In 2011, New York Times national security writer Scott Shane added an afterword to The 9/11 Report, suggesting that this government report was “a great read” that had “astonished many Americans in 2004 with its literary quality.”Footnote ¹ Of course, The 9/11 Report is more than just a page-turner. As the preface notes, the 9/11 Commission's sweeping mandate required it to investigate in exhaustive detail all “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” and the commissioners relied on the conventions of the government report – numbered sections, minute-by-minute timelines of the attacks, exhaustive evidence, maps and diagrams, and a neutral passive voice – to present those facts as clearly and objectively as possible.Footnote ² At the same time, however, the report features what other writers for the New York Times have called “a dramatic, often gripping narrative style,” allowing readers to experience firsthand the emotional power of stories constructed from the facts of 9/11.Footnote ³ As Shane points out, the report's opening chapter title – “We Have Some Planes” – draws readers in both emotionally and intellectually by invoking a much-reported phrase from the day of the attacks, a phrase that “still sends a shiver” up our spines, even as it reminds us of our role as concerned citizens sifting through news reports.Footnote ⁴ The December 2014 release of The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture exposes once again the necessary relationship between the public's visceral response to violence and its civic responsibility for peacekeeping. The 9/11 Report helps define and clarify how this relationship works by arguing in literary-critical terms that America's “most important failure” before 11 September 2001, “was one of imagination” (xcvi). Delineating the specific political gains afforded by its own literary qualities, The 9/11 Report unites the defense of the nation with the defense of the humanities.

This essay explores that unexpected union by investigating both the methods and the meaning of The 9/11 Report's repeated juxtaposition of literary imagination and political action. The 9/11 Commission foregrounds its own belief that the terrorist attacks were “unimaginable” or “beyond our consciousness” before they occurred (414), and the report therefore argues that it is “crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination” in the aftermath of the attacks, despite the fact that “imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies” (492). For those who share a commitment to critical thought and creative expression across disciplines in the liberal arts, the idea of bureaucratizing imagination might seem more like the death than the defense of the humanities. However, the report's effort to mobilize imagination in the so-called “war on terror” suggests that the humanities might actually be stronger and fitter than the American public has recently seemed to think.Footnote ⁵ The 9/11 Report supports this idea by modeling some potentially productive ways to bring literary imagination into bureaucratic processes: the report experiments with point of view, plot, symbolism, and critical self-reflection to demonstrate the crucial role of both storytelling and interpretation in creating an effective government and an informed citizenship. By analyzing the report's most literary qualities, humanists can learn to articulate more clearly their own professional place in the post-9/11 political arena and thus to advocate more effectively for key changes in future intelligence gathering and policymaking.

The positive political impact of the humanities depends upon an understanding of literature firmly grounded in literary theory. In 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson raises Rousseau's “nagging question” whether

Marc Redfield identifies a similar problem in political representations of the attacks, arguing that the omission of “2001” in the “bare name-date” of “9/11” suggests that “a new history begins here, at this calendrical ground zero: previous September 11s disappear into that zero.”Footnote ⁷ Redfield criticizes the US for a self-absorbed “inability to say what this violence, this spectacle, this ‘everything changing’ means,”Footnote ⁸ much as Simpson critiques the US government's post-9/11 “rhetoric of justification and its indifference to any fully dialectical interrelation of them and us,” terrorist and citizen.Footnote ⁹ However, just as Redfield believes that this lack of national understanding “gives criticism its chance” to make sense of the attacks,Footnote ¹⁰ Simpson calls upon theory to expose “the danger of academic legitimations of political actions of the sort that have parlayed the commemoration of 9/11 into the invasion of Iraq.”Footnote ¹¹ My argument that The 9/11 Report models specific literary-critical skills essential for engaged citizens builds upon both Redfield's and Simpson's work, theorizing and analyzing a text that even the President of the United States found to be much “like a mystery, a novel.”Footnote ¹²

Despite this widespread recognition of its literary qualities, The 9/11 Report has received surprisingly little literary-critical attention. Two notable exceptions are essays by Craig A. Warren and Bryce Traister.Footnote ¹³ Both Warren and Traister analyze the report's use of literary techniques to draw readers in and thus to shape public opinion. Warren's essay patiently maps the history of The 9/11 Report as a “literary document,”Footnote ¹⁴ citing reviewers who claim that it “reads like a Shakespearean drama,” “like a novel,” like the work of “a trauma memoirist,” or like “a laudably thorough legal brief.”Footnote ¹⁵ He optimistically argues that the report's “ability to challenge literary classification” requires readers to think deeply, to “train their interpretive powers not only on the accessible language of the commissioners, but also on the wounds behind that language” because those wounds are both personal and national.Footnote ¹⁶ Traister takes a far more skeptical approach to what he calls the “paranoid” narrative of the report. He argues that even as it “purports to reveal the hidden plot of contemporary anti-US terrorism,” The 9/11 Report actually just “manufactures an acceptable political fiction” that compensates for the government's “failure to promote democratic structures of feeling in response to national trauma.”Footnote ¹⁷ Comparing Herman Melville's 1855 Benito Cereno to the 9/11 Commission's 2004 report, Traister concludes that both texts employ literary conventions to “narrate a surrender of democracy to the exigencies of statist and nationalist desires” in the build-up to the Civil War or the war on terror – whether critically, as he argues Melville does, or complacently, as he believes the 9/11 Commission does.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, although Warren and Traister differ in their assessment of the 9/11 Commission's narrative aims and intentions, they agree that the report's literary techniques shape individual imagination by encouraging US citizens to identify closely with their embattled nation.

