9/11 Commission Report: Findings, Laws Passed, and Gaps

The 9/11 Commission Report, released July 22, 2004, concluded that the September 11 attacks succeeded because of a government-wide “failure of imagination,” and it set off the largest restructuring of U.S. intelligence and homeland security since the Cold War. The report ran 13 chapters, traced al Qaeda’s rise and the day of the attacks, and issued 41 recommendations. Some were enacted within months. Others still have not been implemented more than two decades later.¹

What the Report Is

The report was the final product of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a bipartisan ten-member panel created by Public Law 107-306 and signed into law on November 27, 2002. Chaired by Thomas Kean with Lee Hamilton as vice chair, the Commission operated on a $15 million budget, reviewed more than two million pages of documents, and interviewed over 1,200 people before closing on August 21, 2004.² Its mandate covered intelligence, law enforcement, diplomacy, immigration, border control, terrorist financing, commercial aviation, and congressional oversight.

The Core Finding: A “Failure of Imagination”

The Commission concluded that the agencies responsible for national security, civil aviation, and border control “did not understand how grave this threat could be, and did not adjust their policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat it.”³ Terrorism had not been the “overriding national security concern” of either the Clinton or the early Bush administration. Capabilities remained largely holdovers from the Cold War. The report identified fault lines between foreign and domestic intelligence, between and within agencies, and between the federal government and local responders.⁴

Chapter 8 carried the title “The System Was Blinking Red.” CIA Director George Tenet told the Commission that intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 that al Qaeda planned “something very, very, very big.” But the specific threat reporting pointed overseas, domestic agencies were not mobilized, and no analytic work connected the dots between known suspects already inside the country and the wider threat picture.⁴

The report organized the breakdowns under four headings: imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. Under those headings it treated unsuccessful diplomacy from 1997 to 2001, permeable borders and aviation security, difficulty tracking terrorist financing, improvised homeland defense, and weakened congressional oversight.⁵

Specific Failures the Report Identified

The Commission cataloged concrete missed opportunities:

Failing to watchlist future hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar after the CIA identified them.
Failing to share intelligence gathered during the USS Cole investigation.
Failing to flag tampered visa applications and passports.
Failing to integrate the TIPOFF terrorist watchlist into aviation security screening.
Failing to harden cockpit doors.

The FAA and NORAD, the report said, were “unprepared for the attacks,” and their existing protocols were “unsuited in every respect for an attack in which hijacked planes were used as weapons.”⁴

What the Report Recommended

The Commission grouped its recommendations under two themes: “what to do” and “how to do it.” The strategic side called for attacking terrorist organizations, suppressing the conditions that let them grow, and preparing for future strikes. The structural side called for reorganizing a government the report described as “unwieldy” and built for a different era.⁵

Among the most consequential structural proposals:

Create a Director of National Intelligence to oversee the entire intelligence community.
Establish a National Counterterrorism Center to unify analysis and planning.
Reform congressional oversight into a single principal committee in each chamber.
Improve information sharing across agencies.
Build a biometric entry-exit screening system for the borders.
Standardize secure identification documents.
Enhance transportation security beyond commercial aviation.
Create a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

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What Changed: The Two Major Laws

Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004

The first legislative response arrived five months after the report. Signed by President Bush on December 17, 2004, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (Public Law 108-458) created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, the Commission’s two most prominent structural proposals.⁷ It also established a Civil Liberties Protection Officer inside the DNI’s office, mandated privacy impact assessments, created whistleblower protections for individuals reporting civil liberties concerns, and required quarterly reporting to Congress.⁸

In his signing statement, Bush asserted that the executive branch would construe the Act consistently with the President’s constitutional authorities as commander in chief, and that provisions requiring congressional consultation would be treated as “calling for, but not mandating” such engagement.⁷

Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007

A second package followed three years later. Public Law 110-53, signed on August 3, 2007, addressed recommendations the 2004 law had not reached. It established the Urban Area Security Initiative and the State Homeland Security Grant Program, created fusion centers for intelligence sharing at the state and local level, mandated security programs for public transit, rail, and maritime cargo, authorized a Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, modified authorities for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and included international engagement provisions targeting education and public diplomacy in the Muslim world.⁹ Authorized funding for the Urban Area Security Initiative alone rose from $850 million in fiscal year 2008 to $1.3 billion by fiscal year 2012.

