Birth of the 9/11 Commission
On November 27, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law congressional legislation authorizing federal funding for intelligence activities. The legislation also established the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in order to (in Bush’s words) “examine and report on the facts and causes relating to the September 11th terrorist attacks.”
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was Bush’s choice to head the commission, while Democratic congressional leaders chose former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as vice-chairman. Less than a month later, however, both men resigned from the 9/11 Commission, citing potential conflicts of interest. Mitchell did not want to sever ties to his law firm, while Kissinger—whom many considered too close to many national and international leaders to be objective—did not wish to disclose the identities of clients of his consulting firm.
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In early 2008, after it was revealed that that the CIA had destroyed videotaped interrogations of Al Qaeda operatives, 9/11 Commission leaders Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton wrote in the New York Times that the commission had asked the CIA repeatedly for information of the kind that would have been obtained in such interrogations; they called the agency's failure to disclose the existence of the tapes "obstruction."
To replace Kissinger, Bush tapped former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, a Republican. Congressional Democrats chose former Representative Lee Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, to replace Mitchell. The 10-member commission included five Democrats and five Republicans. It was given a budget of some $3 million and a total of 18 months, or until the end of May 2004, to complete a full report of the circumstances surrounding the events of 9/11 and provide a number of recommendations to guard against future attacks.