The literary qualities of The 9/11 Report, however, do more than just describe the impact of politics on each citizen's mind; they also demonstrate the power of the individual imagination to shape politics in meaningful ways. Presenting the facts of 9/11 in “the narrative of this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration” (cxxv, my emphasis), the 9/11 Commission concludes with four specific recommendations about how the US might effectively “institutionalize imagination.” These recommendations call for increasingly complex narrative approaches to intelligence data, each one of which corresponds to a specific technique of literary analysis. First and most simply, the recommendation to look at data “from the enemy's perspective” is much like the literary critic's effort to understand various points of view within a text (496). Building on this broadly inclusive view of intelligence information, the report's second recommendation – that the US should create “a set of telltale indicators” (496) signaling the development of terrorist plots – corresponds with careful literary-critical attention to foreshadowing and emerging plot patterns. The even more specialized ability of the third recommendation – to “monitor such telltale indicators” by creating a system “tuned to comprehend the significance of this information” (497) – parallels the complex literary-critical ability to interpret symbolic meanings that deepen and intensify a general understanding of plot. Finally, the capacity to “perform the broader warning functions we describe here” by analyzing America's own “domestic vulnerabilities” to these emerging terrorist plots (497) is similar to the processes of critical self-reflection and cross-cultural comparison that result from careful reading of a series of interrelated texts. Rather than using literary techniques primarily to implicate readers in their government's construction of national policy, as others have suggested it does, The 9/11 Report actually demonstrates the political value of each citizen's literary-critical imagination: the reader's – or government agent's – understanding of perspective, foreshadowing, symbolic patterns, and cross-cultural literary relationships deepens his or her overall understanding of national security.

The degree to which such understanding is either possible or useful is certainly open to debate. Writing for the New York Times, Richard Posner argues that the report's achievement as “an improbable literary triumph” does not alter the fact that the “commission's analysis and recommendations are unimpressive.”Footnote ¹⁹ The problem for Posner lies in the report's conclusion that there are “systemic failures in the nation's intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus,” when in fact The 9/11 Report as a whole “points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously,” a view that echoes hauntingly, for example, in the aftermath of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in France.Footnote ²⁰ Posner sympathizes with the 9/11 Commission because he believes that the impulse to fix problems is fundamental to American national identity: since “Americans are not fatalists” by nature, he argues, the conclusion that “there is really rather little that can be done to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks beyond what is being done already … would be a real downer – even a tad un-American.”Footnote ²¹ The problem with Posner's critique of the report, however, is that he focusses so tightly on the inadequacy of its recommendations that he ignores the aesthetic power of their representation. While Posner is right to contend that “greater dangers may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven't a clue as to how to prevent,”Footnote ²² the 9/11 Commission's “improbable literary triumph” models for readers the kind of humanist approach that just might give us that clue.

From its opening pages, The 9/11 Report involves readers politically by engaging them aesthetically, establishing setting, characters, and conflict even as it shows how time and distance have shaped readers' perspectives on 9/11. The report's first sentence establishes the setting of the attacks: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.” Because readers in 2004 know what is about to happen when they read this description of 2001, they picture not just the cloudless New York sky, but also the deadly hijacked planes that will soon transform this peaceful setting. The next few sentences introduce some of the unwitting protagonists of the story: “Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center.” The contrast between the temperate day and the terrible attacks, the unknowing victims and the unlikely heroes some of them will soon become, parallels the gap between then and now, pre- and post-9/11. That gap continues to widen as the following paragraph describes a past world unaffected by present Homeland Security, a world where on “Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour” that the public can no longer take, and where weather was the biggest safety concern for air travelers: “For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travelers were Mohammed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine” (3). Refusing to profile these travelers as the terrorists we now know they were, the report begins by placing readers in the conflicting, competing perspectives of pre-9/11 innocent bystanders and post-9/11 experienced citizens at the site of the attacks themselves.

