9-11 Commission

The 9/11 Commission (officially the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) was a bipartisan commission created by the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush in late 2002 to investigate the events of the September 11 attacks. It was chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean with Lee Hamilton as vice-chair, and produced its final 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004.

Its conduct and conclusions have been disputed from several directions. Kean later described the Commission as "set up to fail"; Congressman Curt Weldon and former FBI Director Louis Freeh called its investigation incomplete; and the author David Ray Griffin holds that it systematically omitted evidence that contradicted its predetermined conclusions, among them the conflicts of interest of its own staff. Researchers of the deep state and other independent investigators extend the criticism to the report's silence on the Department of Defense accounting discrepancy announced on September 10, 2001, the NORAD response, and the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.

The criticism takes three forms. The structural reading is that underfunding, a short deadline, weakened subpoena power and the White House ties of executive director Philip Zelikow limited an inquiry into the officials who had appointed it. The concealment reading, advanced by Weldon and the investigative series The 9/11 Files, is that Zelikow's staff and officials of the Central Intelligence Agency kept the Able Danger program and a CIA recruitment operation out of the report. The complicity reading of the journalist Jim Marrs, the architect Richard Gage and Griffin is that the omissions concealed the involvement of U.S. officials in the attacks, citing the war games, the interceptor response and the collapses of the World Trade Center towers and Building 7.

Background

The disputed evidence precedes the Commission. On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly announced that the Pentagon could not account for $2 trillion in transactions. Bret Weinstein, in a 2025 DarkHorse Podcast episode with Senator Ron Johnson, highlighted that the section of the Pentagon investigating this accounting discrepancy was the exact section struck the following morning. Weinstein characterized his position as the founder of a "9/11 fiction movement" — arguing not that he knows what happened, but that the official narrative is demonstrably false.

That day, the National Security Agency intercepted an electronic message from Mohamed Atta, identified as the lead hijacker, stating: "The match is about to begin. Tomorrow is zero hour." On the morning of September 11, 2001, NORAD Northeast was conducting war game exercises — a fact that received minimal public reporting. According to investigative journalist Marrs, at least one of the exercise scenarios involved hijacked aircraft being crashed into buildings — meaning that when air traffic controllers reported four planes off course and the Pentagon received word of hijackings, the initial assumption may have been that the reports were part of the exercise. Marrs highlighted that Atta's use of the word "match" — a synonym for "game" — implied the hijackers had knowledge of the war game exercises and timed their attack to coincide with them, raising the question of how they obtained that information.

Marrs contrasts the response that morning with that of 1999, when golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet suffered cabin depressurization and went off course: jet interceptors reached the aircraft within 12 minutes and tracked it until it crashed in an unpopulated area. On September 11, four commercial airliners were hijacked and off course, yet no interceptors were launched for 35 minutes — and those that were scrambled carried no live weapons. Andrews Air Force Base, approximately 10 minutes from the White House and the Capitol, maintained two squadrons of interceptors on 24-hour duty, yet when planes were finally scrambled they came from Otis Air Force Base — substantially farther away.

The World Trade Center towers and Building 7 collapsed that day. Marrs, who as a newspaper reporter had covered more than half a dozen major building demolitions, stated that the collapses displayed "all of the earmarks of a classic demolition." Researcher Jim Hoffman, whose analysis Marrs cited from the site 911 Research, argued that "there is no gravity collapse scenario or probable explanation by fire that can account for the complete leveling of the massive columns that comprise the tower's cores or the ripping apart of their sturdy perimeter walls." Video analysis showed blasts of smoke and debris — sometimes called "squibs" — erupting from floors below the collapse line, projecting debris hundreds of feet outward, which Marrs characterized as evidence of pressurized explosives detonating within the structure ahead of the collapse front.

Building 7, a 47-story steel-frame high-rise, fell at 5:20 p.m. despite not being struck by any aircraft. The building housed a secret CIA office, Secret Service offices, and the New York City Office of Emergency Management; all records were destroyed in the collapse.[citation needed] Gage states that CBS News anchor Dan Rather, broadcasting live as the building fell, spontaneously described the collapse as "reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on television before when a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down" — a description Gage says Rather has never repeated and that has rarely been replayed by mainstream networks — and that no steel-framed, fire-protected high-rise building has ever collapsed due to fire, before or since September 11, including multiple buildings worldwide that have burned far more extensively and for far longer than the fires observed in Building 7 prior to its collapse. Barry Jennings, deputy director of the New York City Housing Authority's Emergency Services Department, and Michael Hess, Mayor Giuliani's attorney, were trapped inside Building 7 during the morning after arriving for a meeting. Jennings described hearing and experiencing large explosions inside the building beginning before the towers fell — well before the time period in which the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) posits that office fires could have developed to the collapse-initiating temperature. According to Gage, his testimony was recorded and corroborated, and Jennings died in August 2008 — two days before NIST released its final report on Building 7. A Worcester Polytechnic Institute analysis of steel recovered from Building 7's wreckage documented a phenomenon described in the New York Times as "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation": steel members showed evidence of "rapid oxidation" and the presence of sulfur in liquid iron at approximately 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, consistent with thermite-based demolition, a finding Gage describes as "completely ignored and omitted" by NIST's final report.

