What We Know Now

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U.S. Command and Control Broke Down
From almost the moment the first jet slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, the government's reaction to the day's events was so confused that it effectively eliminated any chance to fend off the subsequent attacks. The Federal Aviation Administration had difficulty tracking and alerting the military to the hijackings. Top brass did not learn about United Airlines Flight 175, or American Airlines Flight 77--which the FAA lost track of for 36 minutes as it turned toward the Pentagon until around the time the planes crashed. They didn't learn about United Airlines Flight 93 until after it went down in Pennsylvania.

By the time the military received Vice President Dick Cheney's authorization to shoot down any hostile aircraft, at 10:31 a.m., the last of the hijacked planes had already crashed. The commission report says Cheney did first get the President's go-ahead over the phone but commissioners told TIME that formal documentation for that order is incomplete. However it came about, the commission also reveals that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) never actually relayed Cheney's command to its pilots in the air, some of whom were seeking a jet, American Airlines Flight 11, that had earlier crashed into the World Trade Center. So pronounced was the state of confusion that Cheney told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during a conference call at 10:39 a.m. that he believed the U.S. had "already taken a couple of aircraft out."

The 9/11 commission now faces its toughest job coming up, in the middle of an election year, with a unanimous, bipartisan final report. One of the most contentious issues is expected to be the recommendation of how best to restructure the nation's domestic intelligence gathering. But all the members say they share the same goal to make sure the U.S. is never again taken so much by surprise.