The Eleventh Day: 9/11 - The Ultimate Account

by Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan

Writing with access to thousands of recently released official documents, new interviews & perspectives coming from a decade of research & reflection, Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan deliver the 1st panoramic, authoritative look at 9/11.
For many Americans, 9/11/2001, is the darkest date in the nation's history. What exactly happened? Could it have been prevented? How & why did so much acrimony & bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon & a Pennsylvania field? What remains unresolved? What is certain: Discord & dissent continue to this day.

Beginning with the 1st brutal actions of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the sequence of events & introduces the players: pilots, terrorists, passengers & those who died on the ground. Drawing on previously classified records & raw transcripts, Summers & Swan investigate the response of President Bush & the military that day, & the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by US officials &, as counterpoint, consider the contentions of the 9/11 Truth movement. With meticulous research, they examine the personalities of those behind the onslaught, analyze their motives & expose the US intelligence blunders preceding the attacks. They note how afterward--without good evidence--the Bush administration tried to link 9/11 to Iraq. Finally, they confront the question the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in a foreign nation long viewed as a friend?

Riveting, revelatory, thoroughly sourced & complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal event.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Terrorism, Politics, War, American History, Middle East

624 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Anthony Summers is the bestselling author of eight nonfiction books. His investigative books include Not in Your Lifetime, the critically acclaimed book about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; Official & Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover; and most recently The Eleventh Day, on the 9/11 attacks—a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I wanted to know about 9/11

1. All about the conspiracy theories.


The conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, they've become mainstream. In 2006, one third of the American population thought that Bush was somehow responsible for 9/11. Most of this third was under 30. I was very pleased to see that after recounting te events of 9/11, this book immediately confronts the Truthers.

What do The Truthers say?

1. The Towers collapsed because they were deliberately blown up by explosives already planted in them. The planes did not cause the collapses. (Building 7 collapsed and was not hit by a plane).

2. The Pentagon was not hit by a plane, it was a missile.

3. The whole reason was to provide a pretext for war with Afghanistan and Iraq, and the reason war was desired was because the military-industrial complex needed a new enemy to maintain its own power base & source of wealth, now that the USSR had gone.

I liked the way that this book discovered Truther Zero (the first person to post a conspiracy theory) in the same way that "And the Band Played On", a brilliant account of the Aids epidemic, named a Patient Zero. I noted the inevitability by which misgivings about the authorities' explanations of the events morphed into credulity about the alternative theories. I enjoyed the proposal by David Rostcheck of what he calls America 1 and America 2 – the first America accepts what the government says, and isn't on the internet, more or less, and the second America lives on the internet and believes the complete opposite. Each thinks the other is crazy.

Such terrifying, vast events create a great desire to believe in appropriately vast causes. The idea that 19 guys with box cutters did all of that strikes many as silly and offensive. So begins the search for a greater, more awesome conspiratorial explanation. But that, of course, is a fallacy.

In a strange way the conspiracists are like the defence in a court case. The prosecution presents the case – how the crime was committed, how it was the defendants who did it, motive, means, opportunity – and the defence, in this case the truthers, pick large or small holes in the prosecution's credibility. Like by hiring experts who give opposite views about the forensic evidence. The defence does not have to present a credible alternative theory. They don't have to tell you who they think really did the crime. They just have to demonstrate that the prosecution's presentation cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Okay, mostly I would disagree with the truthers about the meaning of the word reasonable.

I should be clear here, it behoves me - I think it really was OBL. But yes, the Bush regime really were gagging for a Reichstag Fire and they seized on 9/11 as no tragedy has been seized on before.

AN ASIDE : CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND THE PEOPLE

There is, too, a general reluctance everywhere, in democracies and non-democracies alike, to believe those in power. It was ever thus. Mountebanks and snake oil salesmen slide through this credibility gap. In Britain one single doctor published an article full of unjustified claims about the MMR (mumps measles rubella) vaccine in 1998. The article made a connection between this vaccine and the rise of autism in British children. This one article caused the number of kids being vaccinated to plummet to levels where the three diseases began to flourish again. The point is, this one article acted like the match which started the forest fire. But the forest was already bone dry, waiting for the flame. There was an immediate acceptance of an unproved surmise. People were gagging to believe it.

TWO REAL CONSPIRACIES

There were TWO actual genuine cover-ups regarding 9/11 however

a) the incompetence of the initial response to the crisis by the military and civil aviation authorities was covered up.

b) the total failure of the security services, all of them but, you know, probably the CIA most, to discover the plot was covered up or obfuscated and not admitted. I mean, that's what they're there for, right? To nip things in the bud? Not to give you precise chapter and verse about who done it after they done it. Yes, they did beat the drum about al Qaeda to the Bush administration, but there were no specifics because they had no idea of the 9/11 plot. No one ever admitted any failure.

I learned something on page 325 – this is a wow.

The most ominous warning, had it been heeded, reached the State Department from a source uniquely well placed to get wind of what Bin Laden was hatching. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, had sent an emissary across the border into Pakistan to seek out a US official to whom he could pass information. …in the third week of July this Taliban emissary met at a safe house with David Katz, principal officer of the US consulate, in the border town of Peshawar.

