The 9/11 Commission Report and the Limits of the Bureaucratic Imagination

The 9/11 Commission Report begins, like any cosmopolitan pastoral, with the weather, with a constellation of placid and ordinary sites, with everyday people waking up and moving into the world.1

This distant, high-altitude opening conjures the pulse of American normalcy in graceful scene shifts from New York to Virginia, D.C. to Sarasota, with the busy peace of a shared endeavor unfolding to the industrious rhythm of an American president out for his morning jog. The text's conjured air grows heavier and more silken as the narrative moves south to the Capitol, and further south to the Gulf. The proper names are familiar, steady, comforting; in the Potomac, we hear the echo of George Washington's crossing, in Arlington, the glory of fallen soldiers. In and as her millions, America woke, went to work, paid homage to democracy, attended to her fitness. Replete with sweeping "meanwhile" gestures, one sees immediately what Anderson means by the imagined community, brought into being, once again, in print. It is a masterpiece of patriotism — ekphrastic and lyrical, shimmering with idealism and ideology. The image it presents is that of a healthy nation.

The next paragraph reveals this idyll — as every reader already knows — on the brink of being shattered, the opening lines already an irrecoverable fantasy of innocence. The narrative shifts into a register of quasi-menacing detail, quoting from the bureaucratized speech of commercial airlines, and then zooms further in to focus on two strangers, whose names fall heavily in the prose, an index of their unbelonging:

The Report does not persist in this tone or this pastoral projection of American life at the turn of the millennium for very long. Much of the text is technical and didactic, aiming to provide "the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned" (xvi). But there are, throughout, surprising moments of lyricism, literary deftness, and depth of feeling, even where these sentiments are entirely bizarre and misguided. For a government document, The 9/11 Commission Report expresses an almost unsettling profundity and warmth — couched in a marked writerliness — especially around the edges of the chapters. In the preface, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chair and vice-chair of the commission, express their gratitude to their fellow commissioners, and their "great affection for them," an odd sentiment that marks the Report not only as a record of trauma and detection, but of an unexpectedly optimistic national reimagining.4

It also plays, as many readers have noted, with the generic conventions of the thriller, the mystery, and the horror novel and film, punctuating the dry compilation of facts and the sometimes excruciatingly slow pace — the whole first chapter, forty-six densely footnoted pages, covers about twenty minutes on the morning of September 11 — with dramatic transcripts from cell-phone conversations and cliffhangers that attenuate the smaller enigmas that flow into the larger events of the day. The Report's novelistic strategy appears to be more than decorative, inviting a newly adventurous and creatively apocalyptic view of the international threats to US security, even as it moves within and through received literary forms. As it shifts into the synthetic assessment suite of chapters toward the end, the commissioners make explicit their concern that "[i]magination is not usually a gift associated with bureaucracies . . . It is crucial," they write, "to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination."5 The difficulty of "bureaucratizing imagination," at least in the local history the Report offers, however, points inevitably back to imaginaries already inscribed in literary and filmic registers. When the commissioners wonder why no one thought of hijacked aircraft being repurposed as weapons in the years leading up to 9/11 — particularly following Al Qaeda's use of "suicide vehicles" like truck bombs and boats, as in the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole — they discover that Richard Clarke, at least according to his own lengthy testimony before the commission, had in fact done so, "but" they note, "he attributes his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community."6

The 9/11 Commission Report's first chapter, "We Have Some Planes," unfolds in this Clancian register, with the literarily suspenseful but historically obvious revelation that the story of 9/11 has actually begun percolating at a great — according to the narrative, an almost unimaginable — distance:

The thousands of miles separating the London fax machine from "one of the most remote and impoverished countries on earth" are not just larger in number than the thousands of miles separating Portland, Maine, from Sarasota, Florida. The distance, as the commissioners and their staff conceive it, is augmented by the redoubling of the as-yet-unnamed Saudi's "exile" and the country's "remoteness," here presented not as relative characteristics, but rather as ontic ones. The impoverishment of the region, too, stands to distance it from the earnest and cloudless business taking place in and under the gleaming skyscrapers of New York, which appear, by contrast, to exist in an entirely unconnected temporal order.