NIST attributed Building 7's collapse to a sequence of fire-induced thermal expansion — specifically, that fires on the 12th floor expanded a 50-foot beam, pushing a girder off its seat on Column 79, initiating a progressive collapse. Gage and the University of Alaska's four-year forensic structural analysis (led by Professor Leroy Hulsey using two independent software programs, SAP2000 and ABAQUS) found that the NIST sequence was physically impossible: the fires on the purported initiation floor had already burned out before collapse began, the beams were rated for two hours of fire protection while office fires burn for approximately 20 minutes in any given area, and fire-induced thermal expansion cannot account for the simultaneous and symmetrical failure of all of the building's columns that would be required for its straight-down, free-fall-speed collapse. The University of Alaska study concluded that only simultaneous removal of all columns across multiple floors could replicate the observed video evidence. Gage says NIST initially denied the building fell at free-fall speed, then reversed this position after physicist David Chandler and nuclear physicist Steven Jones publicly demonstrated the admission was unavoidable — while simultaneously declining to acknowledge the implications of free-fall collapse for any non-demolition explanation. Weinstein observed that the two components of the NIST explanation — localized corner failure and free-fall speed — are logically irreconcilable: a localized failure would produce a slumping or asymmetric collapse, not symmetric free-fall.

The structural steel from the World Trade Center — representing the physical evidence of what was the largest structural collapse in recorded history, the first total collapse of a high-rise building during a fire in United States history, and the largest loss of firefighters in a single incident — was cut up and sold as scrap overseas beginning within months of the attacks, according to Marrs. Bill Manning, editor of the 125-year-old firefighters' publication Fire Engineering, wrote in January 2002 that for more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center had been "cut up and sold for scrap." Marrs reported that GPS tracking devices were placed on the trucks hauling debris to maintain absolute control over where evidence was transported.

Formation and funding

In the winter of 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney called Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and warned that pursuing an investigation would be characterized as interference with the war on terror, according to The 9/11 Files; the series holds that Cheney actively worked to prevent even a weakened commission from forming. The Commission was appropriated $3 million for its entire investigation — less than one-thirteenth the $40 million appropriated to investigate the Monica Lewinsky affair, and approximately one-eleventh the funding allocated to the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian election interference. Its subpoena power was deliberately weakened, and it was given an 18-month deadline. Kean later publicly stated that the Commission was "set up to fail."

Commissioners and staff

Zelikow, a former National Security Council staffer, was selected as the Commission's executive director in January 2003. According to Griffin, he had co-authored a book with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — one of the senior officials whose potential dereliction of duty the Commission was tasked with investigating. The 9/11 Files reports further undisclosed ties to the administration the Commission was charged with investigating:

He served on a White House intelligence advisory panel during the Bush administration.
He co-authored a book with Rice in 1995 and served on her transition team.
In 2002, at Rice's request, he authored the policy paper that laid the intellectual groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.
He prepared a detailed outline of the final report — complete with chapter headings and sub-headings — before the investigation had begun, and concealed this outline from the Commission staff.
Phone logs from his office show he regularly received calls from Rice and from Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, during the Commission's work.
He was the Bush administration official who demoted counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke in the months before the attacks, yet this was not disclosed in the report.

Zelikow consolidated control by giving himself sole authority over hiring, blocking staff communication with commissioners, siloing staff teams from each other, and reaching a secret agreement with the Justice Department to prevent access to Congressional inquiry files until the White House had pre-screened them. Commissioner Jamie Gorelick had erected the intelligence "wall" that critics argue prevented sharing of pre-9/11 intelligence between the CIA and FBI. Commission co-chair Kean and vice-chair Hamilton were both connected to government and energy companies with interests in post-9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq policy.

Investigation

Commission staff stated that five Able Danger team members credibly said they had seen Atta's photograph or name on pre-attack charts, but cited the destruction of program documents as precluding further investigation. Weldon holds that the classified U.S. Special Operations Command program had, according to multiple military witnesses, identified Atta and other future hijackers before the attacks. Zelikow himself met with Able Danger coordinator Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer in Afghanistan in October 2003 and received a full briefing on the program's findings. Shaffer was suspended by the Defense Intelligence Agency shortly after returning and before he could testify. Pentagon Inspector General John Crane subsequently sought whistleblower protection after being directed to give Congress false information about Able Danger.