This guy gives a major warning to Katz that a huge attack on America is being prepared. The indication that this warning might be a serious one is that the people telling it to the US consulate is the Taliban. They can see retaliation coming their way and they're trying to avoid it by giving their enemy priceless information. However, one unnamed diplomatic source later commented on why this warning was not passed along :

We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the sky's about to fall in and it doesn't, a kind of fatigue sets in.

2. How did they know it was al Qaeda & Bin Laden so quickly?

The hijackers made no attempts to cover their identities and laid electronic trails of phone calls and money which led immediately to al Qaeda/bin laden associates.

3. Why did the Bush regime then target Iraq?

(Given that the ultra-religious bin Laden hated Saddam as a brutal atheist & that al-Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.)

Richard Clarke talked about the first meeting of Bush's war council after the attacks. He quotes Donald Rumsfeld as saying that there was a need to "do Iraq". He continues

Everyone looked at him. At least, I looked at him and Powell looked at him, like, "What the hell are you talking about?" And he said – I'll never forget this – "There just aren't enough targets in Afghanistan, We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks".


4. Why Saudi Arabia?

I.e. why, since Saudi Arabia and the American government have been spooning and billing and cooing since the days of FDR, were young Saudis eager to volunteer for this suicide mission?

Well – Saudi Arabia is well known to be enforcing a very extreme form of Sunni Islam – no music, women not allowed to drive, all of that. But many Saudis think their royal family is corrupt – especially after the First Gulf War when the King made the fateful decision to allow US troops in to help in the liberation of kuwait from Saddam Hussain. And especially since a number of US troops stayed on in Saudi after that war ended.

Now, how interesting that during the war council which swiftly followed after 9/11, when it was decided to go after the countries who "harboured" the hijackers, Saudi Arabia was not mentioned once.

WERE MY QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Yes, 98%. But this book does also include page after page of suppositions, possibilities, false trails, unanswered questions of its own, and the whole enervating tedium of acronymic boredom and who didn't say what about which splinter group and the money went there and the plan was not made here and they all went to hell in a little red boat. I skipped a whole lot of that stuff. It's for spy geeks. But it's true, you can't tell the story of 9/11 without all that smoke & mirrors. It's a stone cold drag.

My World Trade Centre memory is that we stood on the observation deck of the North Tower with all of lower Manhattan spread like a fantasy below us – we still have the photos in our album. My daughter Georgia was with us on that day too, although she didn't know it, she was minus six months old at the time. So that means she was nearly five years old on 9/11, just coming up to 16 now.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book way back in September, finishing just days before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It has sat on my bookshelves, both virtual and actual, since then, awaiting a review. I haven’t gotten around to it because, frankly, I don’t think anyone cares.

Not about the terrorist attacks themselves, of course. Everyone cares about 9/11. It is the third rail in American life, to be brought up carefully, if at all.

No, I mean that I don’t believe people – Americans in particular – care about 9/11 as a historical event. And why should they? These attacks were not like Pearl Harbor (the obvious analogue, in many ways) or the explosion of the USS Maine. They weren’t even like Hurricane Katrina, which killed almost as many equally innocent people.

September 11, 2001 stands apart because it happened on live television. An entire nation suffered PTSD just from turning to CNN. Personally, I was thousands of miles away, in the safest place in America; but like many of you, I witnesses the events in real time. Live. I had just finished breakfast in the dorms when I stopped by a television and saw the first tower fall. I’ll never forget the confusion between the anchor and the reporter: It’s gone. What? Part of the building is gone? No, it’s all gone.

The emotions of 9/11 have removed the event from the realm of history. It is no longer a thing to be recounted, or examined, or told through the ages. It is something to be simultaneously remembered, and forgotten.

One of the consequences of being my friend (some would say the “price”; I would prefer the “reward”) is that I make way too much about every historical anniversary. Without fail, my friends can expect an email on December 7 (Pearl Harbor), June 6 (D-Day) or April 15 (Titanic) reminding them that XY years ago, at whatever o’clock, such-and-such was just about to occur.

When the decennial of 9/11 approached, I conducted a personal survey of friends and coworkers as to how they intended to commemorate the occasion. I learned that people (at least in my tiny sample) fell into two categories: (1) people who didn't really care; and (2) people who didn’t really care but gave a reason.

The people in the first group consisted of football fans who weren’t about to spend the first week of the NFL season wallowing in a decade-old misery.

The people in this second group consisted of folks who said they didn't want to think about it because it made them cry. Some of these same people did allow for a Facebook update, utilizing the head-scratching “Never forget.” (This phrasing confuses me, and makes me a little uncomfortable. Obviously, it borrows from the iconography of the Holocaust, and its optimistic slogan “Never Again.” But to what end? What are we meant to never forget? Are we supposed to “never forget” the jumpers, leaping to their deaths? Or are we to “never forget” to check the travel visas of Saudi Arabians? I just don’t know).

