A Day of Infamy: Reporting on the Unimaginable

Stuart Mitchner

The 9/11 Commission Report (Norton, $10), which has been on top of the New York Times paperback best-seller list from the day it appeared, is much more than a bureaucratic document representing a year and a half of complex investigation and analysis. With the third anniversary of the catastrophe only three days away, there will be events and observances, as there have already been poeandms and books, television specials, documentaries, paintings and photographic exhibits, all part of an effort to give some form to our sense of helpless awe in the face of September 11, 2001. Even the planners of the attack could not have conceived of the extent magnitude of the devastation. Only the wildest dreamer among them could have envisioned the fall of both towers. What happened was beyond them, beyond us, beyond a million reports and investigations. It exceeded everything.

In its heroic attempt to constructively contain an event of such uncontainable and unimaginable dimensions, the 9/11 Report becomes itself a worthy memorial to the catastrophe. Clearly, the objective was to produce a book that would not only review and scrutinize all aspects of September 11 but give vivid, definitive, lasting expression to an event that deserved treatment on a level beyond the standard government documents with all their mind-numbing detail, repetitive bureaucratic jargon, and mere transcriptions of testimony. The first words of the preface leave no doubt that the intent is to ³present the narrative of this report." The narrative intention is cited again in the concluding "Foresight – And Hindsight" chapter, which begins: "In composing this narrative, we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight."

The authors also made sure to remember to write with the restraint and tact and good sense required to produce an objective but powerful account of the last moments on the doomed flights and the horror and confusion in the towers. The cliche is to "let the facts speak for themselves." That isn't as easy as it sounds when you are laboring with a mountain of data (the 100-plus pages of footnotes give a hint of the massive quantity of material) and are working with the 80-plus-member staff that pulled it all together.

Who deserves the credit? Checking the names and duties of the staff, you can assume the 9/11 Report benefited from the expertise of Alice Falk (listed as an editor) and Stephanie L. Kaplan (listed as special assistant and managing editor). The most likely coordinators of the narrative, however, are both published authors: Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow and Harvard Professor Ernest R. May, who is listed as senior advisor. Zelikow and May collaborated on The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House, a project that must have given them some experience in the art of finessing transcription. Prof. May has also written Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France and Zelikow has coauthored a book with one of the Commission's more reluctant witnesses, Condoleezza Rice.

Narratives usually have characters. While the 9/11 Report's large cast includes people like Presidents Clinton and Bush, and numerous stars and bit players in the government and among the terrorists, as well as the various victims and heroes of 9/11, the nearest thing to a character, oddly enough, is the man who conceived the inconceivable plot, the mastermind and mass-murderer – not Osama Bin Laden, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, designated KSM throughout the narrative. What gives KSM the necessary depth is that, having been captured and interrogated, he is allowed to tell his own story. How much may have been lost in translation is hinted at in a note pointing out that much of the information concerning the hijackers comes from captured Al Qaeda members to whom the Commission could only submit questions for use in interrogations; they themselves were not allowed to question interrogators and they had "no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked."

In spite of the popular conception, then, the author of the 9/11 attack was not Osama Bin Laden, but KSM, who, along with Bin Laden, is the only person who rates an individual photo in the text. It was KSM who brought the plan for the attack to Bin Laden and who subsequently resisted all his attempts to revise it or rush the implementation of it. At first KSM even resisted pledging his allegiance to Bin Laden.

KSM also inspired one of the narrative¹s most conspicuously subjective sentences, which came in response to his more ambitious vision of an attack that would have involved ten planes hitting targets all over the country and was to conclude with KSM landing the tenth plane at a U.S. airport where, "after killing all adult male passengers on board and alerting the media," he would deliver a speech "excoriating U.S. support for Israel, the Philippines, and repressive governments in the Arab world." This is "theater," The 9/11 Report tells us: "a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star – the superterrorist."

Another element in KSM's story compelling attention is that he actually lived and was educated in the United States, not in the late 1990s in the context of the planned attack but in the 1980s, when he transferred from a small Baptist school to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, from which he graduated in 1986 with a degee in mechanical engineering. He was "enamoured of violent jihad," however, even before he went to school in the U.S. and after graduation he went to Afghanistan to join the anti-Soviet jihad. Seven years later he was plotting to blow up 12 jumbo jets and plotting to have President Clinton assassinated during his November 1994 trip to Manila.

KSM also has a knack for quirky details, like his claim that he steered two of the hijackers to San Diego "on the basis of his own research, which supposedly included thumbing through a San Diego phone book acquired at a Karachi flea market." Details like that seem worthier of Tom Pynchon than Tom Clancy.

The only other person who appears in the narrative often enough to be called a major actor (if not a character) is National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke, the author of Against All Enemies and provider of what was probably the single most dramatic moment of testimony before the Commission when he apologized to the relatives of the victims. "Your government failed you ... and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask ... for your understanding and for your forgiveness."

The most gripping parts of the 9/11 Report are the ones it hurts to read. A brilliant writer might be able to put us on one of the doomed planes imagining ourselves feeling what the passengers felt. But it¹s enough to read the words of a son on United Flight 175 speaking on a cellphone to his father. "Don't worry, Dad – If it happens, it'll be very fast." Or the words of a flight attendant on American Flight 11 after she was asked by an American Airlines official on the ground if she could look out the window and determine where they were: "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low."