Commission investigators were limited in the witnesses they could access. George Tenet was not questioned about the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda summit or about why the CIA blocked the FBI from being warned about the hijackers' presence in the United States. Weldon, vice-chairman of both the Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, was denied the opportunity to testify. The Commission never assigned a staff member to investigate National Security Agency files, despite the NSA's central role in monitoring al-Qaeda communications. The CIA Director of Operations kept the operative attempting to recruit the hijackers — referred to as "V/V" in documents — away from Commission investigators.

A significant portion of the Commission's description of the actual 9/11 plot — how the hijackers met, how the plan was devised — derives from interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh conducted under torture. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou states this information is inherently unreliable, citing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's false confession to murdering journalist Daniel Pearl — a killing the CIA knew he had not committed — as evidence that torture produced fabricated confessions.

Report

According to The 9/11 Files, the final report, delivered in July 2004, matches Zelikow's pre-investigation outline nearly verbatim. According to court filings cited in the series, the Commission's explanation that the CIA failed to share hijacker information with the FBI due to a bureaucratic "zone defense vs. man-to-man" distinction was false. The actual reason, according to former White House counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, was that the CIA was conducting a false flag operation to recruit the hijackers as intelligence assets and therefore deliberately blocked FBI access; the report omits any mention of a CIA recruitment plan targeting the hijackers. The report makes no reference to Able Danger; General Lambert, an Able Danger witness cited by Weldon, says he knew within seconds who had done the attack because he had been briefed on the program. The 577-page report contains no explanation for the collapse of Building 7, and Gage states it does not mention Jennings's testimony.

The report notes in footnote 499 that put options against United Airlines' parent company on September 6 and against American Airlines on September 10, 2001 showed unusual volume, with 95% of the United Airlines trade made by a single U.S.-based institutional investor. The Commission concluded the trades were "innocuous" without identifying the investor, whose identity remains classified.

Griffin's 2004 book argues that the Commission's report omitted evidence that contradicted its predetermined conclusions. Critics of the report, including Griffin, hold that it omitted or minimized:

The multiple intelligence warnings received by U.S. agencies in summer 2001, detailed in the declassified 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry.[citation needed]
The behavior of NORAD in the 90 minutes between the first hijacking and the Pentagon strike.[citation needed]
The collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, not hit by any aircraft.
Dick Cheney's role in a shoot-down order, which Clarke describes in his 2004 memoir Against All Enemies and which, critics hold, the final report minimized despite Clarke's testimony to the Commission.

Aftermath

Former FBI Director Freeh wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling the Commission's report an "incomplete investigation," and made similar statements on Good Morning America. Marrs's Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies, which documented many of the criticisms above, was cancelled by HarperCollins in 2002 despite having passed legal review — a decision attributed to not wanting to upset 9/11 families (see Jim Marrs#''Inside Job'' (2004)). The preface to the eventually published version was written by Ellen Mariani, the wife of a 9/11 victim who was suing President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for foreknowledge and failure to prevent the attacks. An additional group of approximately 400 families of 9/11 victims pursued a trillion-dollar lawsuit against the government of Saudi Arabia.

Gage, a licensed member of the American Institute of Architects and founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, has assembled a petition signed by over 3,600 architects, engineers, and other building professionals demanding a new independent investigation of all three World Trade Center collapses, arguing that the physical evidence of the collapses is consistent only with controlled demolition and inconsistent with fire-induced progressive collapse. Gage has presented his analysis at engineering and architecture conferences where he reports that over half of licensed architects were unaware that a third tower — Building 7 — collapsed on September 11; when shown the footage of Building 7's collapse without prior identification, attendees consistently and spontaneously describe it as a controlled demolition.

Multiple figures who testified in The 9/11 Files call for a new presidential commission with broad subpoena power, adequate funding, and no conflicts of interest. Weldon states he holds the testimony of firefighters, architects, engineers, families of victims, and intelligence officials ready to provide to such a commission. Senator Ron Johnson had, as of early 2026, promised Senate hearings on the evidence for controlled demolition of the World Trade Center towers, referencing both Gage's work and the Tucker Carlson five-part documentary series as motivating evidence.[citation needed]

Open questions

References

Source ratings:

(

[1 Wikipedia-grade]

[2 Questionable]

[3 Reporting/Analysis]

[4 Speculative/Hearsay]

[5 Ungrounded]

). (To change source ratings,

edit this page