Personally, I got a little addicted to the 9/11 pomp: the countless documentaries; the old footage; the contemporary newscast. I’m not some kind of disaster junkie, though. For my generation, 9/11 was the seminal event. If I live to be old, it will to me what Pearl Harbor was to my grandfather (though unlike my grandfather, I didn't get shipped off to the South Pacific). I want to know everything about 9/11, just like I want to know everything about the Titanic or the battle of Gettysburg. History forces us to take the long view. In time, even this – the jumpers, the doomed phone calls, the collapsing buildings – will be the Past: beyond living memory; alive only on film and on the page.

Because I see things through the eyes of a wannabe historian, I welcome Anthony Summers and Robyn Swan’s The Eleventh Day as a historical artifact: a one-volume, all-encompassing history of September 11 that includes the planning, the attack, and the aftermath. Its value – and it certainly has value – comes as a one-stop shop. There will come a day (and right soon) when those who did not live through 9/11 will hear of it from their parents, or their friends, or from (God forbid) Loose Change, and they will head to the bookstore (or more likely, to the internet) to learn of this thing, which is spoken of in whispers. Hopefully, The Eleventh Day will not be the last word on the subject; for now, though, it is not a terrible place to turn for the full story, if one has a desire to know it.

The Eleventh Day begins immediately before the attacks, taking us into the pressurized cabin of American Airlines Flight 11, shortly before it struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. This first section – detailing the four attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania – takes up around 80 pages. In other words, not nearly enough space to give voice to the drama and terror of that day. Indeed, frustratingly, the authors seem to have lost interest in the subject as they wrote. The first few pages are packed with details, down to descriptions of the flight attendants. By the end, though, the authors are haphazardly quoting from cockpit voice recorders and stringing together lines of dialogue. The effect is oddly unmoving. This is about the only time in my life I’ve read something about 9/11 and not gotten the chills at least once.

The authors follow up the attacks with a chapter on conspiracy theories. Editorially speaking, it’s a strange place to cram what is essentially a digressionary chapter. Whatever forward momentum created in the first chapter grinds to a halt for a post-mortem on the wild-eyed rumors that still swirl around the internet to this day.

Fortunately, at least, the authors do not buy any of the conspiracy theories that further complicate the legacy of the most emotionally-complicated day in American history. (Actually, we have come to a momentous moment for logic, as even the charlatan-in-chief Dylan Avery, of Loose Change infamy, has begun to back away from claims that the U.S. Government orchestrated an attack on itself, or let it happen on purpose. The central problem with these government-based theories has always been its presupposition that the U.S. Government is constituted by cold blooded ninja warriors; in fact, it is made up of thousands of ordinary human beings who live in your neighborhood, do not skulk in the shadows, and would have a hard time murdering thousands of people without breaking a sweat or telling a soul…or the Washington Post).

Unfortunately, the authors’ treatment of these theories is a bit scattershot and lacks focus. It veers from internet crackpots to the actual, concrete discrepancies in the official account. As such, this chapter pales in comparison to Popular Mechanics now-famous point-by-point demolishment of reputed “holes” in the story.

Actually, this is a problem throughout the book. The whole of The Eleventh Day is greater than the sum of its parts. That is, its various chapters are covered better, more fully, in other books. As I noted above, for a better refutation to the various conspiracies, check out Popular Mechanics. For a better tale about the attacks, check out Dwyer & Flynn’s 102 Minutes.

The subsequent chapters on the plotters and the planning of 9/11 are also covered more fully, elsewhere, in critically-acclaimed works such as Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower. At times, the ground covered by Summers & Swan feels well-tilled.

To be sure, the later chapters certainly have a lot of good information within them. And at times, they give you tantalizing hints at a fuller story still concealed. For instance, the authors touch on an incident on 9/11 concerning United 23, four young Arabs in first class, and un-claimed baggage with “incriminating material.” Was this another attempted hijacking? Or was it nervous white people freaking out that Arabs were on a plane while New York was being blown to hell? Who knows, but until I read this book, I hadn’t even heard of Flight 23.

Probably the best parts of The Eleventh Day concern the Saudi Arabian-shaped elephant in the room: to wit, Saudi Arabia’s foreknowledge of, and contribution to, the 9/11 attacks. Specifically, Summers & Swan detail investigations by the 9/11 Commission Report that linked two of the hijackers to the Saudi government. This information did not make it into the final report. Of course, the authors are not able to answer many of the questions with definiteness. To the contrary, the best they can do, oftentimes, is to pose more questions of their own.

That there can be no definitive answer at this time (or perhaps ever) is not the authors’ fault. They have certainly done their research for The Eleventh Day. To be sure, there are a lot of secondary sources here, but the authors have also benefited from the release of new documents pertaining to the attacks. The notes and sources section runs over 100 pages, and the notes themselves are required reading (of course, all the flipping back and forth becomes a major pain in the ass; this is why I love footnotes, as opposed to endnotes).

I wasn’t bowled over by The Eleventh Day. I’ve made that plain. The quality of the writing and the presentation of the material do not rise to the level of the best books about September 11. However, it should not be faulted for its ambition: to attempt to tell the “full story” of the 9/11 attacks in under 500 pages. At the very least, it clears up many entrenched inaccuracies and begins to restore the historical record.