If the Report treats geospacial dilation as sublime, its contraction is horrific. The middle sections of the Report, especially chapter 5, "Al Qaeda Aims at the American Homeland," emphasize the infiltration of foreign nationals into the channels of American progress, and the peace of unsuspecting rural locales. The background narrative of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is instructive in this regard, emphasizing his proficiency in the migrant's Protean arts, the extent to which he was "equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse," where he "applied his imagination, technical aptitude, and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes."8 Ethnically Baluch, "KSM," as the narrative refers to him, was raised in Kuwait and wound up at Chowan College, "a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina" — from there, he transferred to the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he studied mechanical engineering.9 The following lines "plunge" KSM, postgraduation, into the anti-Soviet Afghani jihad, cutting ominous scenes between Peshawar and cave excavation in Afghanistan. The contrast between Greensboro and Tora Bora is pointedly, strategically uncanny, suggesting an ever-present proximity that is only terrifying in one direction. The next pages detail KSM's connections and operations in the Philippines, Qatar, Brazil, Sudan, Yemen, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Thailand, the Maldives, and more. These details, both of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's movements and of alleged operations coordinated by or through him are included in the narrative in spite of a boxed disclaimer that the chapter "relies heavily on information obtained from captured Al Qaeda members," and that "[a]ssessing the truth of statements by these witnesses — sworn enemies of the United States — is challenging."10 The commissioners surmise whether other Al Qaeda operatives interrogated in the post-9/11 arrests might have diminished Mohammed's role in the organization out of "a touch of jealousy."11

The oscillation between shrinking-world rhetoric and the human-scale personal intimacies and grievances that destabilize the narrative foundations of the Report and highlight its key affects of anxiety and fear on the one hand, and a dilatory representation of the distance between the Islamic breeding grounds of terrorism and the West on the other, is a specific effect of the 9/11 Commission Report as a literary document. It only partially reflects the distribution of resources between the War on Terror as it was waged abroad and domestic security within the US in the wake of the attacks. As Zareena Grewal has noted in her critical geography Islam Is a Foreign Country, the first city-based office of Homeland Security opened not in New York, but in the predominantly Arab Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan.12 Global space in the Report is hardly a matter of cartography; it is, rather, a narrative device determined by the text's twin goals of justification for the War on Terror and a narrative of national healing and bureaucratic reordering. Both are routed through the genre of descriptive landscape, which is offered up as evidence of what a healthy, flourishing society does and does not look like. The first chapter, "We Have Some Planes," ends in a disorientating cliffhanger, with no location named. The unspecified country — "one of the most remote and impoverished on earth," which is the origin of the ominous fax — insists on these landscapes not as specific sites with cultural, political, and economic determinants, but rather as paragons of the ahistorical qualities of "remoteness" and "impoverishment" long associated with the backwards regions of the Orient and other colonized spaces. This picture of a backward and sickly place lingers over the break until it is named in the beginning of the next chapter; once the narrative locates the reader in Afghanistan, the juxtaposition of a primer on Islam (we learn that it "arose in Arabia with what Muslims believe are a series of revelations to the prophet Muhammad from the one and only God") with the diagnosis of a "social and economic malaise" in the oil states, the other Arab nations, and Pakistan is already fixed in the reader's mind as a kind of  perfect sense.13 According to the logic laid out by the narrative, Islam — in contrast to the "anticolonial grievances" that fed the "overwhelmingly secular struggles for independence after World War I" — fills in the blank space of the remote and the impoverished "country" from which the threat issues with maladies both social and economic.14