By destabilizing the reader's personal perspective on the events of 9/11 in chapter 1, the report foregrounds the parallel need to understand the attacks from various political points of view, its first recommendation for the process of institutionalizing imagination. The next four chapters employ a mirrored structure to illustrate this idea formally. Chapter 2 offers a history and background of al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism. Chapter 3 describes the US agencies that failed to understand and use that information about al Qaeda, and then chapter 4 makes personal the reader's understanding of this institutional failure by introducing various individuals working in those US agencies. Chapter 5 returns to the topic of chapter 2, offering a behind-the-scenes look at key players in the terrorist movement and thus granting personal understanding of this institutional threat. Yet even as these four mirrored chapters place the US at the heart of the report's post-9/11 historical analysis, they also emphasize the need to frame the attacks on the United States within their broader global context: when US citizens or agencies fail to think globally, they quite clearly risk exposing the homeland to outside threats. The report demonstrates the very real dangers of American myopia by contrasting the short-sighted view of US security personnel in chapter 4 that “‘suicide wasn't in the game plan’ of hijackers” (125) with the long-range vision in chapter 5 of “the terrorist entrepreneur,” who applies painstaking “imagination, technical aptitude, and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes” (210). Chapter 5 focusses in particular on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” (210), whom the commission describes as “intelligent, efficient, and even-tempered” (217). Within al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was an “effective leader” and a “capable coordinator” with “innate creativity” and a “single-minded dedication” to staging “a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star – the superterrorist” (217, 222). The report's cautious, detailed description of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – and other “charismatic, intelligent, and persuasive” terrorists such as Mohammed Atta (232) – portrays each potential or actual terrorist as an individual “who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal” (cxxvi). Helping readers to understand the creative planning as well as the destructive aims of al Qaeda operatives, the report employs point of view to advocate for more imaginative and sympathetic intelligence analysis on the part of the American victims.

Such analysis depends upon America's ability to follow the report's second recommendation for institutionalizing imagination: the US must actively seek “a set of tell-tale indicators” that signal the possibility of a developing terrorist plot (496). The 9/11 Commission opens the report with the “hope that the terrible losses chronicled in this report can create something positive – an America that is safer, stronger, and wiser” (cxxvi). The report's movement between past and present teaches readers who lived through 9/11 to interpret past facts as strategic moves clearly foreshadowing al Qaeda's attack on the US. This rereading of the past aims to rewrite what the commission sees as a problematically “inaccurate government account of those events,” an account that allowed the US government and intelligence agencies to avoid taking action before 9/11 (49). Chapter 1, for example, concludes with a post-9/11 comment by a government official – “This is a new type of war” – followed immediately by a description of the past that ominously foreshadows this present: “He was, and is, right. But the conflict did not begin on 9/11.” The report then offers readers a tell-tale indicator that “few Americans had noticed” before the attacks: the 1998 publication in a London Arabic-language newspaper of Osama Bin Laden's anti-American fatwa, which called for “the murder of any American, anywhere on earth,” because “America had declared war against God and his messenger” (70).Footnote ²³ The 9/11 Commission juxtaposes past with present again in chapter 3, demonstrating how and why the US government constructed such an inadequate pre-9/11 narrative about the terrorist threat: “An almost obsessive protection of sources and methods by the NSA [National Security Agency], and its focus on foreign intelligence, and its avoidance of anything domestic would, as will be seen, be important elements in the story of 9/11” (129, my emphasis). The report asks readers to do a better job than the government did in the past – to see flaws in the US intelligence system as important parts of the story before, rather than after, a future terrorist attack.

The framing of 9/11 as a “story” and the foreshadowing of what “will be seen” become important narrative patterns in the 9/11 Commission's report. Discussing al Qaeda, for instance, the commissioners repeat the phrase “it is the story”: “It is the story of eccentric and violent ideas sprouting in the fertile ground of political and social turmoil. It is the story of an organization poised to seize its historical moment” (73). The commission then shapes the reader's response to this 9/11 story by situating it within a literary history of other terrorist plots from the past. They describe as “a cautionary tale” the 1988 Libyan hijacking of Pan Am flight 103 (111) and discuss the “stories” of the Iran–Contra affair as they relate to “the story of 9/11” (146). Even in the opening paragraph of chapter 11, which begins to draw conclusions about the evidence presented in the report, the commissioners call attention to their role as the official narrators of the 9/11 story: “In composing this narrative we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight.” They recognize their own perspective as both a benefit and a handicap, and they foreground the biases that have necessarily shaped their storytelling: “Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly – with 20/20 vision. But that path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply in shadow.” The fundamental conflict here is that even as “more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the narrative choices necessary to shape this growing body of facts into a coherent story become increasingly difficult (485). Calling their report a “narrative” and contrasting the brightly lit facts that dominate this public narrative with those that fall into shadow because they are less frequently discussed, the 9/11 Commission acknowledges both the power of storytelling and the difficulty of reimagining stories after they have already been told: “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes and the remaining memories of it become colored by what happened and what was written about it later.” The commissioners therefore carefully highlight their ethical responsibility as narrators of 9/11's history: “With that caution in mind, we asked ourselves, before we judged others, whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done” (485, original emphasis). By theorizing the literary nature of their own interpretation of intelligence data, the commissioners make their readers acutely aware of the civic responsibility to seek out such data and to think critically about the various national narratives that those details might shape.