Because someday, 9/11 will not be this gaping emotional scar that we aren’t able to explore or talk about because it’s “too soon.” Because someday, 9/11 won’t even be a memory. Because someday, 9/11 will be history – something only to be learned, and no longer relived.

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, let me start by saying that I am a spoiled middle class American and that I routinely ignore world events simply because I have the luxury to do so. I have been known to say about the news, “I’ll pay attention to it when it comes knocking on my door.” I am woefully ignorant of real world politics. I grew up in the 1980s and in my mind Israel and Palestine have been at war “forever” and the Muslims hate the Jews and in general America supports the Jews. As egocentric as that may sound, it is true. I simply don’t pay much attention to the outside world. Obviously, I know that there was an attack on 9/11/01; I remember it and I watched some of the fallout, but I didn’t really have much information other than the general mainstream propaganda.

I picked up this book because I saw that it was finalist for the Pulitzer and I figured I should probably teach myself a bit about this pivotal moment. I’m glad I did so because not only do Summers and Swan give an overview of 9/11 and some of the conspiracy theories and some of the real cover ups and mess ups, they also give a bit of a historical perspective on the attacks.

I’m not gonna say much else about the text, I’m just going to go through the highlights of things that I found interesting and/or did not know:

1. There are many more deaths/sicknesses/injury from 9/11 than just from the actual events. The dust that was spewed all over the area contained asbestos, lead, glass fibers, dioxin, PCBs, PAHs, toxins from vaporized computers. Many people breathed this (and for many days). By late 2008, 16,000 responders and 2,700 people who lived near Ground Zero were sick and under treatment from breathing the dust.

2.The main cover-up had to do with the poor response on 9/11, both because of communication mishaps between agencies (FAA, NEADS) and within the command structure (Bush and Cheney). Immediately afterwards, there were various lies told to the public about when and how events unfolded (especially poignant is that Cheney gave the shoot-down order before he could have actually received it from Bush). I agree with the authors: “To have done so, moreover, would certainly have been more sensible than sinister. At a moment the capital seemed to be in imminent peril, the two men properly heading the chain of command were out of touch….Many might think that Cheney, on the spot and capable, would have been justified in short-circuiting the system. If he did so, and had he and the President soon acknowledged as much, it would have been pointless to blame the Vice President. If he did so, and then persistently told a false story…history will be less generous.”

3. Al Qaeda was familiar to government agencies in the early 1990s and should have been more closely monitored by all three agencies (CIA, FBI, and FAA) and the White House. Summers and Swan assert that “In the spring and summer of 2001, half of the FAA’s daily summaries had mentioned bin Laden or al Qaeda.” And “In July 2001, exactly two months before the attack, an FBI agent in Pheonix had reported his suspicion that it was ‘more than coincidence that subjects who are supporters of bin Laden are attending civil aviation universities.’”

After the first attempted bomb at the WTC and the embassy bombs in Africa, Clinton had bin Laden on the radar. In 1996, “former CIA station chief Milton Beraden has said, ‘perhaps we could have controlled or monitored him more closely, to see what he was doing.’” In 1998, then CIA director Tenet cancelled a plan to nab bin Laden from his Afghanistan training camp.

As Clinton left office and Bush took over, the Commission on National Security attempted to get Bush’s attention but they were unable to secure a meeting with Bush or Cheney. In February of 2001, the chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism said that the Bush administration was “’paying no attention to the problem of terrorism.’” The same chair of the Commission on Terrorism (Clarke) was frustrated that “All the things he had recommended back in January 2001…were to get done—after 9/11.”

Most incriminating is that the CIA did not share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi being in the US with the FBI. Rather than both agencies watching these KNOWN TERRORISTS, neither agency seems to have paid them much attention. Summers and Swan do mention the Trentos’ speculation that “The reason the FBI was not told anything about Mihdhar and Hazmi…was ‘because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States.’”

4. “In Washington, warnings of impending attack had been coming in all summer. From France’s intelligence service, the DGSE; from Russian counterintelligence, the FSB; and-again-from Egypt. Citing an operative inside Afghanistan, the Egyptian report indicated that ’20 al Qaeda members had slipped into the US and four of them had received flight training.’ The most ominous warning, had it been heeded, reached the State Department from a source uniquely well placed to get wind of what bin Laden was hatching. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, had sent an emissary across the border into Pakistan to seek out a US official to whom he could pass information.” None of this information was heeded in part Summers and Swan imply because the leaders were all on vacation in August.

5. I already knew this one, but not quite to the extent that Summers and Swan belabor it. Iraq really did not have anything to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11. The war on Iraq was brought up immediately by Bush and Cheney and used as a distraction. Instead, the two nations that are “allies” (Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) have actually been implicated in aiding bin Laden and Al Qaeda both before and after 9/11 and have never been accused or attacked in any way. It does seem slightly ironic to me that the rationale for terrorist attacks on US is (in large part) because of US involvement with the Israel/Palestinian war and instead of “learning a lesson” (if you will) US kills 168,000 people in a war against Iraq (which could be argued was slightly unprovoked).

