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Thank you very much. Thank you particularly for reading that introduction that my mother wrote for you. I wasn't at all sure exactly what the tenor of the speaker tonight should be, and I asked Ambassador Walker how formal this presentation ought to be, and he said, "Don't try to be witty or clever, just be yourself." So I'll try to be myself tonight.

I would like to talk to all of you and then have all of you talk to me, because I really want to leave as much time as you can all spare to get your views and questions about what our 9/11 findings and recommendations have been. I want to talk to you a little bit about the process, because it's something that I think all Americans should take a little time to focus on, then talk a little bit about what our investigation, which went on for twenty-two months, found. Then talk a little bit about the conclusions that we drew, the lessons we feel should be learned from those factual findings. Then the specific recommendations that we have made to make the free world safer and to deal with this phenomenon.

First, a little bit about the process. When this commission was appointed, it seemed to be doomed to failure because it was very controversial. Its five Democrats and five Republicans were picked by the partisan leadership of Congress. The president picked the chairman; the chairman quickly withdrew – Henry Kissinger – because of perceived conflict of interest. George Mitchell, the vice-chairman, quickly withdrew because of perceived conflict of interest. So we did not get off to a very good start. In fact, each of us were picked by the Republican leadership, the Democratic leadership, almost because we were known to be fairly – perhaps combative is too strong a word, but energetic, let's leave it at that.

When we started out, we started out from very different perspectives. Most of the Republicans generally thought that the fecklessness and drift of the Clinton Administration was responsible for 9/11. The Democrats thought that the obsession with Iraq and with ballistic missile defense and the Chinese threat in the Bush Administration was responsible for it. So our early meetings were very contentious and we had very differing perspectives, to say the least.

But we launched in on a very in-depth investigation. We had a staff of some eighty full-time professionals. These were really very high-powered, experienced people. We ended up interviewing about 1,250 people, including President Clinton and President Bush and the vice presidents, secretaries of state past and present, directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, desk officers, consular officers. We really got a tremendous in-depth set of insights from aloft and [from low], under oath – we put people under oath not because we thought they would lie to us, but because experience had taught us all that being under oath helps to concentrate the mind. We gained access to, in the end, over 2.5 million documents at the top secret and compartmentalized code-word level. As far as we know to this day, we were not denied access to anything, any person, any intercept, any photograph, any piece of intelligence that existed in the government. It wasn't easy, as you all read in the paper. There were issues of executive privilege that were raised. There was a lot of bureaucratic resistance, for which the White House ended up being used to run interference. But all these obstacles gradually fell.

As they fell, we five Democrats and five Republicans found less and less to disagree about, as the process went on. We started out about one day a week, almost two years ago. We started around the middle of December two years ago. At first it was one day a week, then two days a week, then three days a week. By May of this year, we were almost all full-time. Every weekend was immersed in reading and catching up. So it really was a case of total immersion. By April it was clear to us that we weren't disagreeing about anything, in terms of the facts, because we took an approach that was really – look, let's leave aside our policy perspectives and our own brilliant views about how the world should be ordered; let's concentrate on the facts first. By doing that, a picture emerged, was filled in steadily, that really left no grounds for disagreement on what had happened, what the source of this attack was, what had allowed it to happen, and what went wrong in the United States government.

By April, it was clear to us that we were going to issue a unanimous report, at least in the findings, although we still had many differences about what we were going to end up recommending. All during this period we were talking about – maybe the best way to deal with this is take the British approach, with MI-5, or change this approach to human intelligence. So we still had a lot of disagreements – not really disagreements, but differing approaches to the solutions. No disagreement to the problems, the findings, what went wrong. Gradually, by May, the lessons learned were pretty clear as well. We had less and less to disagree about.

It wasn't really until the end of June, beginning of May, that it became clear that we were also going to be unanimous in recommending how to fix these things. That was quite remarkable, because those of you who – and I think it's a majority in this room – who are policy professionals and inside-the-Beltway people know that Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie Gorelick, myself, are not – we don't tend to consensus very easily. Yet we found ourselves really in agreement on what ought to be done to fix these things. It wasn't the kind of agreement of lowest common denominator – let's all find a consensus, let's work together, let's cut off the sharp edges. This is a very hard-edged report, both in the findings and in the recommendations. That was, to me, a remarkable and unprecedented – in my experience – intellectual experience, to have this kind of intellectual process that led to very decisive and hard-edged and unpopular recommendations, unanimous.