Careful reading and writing of such political narratives are central to the report's third recommendation for institutionalizing imagination: the US must construct an intelligence system “tuned to comprehend the significance of … information” collected in the field (497). The report emphasizes the level of discord, rather than tuning, in the US intelligence system before 9/11, going so far as to describe the dramatically rising “level of reporting on terrorist threats and planned attacks in the spring of 2001” with the metaphor of an insistent yet ignored “drumbeat” (366). The sometimes almost lyrical metaphorical language that describes this discord throughout the report contrasts markedly with the miscommunication that it describes – and thus heightens readers' desire for imaginative harmony. The report focusses most closely on problems in the FBI and the CIA, suggesting that “the information flow withered” in the FBI because “too much information sharing could be a career stopper” and that, as a result, “relevant information from the National Security Agency and the CIA often failed to make its way to criminal investigators” (116). One CIA insider used a basketball metaphor to contrast his own agency, which “tended to play a ‘zone defense’,” with the FBI, an agency that “tends to play ‘man-to-man’” (385). Although combining the “where” approach of the CIA's “zone defense” with the “who” approach of the FBI's “man-to-man” coverage might have allowed the US to understand the impending terrorist threat more fully, the report concludes that different institutional cultures and norms across government agencies instead “blocked the arteries of information sharing” in a near-fatal way (117). By late 2001, as director of central intelligence George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission, “the system was blinking red” and “could not ‘get any worse’” because “no one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets” (373, 379). The result was that “the terrorists exploited deep institutional failings within our government” on and before 9/11: “The domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction, and did not have a plan to institute,” so “the public was not warned” (381). “It is now clear,” the report regretfully concludes, “that everyone involved was confused about rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence channels” (390), and Presidents Clinton and Bush were therefore both offered a “narrow and unimaginative menu of options for action” before, during, and after 9/11 (502).Footnote ²⁴ Contrasting this unimaginative menu with the broad selection of highly imaginative metaphors featured within the report itself, readers can see the gap between the government's past problems and the report's present recommendations for intelligence analysis and political diplomacy.Footnote ²⁵

It is important to understand just how broken US governmental systems of coordination were on and before 9/11, since the report's ideas for institutionalizing imagination respond directly to “its principal recommendation”Footnote ²⁶ that the US commit to “expanding information sharing” across governmental agencies.Footnote ²⁷ Part of the reason that the FBI saw no pressing need to draw the CIA into its investigations was the FBI's false belief that its own “law enforcement system was well-equipped to cope with terrorism,” since the bureau had successfully “prosecuted and convicted multiple individuals” connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (106).Footnote ²⁸ The report concludes, however, that the FBI's law-enforcement process, which was “meant, by its nature, to mark for the public events as finished – case solved, justice done” (107), was fundamentally unsuited to a complex analysis of the 9/11 attacks' present and future impact. Such narrow, compartmentalized ways of thinking also limited the coordination and success of 9/11 rescue efforts. The New York Port Authority acknowledged that “neither full nor partial evacuation drills were held” in the World Trade Center before 9/11 and “that it had no protocol for rescuing people trapped above a fire in the towers” (404). Once the twin towers were hit, “there was a lack of comprehensive coordination between FDNY, NYPD, and PAPD [Fire Department of New York, New York Police Department, Port Authority Police Department] personnel,” and “information that was critical to informed decision making was not shared among agencies” during the rescue effort (460). The central government, too, lacked coordination: The 9/11 Report documents how, between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m. on 11 September 2001, the President's “staff was in contact with the White House Situation Room, but as far as we could determine, no one with the President was in contact with the Pentagon” (60). This fact makes particularly disturbing President Bush's assertion to the vice president in a 9:45 a.m. call: “Sounds like we have a minor war going on here, I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war … somebody's going to pay” (61). The report explains how “none of the information conveyed in the White House video teleconference, at least in the first hour, was being passed to the NMCC [National Military Command Center],” which was simultaneously but separately holding voice conferences. As a result, one witness says that it “was almost like there were parallel decisionmaking processes going on” because there “were competing venues for command and control and decisionmaking” (57). Even after the attacks, the lack of “an effective government organization dedicated to assessing vulnerabilities and handling problems of protection and preparedness” in the United States made it difficult to address questions about how to restore civil aviation, reopen financial markets, return border and port security to normal, and evaluate legislation in support of the airline industry (468).

Suggesting that “a rededication to preparedness is perhaps the best way to honor the memories of those we lost that day” (464), the 9/11 Commission dedicates itself in the report not only to compiling evidence of failure on the part of US intelligence, rescue, and political agencies, but also to modeling more imaginative methods of preparation. The report spends more than six hundred pages patiently engaged in the painstaking process of “aggregating and analyzing facts to see if they could provide clues to terrorist tactics more generally” because our existing system “was not designed to ask if the events [of 9/11] might be harbingers of worse to come” (107). Despite its deliberate pace, the bureaucratic labor of sifting through data makes it possible to ask whether the events might be harbingers – or tell-tale indicators – of worse to come and is thus foundational to the critical act of political storytelling. The repeated institutional failure to read terrorist threats as precursors of terrorist acts suggests that the problem is not in collecting the data but in interpreting and narrating the story of that data. Because US intelligence agencies “had little appreciation for the role of analysis” before 9/11, they “lacked the ability to know what [they] knew” – to tell a story that anticipated 9/11 and its aftermath (113).

