On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft, crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and destroyed a fourth aircraft in an attempt to attack the Capitol or the White House. The United States intelligence community failed to detect the plot despite having adequate information before the attack happened. The 9/11 Commission Report examined how the US government failed to respond to the al-Qaeda threat and explained how intelligence agencies failed to recognize and share the information within the intelligence community. Many lessons have been learned, especially regarding collaboration across various agencies. This paper will recognize these improvements while highlighting three 9/11 …show more content…
This only became clear in the post attack analysis by the 9/11 Commission. The commission found that the US counterterrorism effort was divided across multiple agencies, and that information was not routinely shared or managed effectively across them. Agencies often withheld information from others, sometimes by policy, sometimes by tradition, and other times based on a “need to know” basis. As the 9/11 Commission considered what the government knew and when it knew it, it concluded that the United States needed to coordinate its efforts across the intelligence community. The commission believed the solution would be to unify the intelligence community under a new Director of National Intelligence. While the DNI has been an very important element of a greatly improved United States Intelligence Community, it is also one of the three 9/11 Commission recommendations examined in this paper that have yet to be completely followed. …show more content…
(9/11 Commission Recommendation 27, p397) Different police, fire, and medical responders were unable to communicate with each other in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 commission recommended that Congress immediately pass pending legislation to assign a radio spectrum for public safety purposes. The legislation is still pending. Robert Morris, Vice President, Port Authority PBA, spoke of serious communication and inoperability problems. “The officer carries a radio on his belt but he might as well be wearing a brick,” said Morris to describe where some communication devices work so poorly at various locations that officers are using their personal cell phones to communicate with each other. “We have front line, rank and file troops unable to communicate. Forget about interoperability…we are talking about complete inoperability. This is nearly a decade after 9-11 and the same ‘bugs’ in our communications systems that cost lives still exist.” (Gadiel & Dunleavy,