These sources of malaise include an addiction to subsidized social welfare programs and their entitlements in the "unmodernized oil states," the failure of free enterprise owing to "unprofitable industry, state monopolies, and opaque bureaucracies," stagnant economies with low job growth ("a sure prescription for social turbulence"), and the "repression and isolation of women in many Muslim countries," which "crippled overall economic productivity."15 Afghanistan's many woes do not even make the list of these symptoms, since it is a place, according to the narrative, "where real economic development has barely begun."16 If this weren't bad enough, the "secular education reflected a strong cultural preference for technical fields over the humanities and social sciences," such that the exploding population of young Arab men "even if able to study abroad, lacked the perspective and skills needed to understand a different culture."17 Presumably, the Report's warmly informative tone, textbook style information boxes, and one-paragraph introduction to Islam — the religion of a quarter of the world's population — represents the appropriate "perspective and skills needed to understand a different culture." The malaise here described culminates in a simultaneous diagnosis of the warning signs of "radicalization," and an underhanded defense of the global university and its shallow diversity training as a conduit of development and proper thinking. The picture of the Islamic world as a space of disordered education and nondevelopment locates in it both the agent of a diseased civilization as well as its symptoms. Unmodernity and economic stagnation are also locked in a tautology with the repression of women and crippled productivity — the sanctions and debt structures imposed by US foreign policy appear nowhere. American material and political support of repressive regimes in the Gulf states make no appearance either. But for the unique lexicon of late-capitalist bureaucratese, the list might have come from Josephine Butler's impassioned plea on behalf of her "Indian Fellow Subjects," or Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education — or worse, from the mouth of one Turton or Burton in Forster's satire of late-imperial decline in A Passage to India.18

The chapter affixes the terminus of its suspense by returning to the menacing fax that served as the previous chapter's cliffhanger, while also playing on a peculiar assonance with bin Laden's name ("bomb-laden"):

The temporal coordination of the attacks on the East African embassies mimics in sinister reverse the "meanwhile" gestures of the Report's opening pages. The contraction of American space from Maine to New York to D.C. to Florida appears through this lens as a premonition of the seeming instantaneity — the out-of-the-clear-blue-sky-ness — of the planes' collision with the Towers. This narrative technique highlights the terror of global enterprise through a combination of pathetic fallacy and spatial juxtapositions that sound the alarm or — in the 9/11 Commission Report's terms — beat the drum of warning. Paradoxically, it is the colonial origin of this discursive history that enables the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report to meditate on the way in which globalization 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," they conclude, "the American homeland is the planet."20 Such a vision also seems to claim the future as its territory: "because few tolerant or secular Muslim democracies provide alternative models for the future, Bin Ladin's message finds receptive ears."21 Such a characterization further implies that the lack of secular democratic structures leaves people in the "Muslim world" more susceptible or vulnerable to the kinds of ideology with which "Americans cannot bargain or negotiate," namely radical Islam's lack of "respect for life," which the commissioners suggest "can only be destroyed or isolated," as if by inoculation or quarantine.22 What festers over there, such narratives warn, can be here in an instant.

Later in the 9/11 Commission Report, we are told that the warning signs before 9/11 were missed in the manner of a bad diagnosis:

This logic runs through not only this document, but so much of the governmental, military, and agency rhetoric that borrowed from the Report both the idyll of a healthy United States and the specter of a sick and infectious brown world outside. Twenty years after the attacks, in the midst of a grievous pandemic handled callously and incompetently at the expense of the very same devalued lives America has warred against at home and abroad, we are living the vanishing point of the metaphor of epidemic terror. To have propagandized the War on Terror as an attack on ideological contagion or cultural pathogenicity is also, as I have written about at greater length in Epidemic Empire, to divert every available resource from the actual, material health of human beings who are considered disposable, like so many vestigial organs of the global body politic. We have never been more aware of the cruelty of this nation, I think, than we ought to be on this grim anniversary.

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Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory and poetry. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and has taught at Bard, Williams College, City College New York, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 

Her academic research explores how science, medicine, natural history, and other kinds of colonial knowing reshaped literature, culture, economy, and politics. Her first book, Epidemic Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2020) uncovers the history behind the dead metaphor of the "terrorism epidemic," by looking at documents of public health, policy, immigration law, novels, poems, films, and more. 

Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in various venues and are in conversation with the traditions of Urdu poetry, contemporary queer poetics, and lyric memoir. You can follow her on Twitter at @anjulifatima.

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