After foreign terrorists hijacked jetliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Congress created a commission to find out who and what was behind the unprecedented assault on American power, and why our government failed to protect us from this catastrophic failure of national security.
Now there is a push to establish a commission to confront the threat of domestic terrorism that would have the same subpoena power and ability to get documents and interview key people in the government, including President Trump and his circle, as the 9/11 commission had in accessing the then Bush administration.
The findings of the 9/11 commission were broadly accepted by the public. Its report became a bestseller and its chapter-by-chapter journey through the origins of the terrorist group behind the attack to what the Bush administration knew and when they knew it is now a college textbook.
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All but one of its 42 recommendations for reform of the national security community and its infrastructure were implemented. (The lone holdout was streamlining the number of congressional committees with oversight of Homeland Security.)
“It worked once. Why not try something that worked?” says 9/11 Commission co-chair Tom Kean, a Republican. He and his co-chair, Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, suggested in a letter on Feb. 12 to President Biden and congressional leaders that Congress create a 1/6 commission modeled after what they did by adhering to a rigid bipartisanship to win public confidence despite a toxic blame game.
Kean says he and Hamilton call themselves “reformed politicians,” adding that “you don’t want people with ambition” serving on a commission whose mandate is assessing foreign or domestic terrorism. When they were appointed, Kean was a popular former governor of New Jersey. Hamilton had served 12 terms in the House representing Indiana.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Kean after receiving the letter, and they talked for 45 minutes. Then she called Hamilton. The letter said nothing about structure, but as a guide, the 9/11 commission was bipartisan, five appointees from each party, named by the president and the leaders of both houses of Congress. “I’ve got some people in mind,” Kean says. “There are a lot of people out there. We can damn well find somebody.”
One obvious place to look for people is the Bipartisan Policy Center based in Washington, a haven for elected officials with a proven record of working across the aisle. Former Senate leaders Tom Daschle, a Democrat, and Trent Lott, a Republican, come to mind, as do Janet Napolitano, Democrat, Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, Republicans, all former heads of the Department of Homeland Security.
Mike Rogers, a former member of Congress who previously worked for the CIA, is mentioned, as is former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte. No sitting member of Congress will be asked to serve, so congressional leaders will be selecting commissioners from among formers, and it will be obvious from their picks whether they are acting in good faith or looking to sabotage the commission.
There is pushback from Republicans to narrow the mandate of a 1/6 commission to the security of the Capitol. “If it were essential to do a 9/11 commission when the security risk came from the outside, we need even more to do one to look at the assault on our democracy from the inside,” says Tim Roemer, a former member of Congress and one of the Democrat-appointed 9/11 commissioners. “It can’t be viewed as something to get at Trump, but the facts speak for themselves, and that might include white supremacy groups and elected members of Congress encouraging lies. Those issues are the underbelly of the beast. This can’t simply be a look at security, the height of the wall or the length of the parameter around Congress, but how do we strengthen protection against white supremacy groups?”
The big lesson from 9/11 that applies to 1/6 is strict bipartisan adherence to facts. Hamilton told The Daily Beast that he and Kean turned to the staff so often, sometimes several times a day, asking “what are the facts?” that it became a running joke. “It sounds simple, but it isn’t,” says Hamilton. “Facts are elusive and facts are dynamic. They keep changing, they evolve. You seek as much consensus as you can from the experts and then you have to make choices. You do it by preponderance of evidence, like the lawyers say.”
Philip Zelikow was the executive director of the 9/11 commission. He wasn’t the Bush team’s first choice. They wanted some general, says Kean. But in an early test of his independence, Kean stuck with Zelikow despite Henry Kissinger warning that the George H.W. Bush national security alum, while brilliant, wasn’t well-liked. Kissinger and his Democratic counterpart, former Senate leader George Mitchell, had been forced to step down as the 9/11 co-chairs over conflicts of interest related to their business ventures. It was fortuitous that they were replaced by Kean and Hamilton, two public servants uniquely dedicated to the bipartisan cause at hand.
