Well narrated by Grover Gardner, this is an hour long (35 pages if you read the pdf.) summary of the 585 page (pdf) report. It discusses the government's awareness of the al-Qaeda threat and lack of awareness/preparedness of their intent to use American commercial planes as weapons of mass destruction. It discusses the failures of communication between government agencies and executives, and their inability to act on any intelligence, suggesting specific updates/reorganization of intelligence agencies that the commission believes could better thwart current technologically advanced threats. ( )

beginning is excellent
end is good too
middle is dry ( )

On this 18th anniversary of the 9/11 disaster, I'd like to recommend reading (or rereading) this historical book. Some government reports require hacking through thickets of bureaucratese; not so in the case of the 9/11 Commission Report. Written in clear, simple English, it gives a fascinating account of not only the attacks, the victims, the terrorists, but also events that led up to that infamous day. The Report won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Admittedly, a lot more information has been discovered, reported, and published since the Report came out, but for people who were children at the time, and for others who may not recall all the details reported during those days, this is a riveting account.

Should be required reading. See Jesse's review for a great summary: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/54435804. ( )

It may be unusual that commission reports are readable, but this one is quite well-written and well-structured. I find the last chapters with recommendations for reorganization of the governments security efforts should have been left out and put somewhere else. In the version I have there is annoyingly no index.

I find two major omissions: The engineering report on the structural capability of the World Trade Center. As far as I remember this was intentional left out to a separate later report as the engineering modeling took long time. The other omission is the issue with the interrogation of detainees which may have involved torture. The commission report gets away with this issue by writing on page 146: "Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. [...] Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process". One may wonder what the "sensitive interrogation process" entails... ( )