Overall, I learned quite a lot and it was presented in an approachable manner. The writing was sometime tedious, but I felt like Summers and Swan did a good job presenting lots of material and overview.

Personally, I was in NYC in August of 2001 and I have pics with the WTC towers in the background. I also discovered that I was pregnant with my first child on 9/12/01 (having the distinct pleasure of waking my husband up two days in a row with interesting news: “NYC is being bombed by hijacked aircraft” followed by “You’re gonna be a Dad!”).

[❀⊱RoryReads⊰❀ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 Stars

This was the least interesting 9/11 history book I've read. It starts out alright, but then deteriorates into a long, tedious examination of various conspiracy theories. After that, it's on to global politics, Intelligence, and the military; all told in the same mind numbing style. I ended up doing a lot skimming towards the end.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kelly, a Canadian bookseller who visits us in Chicago once or twice a year, brought this hot-off-the-presses book as a free-will love offering during his most recent appearance. Given the fact that it covers events up through the assassination of Osama bin Laden, I got to it almost immediately.

The Eleventh Day was written by a husband and wife team. Not being their first work together, the prose is seamless except for the final chapter where it shows signs of haste. The fact that they are both journalists, not historians, shows, but the endnotes are good.

The book begins with the events of 9/11 itself, then backtracks to a narrative about the principals, giving the biographies of some of the hijackers and their collaborators. After a cursory review of some of the unofficial conspiracy theories, it goes on to discuss subsequent investigations, particularly the 9/ll Commission, and some of the debates about outstanding issues, many of which remain outstanding because of the demonstrated cover-ups performed by the Bush administration, some of which have been maintained, despite campaign promises to the contrary, by Obama.

The considered opinion of the authors regarding the events of 9/11 is mainstream. Where their suspicions arise is as regards the official accounts given by the Bush administration. Here, incompetence reigned at the highest levels. Bush himself is represented as being pretty much out of the loop on everything, the main players being actors from the offices of the Vice President and Secretary of Defense as well as the agents of the FBI and CIA. The latter agencies, long embroiled in turf wars, maintained poor relations throughout, but the greater fault lay with the CIA which not only withheld information from the FBI and the State Department, but regularly broke the law by operating within the USA. It is maintained that 9/11 was clearly avoidable, thus the concern of the Bush administration to dissemble and lie after the fact, a concern heightened by the close relations maintained between the Bush family and the Saudi royals, some of whom actively supported bin Laden and his allies.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seeing Anthony Summers as co-author (along with his wife) made me both excited and a bit apprehensive about this new book overviewing 9/11. Summers has done great work on Nixon, but in his “The File on the Tsar” he gave credence to conspiracy ideas, claiming that at least Anastasia, if not other daughters of Nicholas II, escaped the cellar in Ekarterinberg.

Well, I was pleasantly relieved early on. Quite so.

Summers quickly dismisses conspiracy theories about the attacks, focusing above all on the Twin Towers. On the engineering side, he refers to the authoritative NIST report. On the common-sense side, he raises the rhetorical question of how could saboteurs plant thousands of pounds of C4 or whatever inside the Twin Towers and never be caught?

The middle 50 percent of the book gives an overview of how al Qaeda came to plot this. Not too much new here, primarily a good tying together of time line issue. But, he does note one thing in conjunction with the CIA’s quasi-criminal laxness on reporting would-be 9/11 hijackers to the FBI. (Plenty on that, a fair amount of the FBI’s bad-enough laxness.)

Reportedly, the CIA may have been trying to “turn” two of the eventual hijackers in an attempt to “penetrate” al Qaeda. Oops! Beyond that, some people claim that Saudi intelligence may have been using the same duo as a go-between, to try to “control” bin Laden.

Summers thinks that of little credence. But the general idea of how much Saudis, including royals, were connected to bin Laden, before, during and after 9/11? Different story.

The final quarter of the book uses as its starting point the fact that the whole final chapter of the 9/11 Commission’s report is still censored/redacted. Why?

Summers speculates, and has a few facts to offer. The censor is George W. Bush himself; he’s acting to protect those Saudi royals. And, there’s strands of evidence to indicate they were individually funneling money to bin Laden, and staying in some sort of contact with al Qaeda members, before 9/11, close to 9/11, and possibly even afterward.

I won’t give details of that; no need for too much spoiler alert. But … read!

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a fact-based historical account of the events of 9/11 minus the smoke screens and whacked out conspiracy theories, The Eleventh Day fills the need. This is not to say there may or may not have been conspiracies. The authors end this work with some disturbing unanswered questions.

While there are a number of books dedicated to the history of 9/11, this one covers the subject with the right balance of detail and brevity. The extensive bibliography and end notes provide readers more than enough pointers to more in-depth treatments of specific details. If you are going to start reading about 9/11, start here.

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The full story” is no exaggeration.

Wow! Of course, as a person who reads a lot, I already knew quite a bit about the entire 9/11 affair and the Middle East context, yet I was blown away by the scope and thoroughness of this work. This book contains literally everything there is to know about the events of that fateful day, from even before it was planned, to the consequences years later.

This was my bedside read for weeks on end.