The 9/11 Report's description of bureaucratic failures in chapter 8 offers a clue as to how imagination might productively shape the reading of all this aggregated intelligence data:

While the CIA, according to sources like “John,” demonstrated a prosaic lack of foresight prior to 9/11, The 9/11 Report draws attention to its own poetic use of hindsight. Much like the language of “drumbeats,” “zone” and “man-to-man” defenses, and “blocked arteries of information sharing,” the metaphor of the lightning and the image of the ticking clock here dramatize intelligence analysis and thus draw readers imaginatively into the process of rewriting in the present a story that US intelligence failed to tell in the past. Other examples of how the report incorporates vivid, dramatic imagery to engage readers' imaginations include an allusion to The Wizard of Oz (“No one looked behind the curtain” of the FBI's intelligence coordination after 9/11 (504)), health care metaphors (“The agencies are like a set of specialists in a hospital, each ordering tests, looking for symptoms, and prescribing medications. What is missing is the attending physician who makes sure they work as a team” (505)), a terrorist hydra image (“The American people are thus given the picture of an omnipotent, unslayable hydra of destruction. This image lowers expectations for government effectiveness” (521)), and even the use of mixed and shifting metaphors to reflect the confusion that the report seeks to capture (the metaphor of assembling “enough of the puzzle pieces gathered by different agencies to make some sense of them,” for example, mixes with that of “working-level officers” who feel as if they are “drowning in information” (508)). In each case, the report models how to both dramatize existing political narratives and, more importantly, theorize and reimagine the meaning of data upon which those often limited past 9/11 narratives rest.

The report makes its goal of institutionalized imagination seem achievable by emphasizing that such imaginative intelligence work was certainly done, if all too rarely, before the terrorist attacks. Its most outspoken advocate before 9/11 was probably Richard Clarke, the National Counterterrorism Coordinator, who acknowledged that he was “obsessed” with Osama Bin Laden and thus, as early as 1998, “‘urged [his staff] to be as creative as possible in their thinking’ about preventing a Bin Laden attack on US territory” (175, 187). The problem, however, was that instead of finding ways to institutionalize and routinize his own and his staff's creative thinking, Clarke became “frustrated with his role and with an administration that he considered not ‘serious about al Qaeda’” (296). His frustration interfered with the ability to shape policy: in a memo to national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, written just days before the attacks, Clarke insisted that “decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US” (307).Footnote ²⁹ Rice told the 9/11 Commission that she “took Clarke's memo as a warning not to get dragged down by bureaucratic inertia,” but the 9/11 Commission criticizes what it calls Clarke's “jeremiad” for simply warning against rather than strategically working within bureaucracy (308). The report sums up Clarke's political failure:

Complaining about a lack of imagination rather than finding ways to institutionalize creative thought, Clarke exemplifies a problem that The 9/11 Report then challenges the post-9/11 American public to solve.

The report suggests that the humanities may hold the key to this solution. The 9/11 Commission's final and most complicated recommendation asks US government agencies and citizens to think critically and comparatively about “domestic vulnerabilities” by analyzing the relationship between emerging terrorist plots and our own counterterrorist policy, much as literary critics seek to theorize cross-cultural connections between literary texts (497). Building such an intertextual intelligence narrative depends upon the ability to follow the first three recommendations of the report: only if readers understand different perspectives, connect details to identify emerging plots, and recognize symbolic patterns that deepen those plots can they analyze intelligence effectively and imaginatively enough to develop meaningful counterterrorist policies. Such analysis requires both careful reading and critical thinking, skills in which the liberal arts have traditionally trained their students. The 9/11 Report's frequent references to the humanities, in particular, underscore the importance of such training in constructing effective and ethical counterterrorist policy. By contrast, the report blames at least some terrorist behavior on what it describes as a Middle Eastern “cultural preference for technical fields over the humanities and social sciences. Many … young [Muslim] men, even if able to study abroad, lack … the perspective and skills needed to understand a different culture” (80). The 9/11 Commission suggests a remedy: “education that teaches tolerance, the dignity and value of each individual, and respect for different beliefs” is crucial, they argue, both to “any global strategy to eliminate Islamist terrorism” (539) and to American domestic policy, since the US must train its own citizens to “offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors” (537). This argument quite clearly fuses America's continued role as a global leader with its continued effort to educate its citizens in the humanistic virtues of freedom, democracy, and individual rights.

