The 9/11 Investigations: Corrections, Conflicts, and Unresolved Evidence

EXPLORE THE RECORD · PATHWAY 3 OF 7 · Updated 9/28/26

Start with the part of the investigation you most want to understand.

• Commission — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States; the independent commission created in late 2002.
• MFR — Memorandum for the Record; staff summaries of Commission interviews and meetings.
• OIG — Office of Inspector General; internal watchdog offices that conducted separate agency reviews.
• Joint Inquiry — the 2002 congressional investigation by the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The 9/11 Commission did not begin as an automatic government response. Families pressed for an independent investigation, challenged its scope and access, and continued asking questions throughout the public hearings. These five moments orient the reader before the deeper evidence.

The Commission was not the government’s first response to September 11. Congressional committees and federal agencies had already opened inquiries. Family members of the victims nevertheless pressed for an independent national commission with public hearings, broader access and public accountability.

Henry Kissinger was initially selected as chair. Questions about conflicts and disclosure of his consulting clients followed immediately, and he resigned on December 13, 2002. Thomas Kean was named chair three days later. No victim-family member sat among the Commission’s final ten commissioners.

The families therefore had to do more than win agreement that an independent commission should exist. They continued pressing over its leadership, access, questions and accountability after it was created.

Philip Zelikow became the Commission’s executive director in January 2003. He had previously served in national-security and foreign-policy roles in earlier administrations and returned to government service under George W. Bush. His appointment drew objections from 9/11 family members, some of whom later called for his removal from the Commission, arguing that his prior national-security work and connections to the administrations whose actions the Commission was examining created a conflict.

At the same time, Zelikow and historian Ernest May were establishing the structure of the Commission’s eventual report. Ernest May later described how he and Zelikow developed an outline for a sixteen-chapter Final Report. By mid-March 2003—while the investigation was still in its opening months—the outline already contained chapter headings, subheadings and sub-subheadings. May wrote that the Commission’s staff teams were subsequently organized roughly around the subjects in that outline.

The names listed in the Final Report are not a complete history of everyone who worked for, advised or was considered for the Commission.

Earlier Commission rosters and personnel records identify staff members, consultants, detailees and proposed personnel who do not appear in the Final Report credits. Tracking those records over time produces a broader picture of who participated in the investigation and how the staff changed while the work was underway.

The Commission was not a fixed body. Its personnel, team assignments and advisory relationships evolved during the investigation.

The Commission reconstructed the air-defense timeline from contemporaneous communications rather than later recollections alone. For American 11, it identified a specific call at 8:37:52 a.m. as the first notification received by the military that the aircraft had been hijacked.

Earlier public accounts gave NORAD significantly more advance warning of American 77 and United 93 than the recordings later supported. Commission staff returned to contemporaneous FAA and military recordings, radar data, logs, chat records and interviews.

At the June 17, 2004 hearing, Staff Statement No. 17 explicitly rejected key parts of the earlier chronology. It stated that the earlier 9:16 notification claim for United 93 and the 9:24 notification claim for American 77 were incorrect, and it reconstructed the Langley scramble from the contemporaneous record.

Conflicting Accounts: The Commission Corrects the NORAD Timeline
9/11 Commission · June 17, 2004

Beverly Eckert, whose husband Sean Rooney was killed in the South Tower, spoke after the Commission’s June 17, 2004 air-defense hearing about what the families were seeking from the investigation: accountability, answers and a public record that addressed their questions.

Her remarks place the hearing in its larger context. For the families who fought to create the Commission, correcting the chronology was not the end of the inquiry. The question was whether the Commission would follow those corrections through to responsibility and accountability.

What remains unresolved: Why the inaccurate chronology was presented publicly and repeated for so long, how it survived internal review, and whether responsibility for those inaccurate public accounts was ever fully established.

The recordings answer a specific question with unusual precision: when NEADS received particular reports. They do not reduce the entire FAA–military information system to those calls.

FAA officials also described military participation in FAA communication channels before some formal NORAD notifications. The record therefore requires three separate questions: when NEADS was formally notified, when other military participants became aware of a problem, and when aircraft-specific information became actionable for air defenders.

“Failure to connect the dots” can make the pre-9/11 record sound as though consequential information was simply scattered among inattentive agencies. In several documented cases, people inside the system were trying to pass, obtain or act on important information and encountered restrictions, resistance or compartmentation.

Miller / Rossini / Alec Station

In January 2000, an FBI detailee assigned to the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit began drafting a Central Intelligence Report (CIR) addressed to FBI Headquarters and the FBI’s New York Field Office. The draft included Khalid al-Mihdhar’s U.S. visa information and his stated destination of New York.

Later that day, a CIA desk officer added a note directing that the CIR be held “for now” at the direction of the CIA Deputy Chief of the Bin Laden Unit. CIA records showed that the report had still not been disseminated eight days later and remained unsent in draft form by mid-February.

DOJ OIG found that the CIR was not released by the CIA and that a Deputy Chief of the Bin Laden Unit directed that it be placed on hold.

