Lessons Learned
9/11 commissioner Gorelick reflects on the commission and its report
9 /11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick
characterizes the day of September 11, 2001 as a story of improvisation; there were no systems or plans in place to face the threat that materialized, largely because of the failure of various
agencies and institutions within the government to share intelligence.
“We had layers and layers of protection, all of which failed, save one, which were the passengers on Flight 93 … who [realized] that their plane was going to be used as a missile, and they did what they needed to do, and that plane crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania. Our only effective line of attack was a group of Americans who improvised.”
Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and general counsel to the Department of Defense, spoke at Duke Law School September 22 to a packed lecture hall, as part of the Program in Public Law’s ongoing series on the war on terror and the aftermath of 9/11. She offered insights into the Commission’s process, reviewed key findings and recommendations, and shared personal reflections from her 20 months of service on the panel.
From the outset, the commissioners were committed to unity and procedural transparency, Gorelick said, the latter motivated by the generally perceived failure of earlier commissions that met behind closed doors.
“If you look at the Warren Commission report [on the assassination of President Kennedy] or the Pearl Harbor reports, they actually fostered more paranoia than they addressed. We concluded that we were going to have public hearings, that we were going to try to put out as much of a story as we possibly could, and that we would make ourselves available to public questioning in the course of deliberations.”
What the Commissioners found was “a high level of dysfunctionality, almost across government,” said Gorelick, firing off a list of failures.
“We found that the FBI did not know what it had, the CIA and FBI did not communicate with each other as well as they should have, the CIA did not communicate with itself as well as it should have, neither one communicated with the State Department, that our military was still looking out, rather than thinking about the mission to protect us internally, that the Federal Aviation Administration–the FAA–which is supposed to protect civil aviation from attack was almost entirely clueless as to what the intelligence community knew, that it’s policy prescriptions and procedures did not match up therefore against the threat.”
The failure of the military to offer effective protection was particularly startling to her as a Defense Department veteran.
“They were literally still in a
Cold War mentality. When [we] asked the senior military witnesses ‘Why were you so blind as to what was happening internally,’ they said ‘We were positioned outward. We were
positioned against a missile or a plane coming across the ocean. We were not positioned internally–we left that to the FAA.’ This was a default of our military’s obligation to
protect us.”
The Commission also found a failure of the chain of command as 9/11 unfolded: At the highest levels, the people who should have been in close communication–the president and vice president, secretary of defense, and ground commanders–were not. Relating the story as a grim comedy of errors, Gorelick deemed it “a complete disaster.”
Gorelick spoke at length of the panel’s recommendation for the U.S. to engage in “public diplomacy” in the Muslim world “in which our standing has simply hemorrhaged.
“The fact is, [our present policy] breeds more terrorists, it emboldens terrorists, it offers them sanctuary, and it is dangerous in actually more profound ways than the delineated threat. And so we have to do something to reverse that. One of the things you can do is offer a Pakistani parent some alternative when they want to educate their kid. Right now they go to a school that teaches them nothing but hate and no skill. That’s a pretty dynamite combination.
“We have unilaterally disarmed by canceling programs that supported libraries and exchange programs, and other windows into who America is and why its values are helpful and can be important in the Muslim world. We have unilaterally disarmed–in the words of our Deputy Secretary of State Dick Armitage–by exporting only our anger and our fears and not our hopes and our moral values.” While she called hard-core al-Qaeda adherents “irretrievable,” Gorelick observed that public diplomacy worked well during the Cold War.
“We had layers and layers of protection, all of which failed, save one … Our only effective line of attack was a group of Americans who improvised.” Jamie gorelick
“Public diplomacy is about the message, it is about who we are, and it is about communicating our values, and I think it is critically important for us to do. People call it ‘soft.’ We were uniform, Republican and Democrat, in agreement that this is a set of things we must do.”
The commissioners did not take a position on the war in Iraq because it was not part of their charter, which was written in December 2002, Gorelick explained in response to questions. They did, however, find that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 or al-Qaeda.
“We also noted that we are still at risk in Afghanistan, where we shifted our attention from finding the sanctuaries of terrorists still there. And if we fail in Iraq, having gone in there, we will have created the greatest sanctuary and the greatest failed state that there is anywhere … which is where there are havens for terrorists to function.”
All the commissioners, said Gorelick, were very pleased to ultimately be unanimous in their factual conclusions and in their recommendations. She described her service on the panel as “personally rewarding,” however difficult.
“I felt I was helping to do something that could make a real difference. I felt that I was helping to get the truth out and that can, indeed, set you free. I enjoyed working in a bipartisan environment, and I hope that the example might encourage others in Washington to do the same.”