The 9/11 Report emphasizes the crucial role of higher education in supporting this effort when it praises the pre-9/11 CIA for thinking critically and acting patiently, as if the CIA were “a university gone to war” (133). The conflation of academia and the military here initially seems to confuse more than clarify the CIA's role, but the report goes on to demonstrate that this kind of university does not march blindly into battle: it changes the terms of engagement. The 9/11 Commission describes how the “CIA had been created to wage the Cold War,” and its operatives could thus for many years “safely invest time and resources in basic research, detailed and reflective,” which was slow but led to “a deep base of knowledge” about a long-standing communist enemy (133). Like university faculty, CIA agents measured professional success by “the quantity and quality of their publications (in this case, classified publications),” which demanded extensive research and comprehensive understanding of their respective areas of expertise (133). After the Cold War, however, as the US entered a “more fluid international environment with uncertain, changing goals and interests, intelligence managers no longer felt they could afford such a patient, strategic approach to long-term accumulation of intellectual capital.” By the early 1990s, “the rise of round-the-clock news shows and the Internet reinforced pressure on analysts to pass along fresh reports to policymakers at an ever-faster pace, trying to add context or supplement what their customers were receiving from the media.” As the US intelligence system struggled to keep up with the quickening pace of media coverage, a “university culture with its versions of books and articles was giving way to the culture of the newsroom,” and deep intelligence analysis was therefore also giving way to the fleeting sound bite (133).

The 9/11 Report demonstrates the danger of these sound bites and refocusses American attention on the “unglamorous but essential work” of both time-consuming academic analysis and the intelligence “oversight function of Congress” (155), a Congressional function that was brought to bear upon the CIA itself in the recent Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. Much as university faculty and students must ideally make space for the deliberate work of research within the fast-paced daily barrage of email, meetings, and other demands, Congressional leaders and intelligence agents must refuse to become “swamped in the minutiae” of immediate tasks, “with little time for consideration of longer-term questions” (156). Criticism takes time, in other words, as David Simpson has argued. Quoting Jacques Derrida, who told the New York Times after 9/11 that we do not yet “know what we are talking about” regarding the attacks,Footnote ³⁰ Simpson insists on the value of “taking time for the effort” of critical inquiry because “one can only hope that keeping faith with the traditions of critical reflection might somehow matter to a world that can be better than one we have now.”Footnote ³¹ He concludes that because “the event of 9/11 has both reproduced and reconfigured culture … it may take more time than usual to work out how and to what ends.”Footnote ³² Looking back on the years leading up to 9/11, Lieutenant General William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence at the time of The 9/11 Report, told the 9/11 Commission that “opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding” (199). The report argues that the US must focus attention not on the quick, repetitive, thoughtless tasks of everyday routine, but on the patient, deep, critical reflection required to transform a broken national bureaucracy into an ethical global democracy.

One might argue, however, that rather than exemplifying this idealized view of higher education, contemporary American universities suffer instead from some of the same problems that plagued US intelligence agencies before 9/11. For example, just as interagency rivalries hindered intelligence sharing throughout the 1990s, university competition for national rankings and limited funding in the 2000s has tended to pit both inter- and intra-campus collaborators against one another in a race to produce employable graduates. The national, state, and local pressures on departments, colleges, and universities competing to produce qualified graduates are much like the “pressure from the Office of Intelligence Policy Review, FBI leadership, and the FISA [Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act] court” on agencies to solve and close cases efficiently and independently (116). Such quantitative pressure is at odds with the painstaking analytical work that builds an informed citizenship. The Chronicle of Higher Education's latest defense of liberal arts education describes this critical work as “the development of a set of intellectual virtues that make good students, good professionals, and good citizens.”Footnote ³³ If profit and privatization replace curiosity and collaboration in shaping the academic workforce and curriculum, both the university and the nation risk sacrificing imagination for efficiency.

Recognizing this risk, The 9/11 Report issues a call to arms, conscripting the university back into the war on terror by drawing comparisons between our contemporary conflicts and World War II. As David Simpson argues, such comparisons should be the time-consuming work of the cultural critic: “The event we call 9/11 has a past that we can recover, a present that we must monitor, and a future we can project.”Footnote ³⁴ But on 9/11, as often happens when nations come under attack, the US media and government lost little time in drawing quick, nationalistic comparisons between past and present, World War II and the war on terror. The New York Times pointed out these parallels almost immediately, aligning the terrorist attacks with the Nazi bombing of the British home front and claiming that American politicians and civilians on 9/11 displayed the same “Moxie among the Ruins” as the British royal family, prime minister, and civilians during the Blitz.Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, as I have shown elsewhere, both the American and the British governments after 9/11 reemphasized the “special relationship” between the US and the UK that Prime Minister Winston Churchill first declared in the 1940s, when seeking American support to help defeat the Nazis.Footnote ³⁶ Just as Churchill during World War II repeatedly praised the noble intentions of the US and the UK to “walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace”Footnote ³⁷ while waging what was generally believed to be “a just war,”Footnote ³⁸ Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed after 9/11 to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder”Footnote ³⁹ with the US against what President George W. Bush labeled first as “evil-doers” and then as a terrorist “axis of evil,”Footnote ⁴⁰ working “to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely.”Footnote ⁴¹ Committing the UK to what he saw as a “battle for and about the ideas and values that would shape the twenty-first century,”Footnote ⁴² Blair even loaned Bush a bust of Churchill in 2001 as a symbol of their nations' continued special relationship in the new war on terror.Footnote ⁴³ This US–UK alliance was in the political spotlight during the time of The 9/11 Report's writing in 2003 and release in 2004: formed in 2002, the 9/11 Commission worked amidst international debate about weapons of mass destruction and the build-up to the Allied invasion of Iraq. The 9/11 Report engages carefully and critically in this debate, turning to the past to find not a political precedent for the war on terror but a historical parallel to the experience of a home front under fire.