Chapter Five: Two September 11 Hijackers: Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi

Robert Wright / Operation Vulgar Betrayal

Chicago FBI Special Agent Robert Wright publicly accused FBI management of obstructing terrorism-finance investigations he had pursued before 9/11. Wright said his work had identified terrorist-financing networks and alleged that superiors restricted efforts to investigate and prosecute them. The FBI acknowledged Operation Vulgar Betrayal but disputed that it had uncovered a connection to the 9/11 hijackers or attacks.

Chapter 7   ⋅ 20:57 Robert Wright begins his statement
Chapter 8   ⋅ 22:02 — Operation Vulgar Betrayal
Chapter 9   ⋅ 23:28 — Wright alleges FBI obstruction
Chapter 10 ⋅ 34:59 — What Wright believed the record showed

At the same May 2002 press conference, Wright’s attorney Larry Klayman said that after 9/11 he had contacted Attorney General John Ashcroft’s office to offer Wright’s assistance and alleged that Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff rejected the approach. The allegation is part of the contemporaneous record of the press conference; it should not be treated as independently established by Wright’s testimony alone.

The Commission demonstrated that official accounts could be tested against recordings and corrected when the underlying record disproved them. Other significant conflicts were handled differently.

The Commission recorded that at 9:59 a White House Military Office officer joined the Air Threat Conference and said the White House requested implementation of continuity-of-government measures, fighter escorts for Air Force One and a combat air patrol over Washington.

The Final Report later stated that continuity plans and leadership evacuations had been implemented. But Chapter 10, note 9 expressly says the Commission did not investigate continuity of constitutional government or continuity of operations except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials. The chair, vice chair and senior staff received a briefing on the plans’ general nature and implementation.

Mineta’s public, sworn testimony is the strongest inspectable account of his presence in the PEOC and the 50-, 30- and 10-mile exchange. It places Cheney there before the Pentagon strike. The Commission adopted an approximately 9:58 chronology without publicly reconciling the testimony; the private, unsworn Bush-Cheney meeting produced no public transcript or recording.

On April 14, 2004, Commissioner Timothy Roemer asked CIA Director George Tenet when he had seen President Bush during August 2001. Tenet replied that he did not believe he had. When Roemer asked whether he had seen the President even once that month, Tenet explained that Bush was in Texas while he was in Washington or on leave.

The Commission’s own Final Report later stated that Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17.

Tenet told the Commission he did not believe he saw President Bush in August 2001. The Commission’s Final Report later placed him with Bush at Crawford on August 17. The published record establishes the contradiction; it does not establish why Tenet gave the inaccurate answer or whether the discrepancy was knowingly concealed.

The Commission and federal agencies reported that the recorders from American 11 and United 175 were not recovered. Their public account did not reconcile named recovery accounts. New York firefighter Nicholas DeMasi reported that he transported federal agents during the search and that three recorders were found; the account was published in 2003 while the Commission was operating. Recovery-site volunteer Mike Bellone independently described the federal search and seeing a recorder-like device.

At the time of the disaster, Nicholas DeMasi was a firefighter at Engine Company 261 in Queens. In “Behind-the-Scenes,” he described his experience:

“At one point I was assigned to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes… We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV… There were a total of four black boxes. We found three.”

Mike Bellone told William Bunch that he assisted DeMasi and federal agents during the search. He said he saw a reddish-orange object with white stripes in the back of the ATV that he believed resembled an aircraft flight recorder. Bellone’s description is a firsthand visual account, not a technical identification.

A September 18, 2001 memorandum from Edward F. Jacoby Jr. of the New York State Emergency Management Office reported that investigators had identified a signal believed to be coming from one of the World Trade Center aircraft recorders. Later reporting did not confirm that the signal came from a recorder.

World Trade Center 7 belongs in this Pathway for reasons separate from the engineering debate. New York City’s Office of Emergency Management maintained its Emergency Operations Center there. The SEC Northeast Regional Office and the U.S. Secret Service New York Field Office were also located in the building.

The SEC reported that it recovered electronically stored material and reviewed its active cases, while records relating to open examinations had to be reconstructed from registrants and other sources. GAO Decision B-300677 separately documents the physical loss of $22,646.20 from the Secret Service New York Field Office’s confidential fund in a locked safe on the 9th floor of WTC 7.

Barry Jennings, a New York City emergency official, described being inside 7 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11 and his experience attempting to leave the building. His interview provides firsthand witness evidence about conditions inside WTC 7. It does not, by itself, establish why the building collapsed.

The cases examined in this Pathway were handled in different ways. The Commission publicly corrected major elements of the NORAD chronology after returning to contemporaneous records. Other conflicts remained unreconciled in the Final Report. Separate inspector-general investigations documented restrictions and failures not fully visible in the Commission’s narrative. Continuity-of-government measures were acknowledged while the Commission expressly limited its inquiry into that system. Later records and archival releases have continued to enlarge the evidence available for examination.

Those differences matter because the Final Report is not the same thing as the complete investigative record. Understanding the investigation requires reading the hearings, staff statements, interview records, inspector-general findings, court records and later releases alongside the Report itself.