Even as he signed the bill, Bush noted that it did not implement the Commission’s recommendation to reform Congress’s own oversight structure, a failure the Commission had called “dysfunctional.”¹⁰

What Never Got Done

After the Commission closed, its ten members formed a private group called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project to track follow-through. On December 5, 2005, the group released a one-page report card grading progress on 41 recommendations. The grades were poor: the former commissioners gave the government “mediocre or failing grades on almost all” of them. The DNI and NCTC earned a B. The FBI’s progress toward a national-security service earned a C. Implementation of recommendations on Saudi Arabia received a D. Congressional oversight reform and air-traveler screening against the terrorist watchlist were singled out as failures.¹¹

A successor group, the National Security Preparedness Group, issued a “Tenth Anniversary Report Card” in September 2011. It flagged nine major unfinished items:

Lack of unified command in many metropolitan areas.
Stalled efforts to allocate radio spectrum for first-responder interoperability.
A Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that had been “dormant for more than three years.”
No biometric entry-exit screening system.
No coalition standards for terrorist detention.
Continued fragmentation of congressional oversight.

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The Recommendation That Never Stuck: Congressional Oversight

Of all the Commission’s proposals, the call to consolidate congressional oversight of homeland security and intelligence has been the most persistently ignored. The House created a Committee on Homeland Security in 2005, but its jurisdiction was limited to six narrow areas of DHS activity rather than comprehensive oversight of the department. As of 2020, more than 90 committees and subcommittees held jurisdiction over parts of DHS.¹² In 2009 alone, DHS spent the equivalent of 66 work-years responding to congressional inquiries, including more than 2,000 briefings and 166 hearings.¹³ The barrier has been institutional rather than partisan: consolidation would require committees to surrender jurisdiction, and the incentives to protect turf have consistently outweighed the case for reform.

The Saudi Arabia Question and the “28 Pages”

A closely related controversy involved 28 classified pages of the earlier Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which dealt with possible Saudi government connections to the hijackers. Those pages were withheld when the Joint Inquiry published its report in 2002 and stayed classified for nearly 14 years. On July 15, 2016, the Obama administration authorized their release with redactions, and the House Intelligence Committee published the declassified section the same day.¹⁴

Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said the pages contained “unverified leads” rather than “vetted conclusions.” Ranking Member Adam Schiff said the Intelligence Community and the 9/11 Commission had investigated the questions raised and “was never able to find sufficient evidence to support them,” adding that one purpose of the release was to “diminish speculation that they contain proof of official Saudi Government or senior Saudi official involvement.”¹⁴

The declassification debate ran parallel to a legislative push by 9/11 families to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which created a terrorism exception to foreign sovereign immunity. The Senate passed the bill unanimously on May 17, 2016; the House followed unanimously on September 9. President Obama vetoed the legislation on September 23, and Congress overrode the veto five days later.¹⁵

A lawsuit on behalf of nearly 3,000 victims and family members was filed in the Southern District of New York. On August 28, 2025, U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels denied Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss, ruling that plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence to proceed toward trial on claims that Saudi nationals provided logistical support to the hijackers.¹⁶ The case remains in active discovery.

The 2026 Bipartisan Review

On September 11, 2025, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence announced a new bipartisan review of the report’s intelligence-related recommendations, chaired by Representative Elise Stefanik and co-chaired by Representative Josh Gottheimer. Committee Chairman Rick Crawford and Ranking Member Jim Himes established the review to evaluate what the intelligence community has adopted, identify remaining gaps, and assess readiness for threats over the next 25 years.¹⁷

In December 2025, a joint session with the House Committee on Homeland Security included leaders from the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and DHS. Additional sessions in February and May 2026 covered the current threat landscape with the CIA and FBI.¹⁸ A final report with actionable recommendations is scheduled for release ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2026. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino noted during the December briefing that some of the original Commission’s recommendations remain “incomplete to this day.”

1
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report
2
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. About the Commission FAQ
3
Yale Law School Avalon Project. The 9/11 Commission Report
4
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Executive Summary
5
Office of Justice Programs. 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary
6
Bipartisan Policy Center. Commission Recommendations Status Report
7
The American Presidency Project. Statement on Signing the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004
8
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004
9
U.S. Congress. Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007
10
The American Presidency Project. Statement on Signing the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007
11
Brookings Institution. 9/11 Commission: A Review of the Second Act
12
U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. Chairman Thompson Urges House Rules Changes
13
Hoover Institution. Congress in a Pre-9/11 State of Mind
14
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Intel Committee Publishes Declassified 28 Pages
15
Kreindler & Kreindler. 9/11 Terror Lawsuit Against Saudi Arabia
16
Homeland Security Today. 9/11 Litigation Is Building a New Legal Framework for Foreign Terrorist Accountability
17
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. House Intelligence Committee Stands Up Bipartisan Review
18
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. House Intel Committee Holds Joint Briefing