“Memories become somewhat gauzy,” Zelikow told the Daily Beast. “We had to work very hard to insulate ourselves from an acid bath of partisanship.” He’s still smarting over a column written by the then-powerful New York Times writer William Safire titled “The Zelikow Report” which disparaged an interim finding in a 9/11 staff report authored by Zelikow that there was no credible link between Iraq and al Qaeda that led to the 9/11 attacks. By then that theory had been abandoned by President Bush and his CIA Director George Tenet, but not by Vice President Cheney, who according to Zelikow appealed directly to Kean and Hamilton, who rebuffed Cheney, deferring to the staff’s finding.
Democrats saw Zelikow as a tool of the White House and blamed him for the long delay in getting National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify. “A cluster of people on the left went after me because they thought I was a shill brought in by the White House,” Zelikow recalls. “The irony is that the Cheney part of the White House was furious with me. They thought I had hijacked an otherwise docile commission and turned it into a bludgeoning beast.”
When Rice finally testified in April 2004, she confirmed the title of the PDB (President’s Daily Brief) she had received in the summer of 2001 and failed to act upon. It said, “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.” It was the most explosive moment in the dozen or so open hearings that the 9/11 commission held. Getting access to those PDBs and bringing the public along as information was uncovered helped the commission build a record of credibility that was essential for the finished product to win the trust of the American people.
Despite the partisan controversy surrounding him, Zelikow got high marks for managing what he calls a “unity staff.” There was no majority/minority staff like you have in Congress. The commissioners, half appointed by Republicans, half by Democrats, did not have their own staffers, forcing a unity of purpose. “We had more than 80 people in three sets of offices,” says Zelikow. “We paid rigorous attention to what happened and why, and we set down a factual record. People could have political arguments about what it means. When the report came out, people cherrypicked what they wanted, and people disagreed on what the report said.” The report did not hand down political verdicts but allowed people to come to their own conclusions.
Kean and Hamilton have long said the 9/11 commission was set up to fail. “Nobody wanted us, the people didn’t want us, Congress didn’t want us, the President didn’t want us,” says Kean. The funding was too little and the timeline of 15 months too short, but the family members of the 9/11 victims kept up the pressure. “They were the wind in our sails,” says Kean.
It’s worth asking who the constituency is for a 1/6 commission. Pelosi for sure, and Democrats overall who would like to give the imprimatur of a bipartisan examination to the historical record they presented in the impeachment trial. Pelosi has the votes in the House, and in the Senate, compiling a factual record of Trump’s involvement before and during the Jan. 6 riot may well align with McConnell’s interests in revealing who Trump is in chapter and verse.
And the lessons learned from 9/11 about bipartisanship are the kind of baby steps that might just work in today’s environment. Kean recalls on the first day when the 9/11 commissioners gathered, the Republicans were on one side of the room and the Democrats on the other. He told them he didn’t want them sitting like that again. When Meet the Press called for an interview, he said he would only appear with Hamilton. “We don’t let guests choose guests,” he was told. He wouldn’t appear then. In less than two hours, the show called to say they would both be welcomed. This two-by-two pairing of Republicans with Democrats set the stage for a Noah’s Arc of Public Policy that worked two decades ago. Now, lawmakers appear poised to try again.
Whether the system is too broke for such a commission even to succeed is a real question. “The circumstances have changed for the country, and the willingness to tolerate untruths as part of our daily diet is far more flexible,” says Richard Ben-Veniste, a longtime Washington lawyer and one of the 9-11 Commission members. “Today there is a willingness by many to tolerate lies without taking action. Many of the former president’s supporters have no gag reflex left.” The question hovering over the proposed Commission, Is it too late? Has the time passed when “reformed politicians” can grab hold of the reins and pull the country back to its moorings? Whether Congress can rise to this moment and choose men and women with the capacity for leadership will say a lot about its future and the future of the republic.