Like the Anglo-American governments and media, The 9/11 Report therefore describes US civilians on 9/11 as under attack, much like UK civilians during the Blitz: the report warns Americans that “in the new age of terror, they – we – are the primary targets” and insists that US “civilians and first responders will again find themselves on the front lines” (464). The report responds to this threat by echoing the famous rhetoric of Churchill's war speeches, which consistently drew the weapon of Allied imagination into the battle against Nazi Germany. In Churchill's 1940 speech to the House of Commons, for example, he praised the creativity of British soldiers in the Battle of France: “The House may be assured that the utmost ingenuity is being displayed and imagination is being evoked from large numbers of competent officers well-trained in tactics and thoroughly up to date, to measure and counterwork [the] novel possibilities” dreamed up by the Nazis.Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, in a 1941 speech at Harrow School, Churchill urged Londoners to “Never Give In” during the Blitz, arguing that “without imagination not much can be done.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The political parallel here between Churchill's suggestion that British imagination could defeat the Nazis and The 9/11 Report's insistence that American imagination might defy al Qaeda is no coincidence. In both past and present, the West's major political and economic empire found itself under attack on its own soil, defending its citizens against what seemed surely to be an axis of evil. The report concludes that civilians must defend themselves from this threat: “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike” (457). For the 9/11 Commission, however, self-defense depends less on swift military action than on careful civilian consideration. Refusing to equate national defense with the victory of the “allies against terror” over the “axis of evil” in a clearly defined “War on Terror,”Footnote ⁴⁶ the report calls US civilians to “exercise imagination” (492) as they “figure out a way to turn a scenario into constructive action,” a political idea into a diplomatic plan (495).

The question that the report raises is thus not whether America should defend itself against al Qaeda but whether we have chosen to do so in ways that support our nation's – and our Allies' – long-standing democratic values. Even the term that the US has adopted to describe the site of its own victimization – “Ground Zero” – points toward the complexities of this important ethical question. In The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield describes the conflict that haunts both the name “Ground Zero” and the political rhetoric surrounding the war on terror: “Ground Zero both calls up and wards off the ghost of Hiroshima, remembering that other scene of destruction while also distancing or demoting it by rendering it an other ground zero.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This echo not of the special Allied relationship but of the exceptional military power of America during World War II foregrounds and questions the ethical relationship between America's rhetoric of victimization on 9/11 and its global military response to terror. Redfield follows this line of thought, arguing that the “name ‘Ground Zero’ stokes a fantasy of omnipotence that is inseparable from vulnerability and exposure.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As part of this analysis, he suggests that the 9/11 Commission “indirectly confesses” its fear that “the Homeland can never be protected enough” in the language of the report's final conclusions:Footnote ⁴⁹ “9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’ should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America ‘over here.’ In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Redfield identifies two distinct voices in these lines from the report: while, on the one hand, “a certain imperialism or state terrorism speaks here, so too,” on the other, “does a terrorized, paranoid subject, conscious on some level that it has no home, only constitutively inadequate, if politically useful, technologies and discourses of security, deployed within an ambivalent state of emergency.”Footnote ⁵¹ Redfield recognizes the fundamental discord in post-9/11 America, but his analysis stops here, leaving the voices of the imperialist state and the terrorized subject to speak over and against one another in what inevitably becomes “an ambivalent state of emergency.”

What Redfield's emphasis on an imperialist or paranoid United States seems to have missed in The 9/11 Report is the commission's self-conscious, self-critical approach to a larger, more time-consuming humanist project. The report's use of key literary techniques such as point of view, foreshadowing, symbolism, and critical self-reflection suggests that the ethical problem of shaping post-9/11 American political policy requires a deep knowledge of complex global relationships. Recognizing that “[i]n the post-9/11 world, threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them” (517), the commissioners open and close their report with an invitation to the kind of democratic dialogue and collaborative problem-solving that one often finds in the liberal arts classroom. In their preface, the ten members of the bipartisan commission offer as a model the collaboration that shaped their report writing:

Their final lines echo this hope: “We look forward to a national debate on the merits of what we have recommended, and we will participate vigorously in that debate” (608). They recognize that although the “first phase of our post-9/11 efforts rightly included military action,” the nation's “long-term success demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense” (520). Lobbying for a national strategy that is “as political as it is military” (520), the 9/11 Commission argues for both effective methods of defending the nation and ethical ways of exercising global power.