Our report, which I hope a lot of you have read – and if you haven't, you should – best ten bucks you'll be able to spend, I think, in the next few years – you'll find that this is a very substantive and analytic and hard-hitting report. Yet there's not a single dissenting note, not a footnote. All of us strongly agree and endorse and are out selling everything that's in that report.

So what does it say? I won't spoil the pleasure for you that haven't read it by giving you too much detail on it. The first set of recommendations are really policy. In a sense, there's been a distortion in the debate – surprising to us, the fact that Congress has almost shockingly jumped to do something about our report. Never happened in history before. I thought I was going to have an August vacation; instead, we testified before twenty committees. But this unfortunately has focused mainly on the organizational recommendations, and they were really secondary.

Our most important recommendations are the policy recommendations, which come first in Chapter 11 and 12. Our number one finding was 9/11 took place because of a failure of imagination, a failure which every one of you, I would be willing to bet, are just as guilty of as I am and as the media was and the Congress and the Executive. A failure to imagine that evil on the scale that Al Qaeda represented could exist in such an efficient, intelligent, organized way, and could penetrate every single defense that this United States government had with ease and confidence – so confident that these nineteen terrorists did not even bother to have a backup plan. They didn't need it. A failure to imagine that such a thing could take place, that a broad organization could conceive of and then train, select, recruit, train and deploy, a group of individuals whose principal objective was to kill as many thousands of innocent civilians as possible. A failure of imagination. That was our first finding.

We go into some detail about the failures that all of our institutions – government and nongovernment – have to share in, because this phenomenon has been growing for a very long time. About a year ago, during the middle of this investigation, I was in an airport and picked up a paperback by V.S. Naipaul – I thought it was a novel; I'm an admirer of his novels – but it wasn't. It was "Among the Believers," which many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with; I was not. This was a travelogue through Indonesia that he wrote – it's not fiction – some twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, in which he described this phenomenon of what was a very broad and tolerant and accepting Islamic society in Indonesia that was being transformed by a new network of schools that were teaching a virulent brand of puritanism that he found quite amazing and shocking. That was twenty-three years ago. Nobody took notice.

In 1983, we lost 241 Marines and sailors in Beirut to a terrorist attack by Hezbollah. We now know because of a trial last year that we had the intercept – it was planned and financed by the Iranian government. We knew it at the time. We did nothing about it. This set a pattern that combined a fanatic, aberrant interpretation of Islam with the methodology of terror. It worked. It really worked. It worked time and again against the United States, because there was no response. There was no effective response, no political response, no diplomatic response. Every time there was an attack against Americans in a hijacking or against the Marines in Beirut or the troops in Khobar, every president – Republican and Democrat – said we will bring these terrorists to justice, as if it was a law enforcement problem. Let the police handle it.

Well, we found that one of the tremendous problems that led to this failure of imagination was a failure to speak clearly about what the phenomenon was really all about – even today. We are not, after 9/11, engaged in a war against terrorism. That would be like FDR saying in 1941, we are embarked on a war against blitzkrieg, or a war against kamikazes. Terror is just a weapon that Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders have found works against free democracies. It's a weapon. We're not fighting a weapon. We are fighting a movement that has grown over the last thirty-plus years to be a global movement with a broad ability to recruit. We have to recognize it for what it is. It is not Islamic terrorism. We are not at war against Islam. It is a war against Islamist terrorism, an aberrant, evil, misinterpretation of Islamic doctrine that has been mobilized and harnessed to political purposes. It is in many ways, as Sam Huntington has said, a civil war within Islam. But it is targeted against the vulnerabilities and the institutions of the free world. We have failed to recognize it and we have failed to deal with it.