[Ann Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Anthony Summers provided a detailed and well-researched description and timeline surrounding the people and events of 9/11. I initially sympathized with the Truthers and believed that the US government had a part in this tragedy- but after reading 11th Day I changed my mind and am more disgusted with how inept, ineffective and low our government leaders and agencies really are.
I’ve never been so emotional and incensed from reading a book! I was especially infuriated with leaders such as George Bush, Condoleezza Rice (who got promoted after 9/11!), John Ashcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld who had the final power and resources to stop an attack but instead chose to be completely apathetic to the myriad of red flags and increasingly strong intel indicating that an attack was going to hit American targets. What is more disgusting is that these same leaders chose to deny under oath all accountability and prior knowledge at the 9/11 Commision and even tried to smear the reputations of those who tried to inform and warn them. Why Rumsfeld and Bush chose to focus on Iraq (starting a war that cost $2 trillion dollars and hundreds and thousands of human lives) and not solely on Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the attacks is ridiculous and immoral. 11th Day illustrated that communication between the FBI, CIA, and FAA are extremely poor and needs much improvement and transparency. The 11th Day also showed what a poor job the 9/11 Commission did (completely omitting facts and persons/countries of interest) at revealing the various truths behind this tragedy.
How do these cretins sleep at night? I really hope they know that their negligence and failure to be proactive helped murder 3000 people.

[Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a member of the subset generation called the 9/11 Generation: we were between the ages of 10 and 20 on September 11th. I don't know if this precisely makes us different from say any other generation that straddled a particularly traumatizing national event, but it's something that I kept in my mind whilst reading this book.
That is its strength. Anthony Summers managed to remind me of the world that used to be, and to give an excellent narrative of the day that changed it. Also, while he dismisses many (though not all) of the claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement in a satisfactory manner he is also very critical of the Bush Administration for both its poor response to, and subsequent exploitation of this day, as well as the suppression of evidence that could link much of the funding of 9/11 to Saudi Royals, who as a family bloc had definite connections to the Bush Family, and the Bush Presidency.
But, on all this-which is itself quite disturbing, it is important to recall that the United States Military Budget, which exceeds the spending of any other governmental agency, by a huge amount, was completely incapable of defending not only the civilian population of New York, but even its own center of operations: the Pentagon. Yet, the Military Budget, which is well nigh untouchable-the true Third Rail of politics in this country at the present-is increased more often than not at the expense of education, health, infrastructure, and social welfare programs.
To avoid further preaching I very much enjoyed this book, and wholeheartedly recommend it.

[Florence Buchholz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors have done a thorough job documenting the tragedies of 9/11. Althought they debunk the various conspiracy theories that have flourished, they provide vital information about little-explored links between the terrorists and their financial backers. The 9/11 Commission Report seems to have ignored some evidence about the involvement of Saudi Arabia in the plot to harm American. And both the Bush and the Obama administration have kept documents that could shed light on the subject classified and unavailable to the authors or the public. The book also contains factual information about Bush administration officials such as Condeleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and others who did not assign a high priority to the possibility of terroristic attacks despite some pretty urgent warnings. And the CIA who knew two of the hijackers had entered the country but did nothing. It is theorized that perhaps the CIA wanted to "turn" them into agents. It is not possible to know for sure but I am not feeling very safe these days after reading this excellent book.

[Sharon Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a new book that I read on my kindle. It was mostly about the Bush Administration and his relationship with the Saudi Royalty. He and Dick Cheney covered up quite a bit about the real happenings of 9/11. Basically they are both liars and Bush should have been thrown out of office for what he did. His administration did not recognize Al-Quida and Bin Laden as a threat. Condolessa Rice blow off anyone who tried to tell her about the real threat that they were. The FBI did not share anything with the CIA, and visa versa, so the attacks happened when different sources knew that it was going to happen. It was a page turner and very interesting and very well documented.

[Brian Bundesen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent narrative, exhaustive research, and several startling conclusions. This book was hard to put down. Highly recommended.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thorough and comprehensive. This book is well worth the read and is a good balance to other material that has been written. It has some of the best sourcing anyone could ask for down to each paragraph's source being revealed. It does a good job at dispelling some of the more "out there" conspiracy theories and deserves high praise for mentioning the roles of first responders and their subsequent abysmal treatment by the government for their ailments.

He does a great job of destroying a lot of the unfounded conspiracy theories that came up after the attacks. The only lapse of good authorship is the needless diversion into the idea that the CIA met with Bin Laden in the UAE. He offers no evidence to support this and it seriously undercuts what is otherwise a well developed and researched piece. A rumor of a rumor is not a fact. Other than that this book is very well researched and an excellent work of history.

Conspiracy theorists say the buildings fell at "free-fall speed," meaning that they didn't just slowly crumble away or tip over like you might expect, but that the whole damn things just fell down at once, like a house of cards. That, they say, proves that the towers were wired with explosives by the U.S. government. Why else would sturdy skyscrapers just collapse in a puff of smoke like that?