The problem, however, lies in mobilizing a public that has become attuned to the sound bite to think carefully and deeply about how to construct such long-term solutions. Publishing statistics and marketing copy for The 9/11 Report suggest that the public heeded the 9/11 Commission's call for “citizens to study, reflect – and act” (cxxix).Footnote ⁵² As what seemed to be required reading on the post-9/11 American syllabus, the report informed the public about the history and aftermath of 9/11 at a low price: the report was – and still is – available as a free, non-copyrighted download on the 9/11 Commission's website, and “over 150,000 copies of the Report sold on the day of its release.”Footnote ⁵³ In its first year, the Norton edition had “sold more than a million copies, about 98 percent of them in paperback.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Norton secured the publishing contract “because it made the best proposal for mass distribution, agreeing to sell the paperback version of the report for only $10” and to “donate $600,000 from its profits on the book to three programs focussed on emergency preparedness and international relations” – promises that appealed to the American reading public.Footnote ⁵⁵ The mass-market paperback itself is the size and shape of a popular thriller or romance novel, and its back cover copy echoes, in the voice of the American people and in bold capital letters, the very questions that the 9/11 Commission hoped the public would ask: “WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11, AND HOW? HAVE WE LEARNED ANY LESSONS? ARE WE SAFER NOW? THE QUESTIONS EVERY AMERICAN WANTS ANSWERED.” According to plan, the report “quickly became one of the best-selling government reports of all time,”Footnote ⁵⁶ topping the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the first twelve weeks of its release, appearing on that list for twenty-four weeks in a row, and even earning recognition as a National Book Award finalist in 2004.Footnote ⁵⁷

Yet these impressive statistics are somewhat deceptive: The 9/11 Report almost certainly sold more copies than the public actually read. In teaching and researching The 9/11 Report, I have been struck by how few of my students, colleagues, and friends have read the document. Seeking data to support this personal observation, I compared online statistics from Goodreads, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble in mid-January 2015.Footnote ⁵⁸ Since The 9/11 Report's publication in 2004, Goodreads has collected 2,490 ratings for it, 229 of which also add reviews. Amazon offers slightly more reviews – 286 – while Barnes and Noble features only thirty-seven reviews of the report on its website. To put these numbers in perspective, compare them to ratings and reviews for the current (January 2015) nonfiction best seller atop Amazon's list (no. 4 after three diet books): Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. Hillenbrand's book has topped the New York Times's nonfiction best-seller list for fifteen weeks to date, moving in and out of the top spot and appearing on that list for more than four years. Published in 2010, this book has 276,256 ratings and 31,124 reviews on Goodreads, 18,127 reviews on Amazon, and 4,818 reviews on Barnes and Noble, which means that Unbroken has spent almost eight times as long as The 9/11 Report on the New York Times best-seller list and been reviewed online by readers an average of a hundred times more frequently. Of course, unlike Hillenbrand's book, The 9/11 Report is neither an individual story of survival nor “soon to be a major motion picture,” as the cover of Unbroken can boast. Nonetheless, the substantial differences in the number of both online reader reviews and weeks on or atop the New York Times best-seller list suggest that people bought The 9/11 Report early and reviewed it relatively infrequently, perhaps considering it more a historical object than a “great read.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In the words of the official Amazon editorial review of the report, “The 9/11 Commission Report is one of the most important historical documents in the modern era. And while that fact alone makes it worth owning, it is also a chilling and valuable piece of nonfiction.”Footnote ⁶⁰

This chilling piece of nonfiction is valuable both as a model of intellectual inquiry and as a call to political action. It is no coincidence that all ten members of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission either attended a liberal arts college themselves or held a leadership position at an institution of higher education during their careers.Footnote ⁶¹ The commission's own self-conscious literary and interpretive choices in narrating the story of the 9/11 attacks on the US first demonstrate, and then demand of American citizens, the crucial humanist work that shapes a truly democratic society. Although the commissioners stop short of constructing educational policy, they do expect readers to engage in the critical and creative thought that is most obviously valued in the humanities classroom. Unless the nation supports – ideologically and financially – its higher-education system in training citizens to take up this intellectual call to arms, America risks prolonging an unwinnable war waged against an ongoing state of fear. The recent release of The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture underscores this risk by describing what happens when fear shapes political rules and ethics: today's most clear and present danger is not that we will speak the truth about inhumane acts but that we will remain silent. Like The 9/11 Report, this new report requires American readers to analyze various points of view, identify emerging plot lines, seek connections across plots, and explore the often fraught relationships between self and other.Footnote ⁶² More importantly, however, The Report on Torture demands that we continue to follow the example of the 9/11 Commission, reading critically and carefully both the past story of 9/11 and the present narrative of Western politics. The 9/11 Report thus models the critical habits of mind that define a liberal arts education, institutionalizing imagination not by emptying it of value but by backing its political currency.