The governmental institutions that we have, in our State Department, in our Defense Department, in our intelligence agencies, really are set up – they're the legacy of the Cold War. They're set up to deal with nation-states, with the threats of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, with the institutions of potential enemy states. Our technology and our intelligence culture has become dominated by the technology that evolved out of that period, so that intelligence has more and more been seen as what we can photograph and interpret, what we can eavesdrop on and interpret. It's a kind of mechanistic view of intelligence that totally failed to detect and understand what was really going on, because this is an intellectual war, not a mechanical war. We're not counting missile silos, which our satellites – which we still continue to spend huge amounts of money on – are excellent at counting, but they do no good to find out what is going through the minds of the people in the madrassahs along the border in Pakistan, or what is taking place in the training camps in various sanctuary areas. It totally failed to even begin to deal with this problem. It's a failure at every level of our leadership, civilian and governmental.

This is why the Commission did not end up blaming anybody, because there are too many people to blame. It's not to say that we can say, oh well, there's no blame to be assessed. We felt it much more important to concentrate on making available to people, in a plain-speaking way, the nature of the phenomena, the history of this movement, and how we have failed to adapt to it.

So our recommendations coming on those findings are, first and foremost, we have to be proactive. Our first recommendation was we have to attack sanctuaries, we have to attack organized terrorist groups where they are, before they attack us. Militarily – we have to kill them. We have to go and kill or capture the organized, trained terrorist groups. They're not just in one place.

We go on in this first, most important set of recommendations to say that just as important are what in conferences like this are termed the soft policy options – just as important. Today, in Pakistan, as one example, if parents want their children in most areas of Pakistan to learn to read and write, the only option they have are these fundamentalist, jihadist madrassahs. It's the only alternative that exists in much of, particularly, the Arab world. The public education system is woefully inadequate, where it exists, and nonexistent in most of the areas that are spawning the terrorist recruits. We've got to spend money on working with these governments to produce a school system which, for dollars spent, is tremendously cost-effective and not requiring vast sums of money. We've got to help them build an alternative to these madrassahs, to begin to fight this disease of Islamist terrorism with truth, with the access to truth, with the access to learning not just the basic skills of reading and writing but of technology and the basics of making a living, that provide a matrix out of which, as Don Rumsfeld has said, we are producing more terrorists than we can kill in any war against terrorism.

We've got to take a very proactive role in forcing the recognition and the taking-up of the Arab League and other organizations of initiatives like a Middle East economic development community, which was the beginning of the Asian tigers' explosive development. We have to be proactive. We can't sit by.

Today, in the war of ideas, we are nonexistent throughout most of the Middle East. The only view of the United States is either provided by Al-Jazeera or "Baywatch." The numbers of hours that are being broadcast into the Middle East in Urdu, in Arabic, in Pashtun, in all of the languages of the area, that just tell the truth – I'm not talking about propaganda, I'm just saying providing factual reporting of the news, for instance – is minuscule. We spend no money on it, nothing. We've left it as a vacuum.

So we've recommended well above – before we get to any recommendations of reorganizing our government – we've got to take on these economic and social issues. We've got to spend money. We've got to be proactive. Our government has to take real proactive initiatives in these areas to work with the governments, to deal with the roots of this huge phenomenon.

Only secondarily did we get to moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic. That has been the focus of this month, reforms of the intelligence community. It seems to me what we've recommended is really no-brainers. A national intelligence director, a national counterterrorism center, an all-source integration – someone with the authority to integrate our IT systems, our security system, to force the kind of rationalization of resources so that instead of spending 90 percent of our intelligence dollars on hardware, we begin to spend enough money on interpreters, on language specialists, on area specialists, on human intelligence. There were only six graduates last year in American universities – all 3,000 of them – who majored in Arabic. Six! That's ridiculous. So these are the kinds of things that are less dramatic but just as important.

So I'll be more than happy to answer any of your questions on any of these issues. Thank you.

Speaker: John F. Lehman is chairman and founding partner of J.F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm. In December 2002, Dr. Lehman was appointed to the National Commission to Investigate the Attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (the 9/11 Commission). From 1981 to 1987, he served as Secretary of the Navy.