When somebody tells you that the towers fell at "free-fall speed," they're more or less pulling that out of their ass. Or at least, they're referencing some other conspiracy theorists who pulled it out of their ass. They're not referencing any kind of scientific theory or measurement; they're just timing the fall as they watch YouTube videos and declaring that it looks different from how it plays out in their imagination. In other words, they don't actually know what they mean by "free fall" except that the buildings seem to be falling more quickly than they'd expect from the almost certainly zero controlled demolitions they've seen before.

Most of the video of the actual collapse is filmed in Cloverfield-style shaky-cam, but if you watch any of the still-camera footage, you can debunk the free-fall claim simply from the fact that there's debris coming off the tower that's falling faster than the tower is. We've known that objects free fall at the same speed ever since Galileo dropped some balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, so that more or less puts the kibosh on the whole free-fall business.

Part of the problem is that the Twin Towers were basically big, featureless rectangles that made it look like the whole thing was falling at once. Conspiracy theorists like Rosie O'Donnell like to rattle off statistics like how the towers fell in nine seconds, which just happens to be free-fall speed. But nine seconds is more likely the amount of time that Rosie put into researching the issue, because if she'd actually timed the collapse, she would have found that the towers took about 15 and 22 seconds to collapse, well short of free-fall speed. But then, that's why very few engineering graduates cite Rosie O'Donnell as a source.

As for why the buildings collapsed at all, that has to do with the way they were designed and their resulting inability to stand up to the horrific fires caused by the crashes. As for why the buildings weren't designed to withstand this kind of attack, it's because the world can only do so much to protect you from unthinkable horrors, and nothing will change that.

Some of his accusations make no sense:

pg. 5: "President George W. Bush at first promised to get [Bin Laden] 'dead or alive' only to backtrack months later and say, 'I don't know where bin Laden is...and I don't really care. It's not that important."

"Backtrack?" What Bush said was in the heat of the moment, after a devastating tragedy. OF COURSE it would subside eventually.

"But Obama," Summers writes, "promised swift and certain justice."

pg. 5: "US interrogators treated [Abu Zubaydah] with extreme brutality, using duress that has been defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many others, as torture."

Still, this book thoroughly debunks whacko conspiracy theories about 9/11, be they David Ray Griffin-type leftists or Paul Wolfowitz-type neocons.

pg. 180: "Tora Bora" means "black dust", not "black widow."

The authors, consistent with the state of other current research and writing about 9/11, do not place the event in the context of what else was happening in the world. Terrorism, to include al Qaeda, was just one of multiple issues on the nation’s and the President’s plate. They do provide a metric that allows some insight into the larger context. On page 309, they wrote: “Every day, too, the President received a CIA briefing knows as the PDB—the President’s Daily Brief. Between the inauguration and September 10, bin Laden was mentioned in forty PDBs.”

There were, therefore, some 234 PDBs. In perspective, bin Laden was mentioned in one of every six or so PDB, approximately once a week. Further, each PDB contained multiple articles. Assuming a low figure of six articles per PDB, there were about 1400 articles, about three in one hundred mentioned bin Laden. That small percentage is consistent with an analysis of the SEIB (Senior Executive Intelligence Brief) done on the Joint Inquiry. The SEIB is a PDB-like document for a slightly larger audience, but one without law enforcement information. I found that terrorism articles, whether or not they mentioned bin Laden, were a small percentage of the total SEIB articles.

So what was going on? There were the continuing international situations, generally briefed daily, including the Middle East, Iran and Iraq separately, Central Europe and so forth. There was the matter of a resurgent Russia that, according to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence briefings for the same period (which I also reviewed), was flexing a military muscle not seen for ten years or not seen since the fall of the former Soviet Union. That flexing was a front burner issue on 9-11, the Russians had scheduled an air-launched cruise missile live-fire launch for the day and for which a NOTAM had been issued. However, above all other issues the one that garnered the plurality of SEIB articles (and, by extension, PDB articles) was an emerging China. Of specific importance, on April 1, 2001, the Chinese forced down an U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, a serious international event.

International events aside, there was also the domestic issue of transition. While the authors wrote about bits and pieces of the transition from Clinton to Bush, they did not address the larger issue of transition time, in general. Each inauguration year, spring and well beyond, brings with it a struggle between a new administration to get its team in place and the Senate to confirm the key members of that team. 2001 was no different, with an additional constraint. Because of the contested election the whole nomination and confirmation process was delayed. There is no evidence that bin Laden’s insistence that the date of the attack be moved up had to do with the transition, but it would have been helpful if the authors had addressed the subject in a larger context.

In military terms, bin Laden was operating within the decision cycle of his enemy, a fundamental advantage, one that virtually assures success. When Mihdhar reentered the United States on Independence Day, July 4, 2001, the perpetrators swung into action. Six days later the administration met to discuss things. My recall is that one outcome was a request to put things in perspective for the President. The answer to that request became the August 6 PDB, in my recollection. Thereafter, the administration’s leisurely pace stands in stark contrast to the accelerated pace of the preparation for the attack. It is that contrast and comparison, discussed implicitly in The Eleventh Day, that warrants separate treatment.

[Steve Parcell · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to read a book that gives you extensive details about 9/11 and the origins and aftermath of the attach, then this is the one.

