard a call between Abu Zubaydah, a suspected Bin Laden associate at the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan and a Palestinian activist, Abu Hoshar. They heard what amounted to a very cryptic message of an incoming attack "the time for training is over". When the Jordanian authorities arrested members of this plot, they found it entailed a multi-faceted operation which included, bombing the SAS Radisson hotel in Amman, attacking the border of Jordan and Israel as well as a bombing of an airport in the United States. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian citizen, had trained in Khalden under Zubaydah, had independently taken it as his initiative to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Chapter Six: Part 6.1 The Millennium Crisis

During the summer and early autumn of 2000, Bin Laden and senior Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan started electing the muscle hijackers-the operatives who would soon storm the cockpit and control the passengers. Despite the phrase widely used to describe them, the so-called muscle hijackers were not at all physically imposing as most were no taller than 5'7". Chapter 7:: Part 7.3 "Assembling the Teams"

With the planning stages near completion, members of Al Qaeda and Taliban were adamantly opposed to Osama Bin Laden's "planes operation" citing retaliatory attacks against a US coalition military that would decimate both originations and eliminate any possibility of controlling Afghanistan. Meanwhile the commission would report the following: "KSM remembers Mohamed Atef telling him that Al Qaeda had an agreement with the Taliban to eliminate Ahmed Shah Massoud, after which the Taliban would begin an offensive to take over Afghanistan. Atef hoped Massoud’s death would also appease the Taliban when the 9/11 attacks happened."

On November 7th 2000, American voters Went to the polls in what turned out to be one of the closest presidential contests in U.S history-an election campaign during which there was a notable absence of serious discussion of the Al Qaeda threat on terrorism. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Six: Part 6.4 Change And Continuity

Osama Bin Ladin began delivering diatribes against the United States before he left Saudi Arabia. He continued to do so after he arrived in Sudan. In early 1992, the al Qaeda leadership issued a fatwa calling for jihad against the Western “occupation” of Islamic lands. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Two: Part 2.4 Building An Organization: Declaring War On The United States (1992-1996)

As 2001 began, counterterrorism officials were receiving frequent but fragmentary reports about threats. Indeed, there appeared to be possible threats almost everywhere the United States had interests—including at home. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Eight: Part 8.1 The System Was Blinking Red: The Summer Of Threat

Legal processes were the primary method for responding to these early manifestations of a new type of terrorism.Our overview of U.S.capabilities for dealing with it thus begins with the nation’s vast complex of law enforcement agencies. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter Three: Counterterrorism Evolves: And In The Intelligence Community

By early 1999, al Qaeda was already a potent adversary of the United States. Bin Ladin and his chief of operations, Abu Hafs al Masri, also known as Mohammed Atef, occupied undisputed leadership positions atop al Qaeda’s organizational structure. Within this structure, al Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist operations relied heavily on the ideas and work of enterprising and strong willed field commanders who enjoyed considerable autonomy. The 9/11 Commission Report: Chapter 5: Al Qaeda Aims At The American Homeland : Part 5.4 A Money Trail?

In February 1998, Osama Bin Ladin and Ayman al Zawahiri,arranged from their Afghan headquarters for an Arabic newspaper in London to publish what they termed a fatwa issued in the name of a “World Islamic Front.” A fatwa is normally an interpretation of Islamic law by a respected Islamic authority,but neither Bin Ladin, Zawahiri, nor the three others who signed this statement were scholars of Islamic law. Claiming that America had declared war against God and his messenger, they called for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as the “individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” The 9/11 Commission Report: The Foundation Of The New Terrorism: Bin Laden's Appeal In The Islamic World

Emergency response is a product of preparedness.On the morning of September 11, 2001, the last best hope for the community of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center rested not with national policymakers but with private firms and local public servants,especially the first responders:fire,police, emergency medical service, and building safety professionals. The 9/11 Commission Report: Heroism And Horror: Emergency Response At The Pentagon

By early 1999, al Qaeda was already a potent adversary of the United States. Bin Ladin and his chief of operations, Abu Hafs al Masri, also known as Mohammed Atef, occupied undisputed leadership positions atop al Qaeda’s organizational structure. Within this structure, al Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist operations relied heavily on the ideas and work of enterprising and strongwilled field commanders who enjoyed considerable autonomy.To understand how the organization actually worked and to introduce the origins of the 9/11 plot, we briefly examine three of these subordinate commanders: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Riduan Isamuddin (better known as Hambali), and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. We will devote the most attention to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief manager of the “planes operation.” The 9/11 Commission Report: Al Qaeda Aims At The American Homeland: The Hamburg Contingent

At 8:30 that evening, President Bush addressed the nation from the White House. After emphasizing that the first priority was to help the injured and protect against any further attacks, he said: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” He quoted Psalm 23—“though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” No American, he said,“will ever forget this day.” Following his speech, President Bush met again with his National Security Council (NSC), expanded to include Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and Joseph Allbaugh, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had returned from Peru after hearing of the attacks, joined the discussion. The 9/11 Commission Report: Wartime: Planning For War

