The 9/11 Commission Report: A Review Essay

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004) Nine days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lt. Gen. Walter Short, the U.S. Army commander in Hawaii at the time, was relieved of duty. Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, the commander of the decimated Paciac Fleet, was relieved of command the next day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then established by executive order a commission to investigate the attack, which was chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. The Roberts commission issued its report on January 23, 1942, less than two months after the attack. The commission found both Short and Kimmel guilty of dereliction of duty. The two ofacers were forced to retire with reduced rank, disgraced. Most subsequent ofacial inquiries and scholarship have concluded that Short and Kimmel were scapegoats, the victims of an unfair rush to judgment, and that the real cause of America’s surprise on December 7, 1941, was the absence of an effective national intelligence structure. Unlike Pearl Harbor, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, produced no Husband Kimmel, no Walter Short. No one has taken the fall for the failure to prevent attacks that killed 2,819 innocent people. These attacks were the work of men, not fate. They could have been prevented but were not. The government failed in this responsibility, but who within the federal government is to blame for this failure? This open-ended question does not sit well with many segments of American society, especially those most skeptical of representations made by President George W. Bush and his principal ofacers. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for an independent investigation into the events leading up to 9/11, seeing such an inquiry as a distraction from more pressing business at hand. The 9/11 attacks triggered extraordinary and simultaneous actions by the federal government on multiple fronts.1 It