The 9/11 Commission’s limits

While the Commission worked, Commissioner Max Cleland told Salon the Commission had had to subpoena the FAA and NORAD, and called the deal over access to White House intelligence briefings “a national scandal.” [1] In 2008 the chairman and vice chairman, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote that the CIA never told them about videotapes of interrogations that it later destroyed. [2]

The BBC reported in 2026 that FBI material on Omar al-Bayoumi, including an airplane sketch, was kept from the Commission. [3] See the Bayoumi file.

The Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, had written a book with Condoleezza Rice in 1995 and, at her request, had reviewed counterterrorism on the Bush transition team; the inquiry was examining how Rice, as national security adviser, handled the al Qaeda threat. In 2008 the New York Times reporter Philip Shenon wrote in The Commission that Zelikow spoke with Rice several times during the investigation, and that the office’s phone logs showed at least four calls from Karl Rove in 2003. [1][3]

Shenon also reported that Zelikow told his assistant to stop logging his White House calls, and that the general counsel told her to keep doing it; that Zelikow tried to strengthen draft wording linking bin Laden and Iraq against his staff’s view; and that Commissioner Bob Kerrey, on learning of the ties, told chairman Tom Kean, “either he goes or I go.” Kerrey stayed. [1]

Zelikow responded that he was authorized to talk to White House officials, that his contacts with Rove were brief and concerned University of Virginia business, and that the Commission had no phone logs to stop. The vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, called him “a person of integrity” and said: “Did he try to sway the report to protect the administration? I think the answer was no.” [1][2]

In November 2022 the National Archives released the memorandum of the Commission’s joint interview with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. [2] On 11 September 2026 it released the Commission’s 7,000-word summary of every President’s Daily Brief on al Qaeda and bin Laden in the three years before 9/11, along with interview records of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Condoleezza Rice and others. [1] The CIA released the underlying brief items the same day. [3]