9/11 Commission Report

The body set up in November 2002 to seek a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11th attacks.

Janice Kephart was an author of the 9-11 Commission Report and Terrorist Travel Policies, and has become one of the most influential voices of the post-9-11 travel era.

She joins me today to offer her policymaker's perspective on the last 25 years.

First of all, thank you again for taking the time

We knew that something like this was going to happen.

And all through the late 1990s, and this is covered very nicely to an extent in the 9-11 Commission Report, We sought a series of authorities from the Clinton administration to take offensive action to deny al-Qaeda the ability to mount a catastrophic attack Those authorities were weak and insufficient at best.

I should state my thoughts are not partisan because when the Bush administration came into power, they had a number of other priorities.

I came into Counterterrorist Center in the beginning of 2001 and was handed a paper that had been written by CPC, which we refer to as the Blue Sky Paper, which looked at everything we could conceive that we could do to degrade the ability of al-Qaeda to conduct the catastrophic attack we knew would be coming.

But they let me have that time.

And you also write about not just like books, books, but like the 9-11 Commission Report or the Iraq Study Group Report.

Things like that.

And you weave those into your…

You decide what is meaningful to you.

But politicians, even no matter how careful they try to be, they reveal themselves in some way.

And about the government documents, just to put a pin in that for a moment, the – The thing that I find very interesting about, say, commission reports, the 9-11 commission report, the Kerner commission report from the 60s about the urban riots, the Senate torture report on CIA interrogations.

Those are sort of alternative histories of the United States at its most traumatized moments, right? 9-11, the Kennedy assassination.