The 9/11 Commission Report

"Well, it looks like this huge dense government report with the US Government seal on the front and it’s 550 pages long. You can buy it at bookstores – I bought mine in Pakistan. But the first chapter especially is a real page-turner. It’s striking for the sheer amount of information acquired and the brutal honesty with which it treats the mistakes made in that period leading up to the attacks. It’s extremely readable and I think Americans should take responsibility and educate themselves. It seems a quite clear-headed report to me and I didn’t feel outrage when I read it. I was impressed by the analysis of what led up to the 9/11 attacks – it’s more like a truth commission really, a catalogue of what went on, without trashing any particular one political party or government agency. I have an interest in the subject, but still I think it’s very readable. I first went to Pakistan in 1996 as a junior reporter for Associated Press. There were two foreigners in the AP bureau in Pakistan at the time. Before, I’d been in Cambodia, working at The Cambodia Daily and I was struck by how affected Cambodia still was 25 years after the Khymer Rouge, and still struggling to recover. When I was offered the AP job and it was clear the Taliban were about to take most of Afghanistan, I felt it was something I couldn’t pass up reporting on."

"It certainly is, and the remarkable thing about The 9/11 Commission Report is that it is a government report. Normally we journalists pick up government reports with a degree of trepidation because they tend to be thick tomes, not easily digestible, and you have got to mine the report for the things you want to find out. Luckily, this report is diametrically the opposite. It is incredibly thorough and it is incredibly well written. It actually reads like a novel or a thriller, and given that many hands were involved in the writing of it, it has a unity and a style and accessibility that is, I think, probably unique in any government report. I would rank it alongside Lawrence Wright’s account, The Looming Tower . And because it was done by a commission it is infinitely more detailed. As a source resource it is unparalleled. If any of your readers want to get hold of it, it is important that they get hold of a copy with the index, because without the index it is hard to navigate your way through it. It is huge. The way that I used it when I was looking at the origins of Al-Qaeda, the names of certain individuals and things like the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was I would simply check in the index. I know that what the report says about individuals and what they did is as accurate an account as you are ever going to get. It was indispensable."