John Dudley's Reviews > The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

This is an exceptional piece of investigative journalism. Whichever government pages actually wrote this thing for the committee should all be doing articles for The New Yorker. There isn’t a single element of the 9/11 story which isn’t covered here. And if it’s not in the text it’s for sure in the 116 pages of notes post-text. Just an incredibly impressive collection of information thoroughly detailing an incredible tragedy we never saw coming.

There are many books now on 9/11, but I would recommend this as thee starting place for anyone interested in really understanding the immense scope of the attack, from inception to execution, from the origin of Al-Qaeda to the start of the war in Afghanistan, from the financing of 20 terrorists traveling in and out and all around this country to their final movements into motels the night before the attacks.

For sure the account is dense and some of the information appears in a seesaw sequence which feels disjointed. There’s probably too much detail about the radios emergency personnel had the day of and who heard what transmission when; and, there’s probably not enough detail about the individual experiences of ordinary Americans whose whole way of living was suddenly, permanently incinerated (for that I highly recommend Garrett Graff’s “The Only Plane in the Sky”). But really is there any truly perfect way to capture a story which defies imagination, a cruelty which saw our bravest men and women go up into burning towers as they were preparing to come down, and a sinister plot five years in the making which evaded detection or exposure at the dawn of the new age of information? In my opinion, the 9/11 Commission Report is about as well constructed as we could ask or expect. And it is a searing reminder/warning of what can happen when our security agencies don’t work together and when the hubris of our leadership doesn’t measure up against the imagination and determination of our foes.