As presently configured, the national security institutions of the U.S. government are still the institutions constructed to win the Cold War. The United States confronts a very different world today. Instead of facing a few very dangerous adversaries, the United States confronts a number of less visible challenges that surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states and call for quick, imaginative, and agile responses. The men and women of the World War II generation rose to the challenges of the 1940s and 1950s.They restructured the government so that it could protect the country. That is now the job of the generation that experienced 9/11. Those attacks showed,emphatically,that ways of doing business rooted in a different era are just not good enough. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments. The 9/11 Commission Report: Wartime: Unity Of Effort In Sharing Information

As time passes,more documents become available,and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer.Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes and the remaining memories of it become colored by what happened and what was written about it later. With that caution in mind, we asked ourselves, before we judged others, the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done. The 9/11 Commission Report: Foresight & Hindsight: Capabilities

President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism Presidential Decision Directives in 1995 (no.39) and May 1998 (no.62) reiterated that terrorism was a national security problem, not just a law enforcement issue. They reinforced the authority of the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate domestic as well as foreign counterterrorism efforts, through Richard Clarke and his interagency Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG). Spotlighting new concerns about unconventional attacks, these directives assigned tasks to lead agencies but did not differentiate types of terrorist threats. Thus, while Clarke might prod or push agencies to act, what actually happened was usually decided at the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, or the Justice Department. The efforts of these agencies were sometimes energetic and sometimes effective. Terrorist plots were disrupted and individual terrorists were captured. But the United States did not, before 9/11, adopt as a clear strategic objective the elimination of al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report: Responses To Al Qaeda's Initial Assaults: Diplomacy

Emergency response is a product of preparedness. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the last best hope for the community of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center rested not with national policymakers but with private firms and local public servants, especially the first responders: fire, police, emergency medical service, and building safety professionals. The 9/11 Commission Report: Heroism And Horror: Preparedness As Of September 11

President Clinton was deeply concerned about Osama Bin Ladin. He and his national security advisor, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, ensured they had a special daily pipeline of reports feeding them the latest updates on Bin Ladin’s reported location. In public, President Clinton spoke repeatedly about the threat of terrorism, referring to terrorist training camps but saying little about Bin Ladin and nothing about al Qaeda. He explained to us that this was deliberate—intended to avoid enhancing Bin Ladin’s stature by giving him unnecessary publicity. His speeches focused especially on the danger of nonstate actors and of chemical and biological weapons. As the millennium approached, the most publicized worries were not about terrorism but about computer breakdowns—the Y2K scare.Some government officials were concerned that terrorists would take advantage of such breakdowns. The 9/11 Commission Report: From Threat To Threat: The Attack On The USS Cole

The nation has committed enormous resources to national security and to countering terrorism. Between fiscal year 2001, the last budget adopted before 9/11,and the present fiscal year 2004,total federal spending on defense (including expenditures on both Iraq and Afghanistan), homeland security, and international affairs rose more than 50 percent, from $354 billion to about $547 billion. The United States has not experienced such a rapid surge in national security spending since the Korean War. This pattern has occurred before in American history. The United States faces a sudden crisis and summons a tremendous exertion of national energy. Then, as that surge transforms the landscape, comes a time for reflection and reevaluation. Some programs and even agencies are discarded; others are invented or redesigned. Private firms and engaged citizens redefine their relationships with government, working through the processes of the American republic. The 9/11 Commission Report: What To Do? A Global Strategy: Reflecting On A Generational Challenge

Tuesday, September 11th, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City .Others went to Arlington, Virginia, to the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run. For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travelers were Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine. The 9/11 Commission Report: We Have Some Planes: Inside The Four Flights: The Boarding Of The Planes

On four occasions in 2001, the CIA, the FBI, or both had apparent opportunities to refocus on the significance of Hazmi and Mihdhar and reinvigorate the search for them.After reviewing those episodes we will turn to the handling of the Moussaoui case and some late leads regarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The 9/11 Commission Report: The System Was Blinking Red: Late Leads - Mihdhar, Moussaoui & KSM Note: This is one of the more important chapters of the Commission Report, so please listen with care. I fill in some of the blanks.

In the late afternoon of September 11th, the President overruled his aides’ continuing reluctance to have him return to Washington and ordered Air Force One back to Andrews Air Force Base. He was flown by helicopter back to the White House, passing over the still-smoldering Pentagon. At 8:30 that evening ,President Bush addressed the nation from the White House. After emphasizing that the first priority was to help the injured and protect against any further attacks, he said: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” He quoted Psalm 23—“though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” No American, he said,“ will ever forget this day.” The 9/11 Commission Report: Wartime: Phase Two & The Question Of Iraq

We, at the 9/11 Commission, recommend significant changes in the organization of the government. We know that the quality of the people is more important than the quality of the wiring diagrams. Some of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 story are the outstanding efforts of so many individual officials straining, often without success, against the boundaries of the possible. Good people can overcome bad structures. They should not have to. The United States has the resources and the people. The government should combine them more effectively, achieving unity of effort. The 9/11 Commission Report: Wartime: Unity Of Effort In The Congress