I liked that it acknowledged the various conspiracy theories as well but gave a measured analysis of them. Personally I believe the US government failed to respond to the threat despite being warned of an imminent attack and this was down to basic human error. I believe to state they caused it deliberately is preposterous.

I also find those who claim the phone calls from the planes and the towers were false abhorrent and the book goes in to great detail about this.

A fascinating read.

[Benjamin Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knowing very little about the details leading up to 911 and the aftermath, I found this gem which is meticulously researched and sourced. While it does cover the terrorist events, much of the book centers around the terrorists involved, the US's abysmal lack of prepardeness, and some of the questions around the decision to invade Iraq / derail investigations into Saudi Arabia's involvement.

There's a lot of misinformation around 911 and I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in what is probably the most factual body of knowledge available.

[Hans Brienesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chilling account of the 9/11 events made even more chilling by the revelations within the pages of events both before and after the Twin Towers came down. Reading this account will be a real eye opener

[JW · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely detailed account of the planning and execution of 9/11. However, all the intelligence intricacies became a little overwhelming at times.

[Neil Mudde · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the back cover of the book " Ten years have passed and Osama bin Laden is no more. Yet there is a lingering sense that the nation and world have been let down, deprived of the right to know -even deceived- on a matter of greater universal concern than any event in living memory.
It need not have been that way, The release in the past two years of some 300.000 pages previously classified 9/11 Commission documents a plethora of other material, and new interviews make it possible to lay some of the mysteries to rest. With access to the new information, we strive in this book to blow away unnecessary controversy, to make up for omissions in the record, and to throw light into the shadows of deception. In a time of anxiety, we want to tell the story as honestly as it can be told"
Most of us can remember where we were on 9/11 and see the tv pictures in front of our eyes, with the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Centre Summer and Swan have done an amazing job, of putting many of the details together, it seems shocking to think that after the first bomb attempt, the word was out this would not be the last attempt, in fact the book shows detail of information from the CIA and FBI many months before of persons coming into the US taking pilot's training, and how these agencies did not share this information Pres Busch and his government did not appear to be taking this whole situation seriously, there is talk of close relationship with some higher up Saudie, and Father of Pres Busch, Condoleeza Rice does not seem to come across as having taken this all serious, off course a lot of fencemending had to be done after the face, lies were told, certainly some attempt at cover ups etc. there will always be a conspiracy issue, as it seems the then US government including Rumsfeld were itching to get into Afghanistan, even though much of this originated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. Nothing will alter the fact that too many lives were lost, most persons died horrific deaths, having been to ground zero one is amazed that not more of Manhatten was destroyed, and what courageous people those New Yorkers are with the 10th anniversary of this horrific event coming up soon, one cannot help but wonder, but hope all will be well.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is eye-opening and it makes me furious too - it is very detailed in its research and it makes me not trust our executive branch of government. I can imagine so much of the denial and passing the blame too, having worked in a government agency in the past. I thought I wouldn't be able to get through this book because of its length and the subject matter, but I actually couldn't put it down.

[Pirate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthony Summers (though this is co-authored with his wife Robbyn Swan) is an outstanding writer whose books have never disappointed whether it be be with Tom Mangold on The File on the Tsar to his chilling one on JFK's assassination. The Eleventh Day (caveat I only came to read it and even be aware of it six years after its publication and perhaps some of the detail may be old hat to others) is a beautifully written, eye opener,, provoking lumps in the thorat and anger at different points, and page turner.
Sympathetic where it needs to be ie with the victims of 9/11 -- reading some of the exchanges of those who didn't make it that day is unbearable at times but also the courage largely displayed in the face of certain death is extraordinarily inspiring -- and I was not cognisant that each day or perhaps month adds to the toll as those who have had breathing difficulties and died subsequently from what they inhaled that day when the towers came down are listed as victims as well as the several hundred policemen 'New York's finest' who have developed cancer.
Some details are astonishing like the Cantor Fitzgerald employee who was discovered dead blocks away still dressed in his suit seated at his desk...
Summers and Swan deal effectively with debunking the ludicrous conspiracy theories which as they remark come with sometimes added 'authenticity' as the purveyors have PhD etc after their names....but as they conclude: "Such facts (truthful ones) in the view of the authors render the claims voiced by the skpetics outrageous, cruel insults to the memory of the dead."
But just in case one thinks that leads on to the book being a sanitised account where the authorities behaved in exemplary style against evil ie white hat and black hat...far from it.
Of course there is no truc whatsoever with the 19 hijackers/terrorists -- 15 of whom were Saudis although Saudi Arabia tried to deny that -- but they are excoriating about the Bush administration and intelligence services.
The latter (CIA/FBI) for failing to liaise with each other with among many things the CIA knowng two of the future hijackers Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi were terrorists and had multi-entry visas to the USA...Al-Hazmi would have shown up on a wanted list when he was pulled over for a traffic offence had the information been shared.
Warnings that something was afoot were aplenty from the Egyptian intelligence services to even the Taliban's Foreign Minister risking his life to set up a meeting (unbeknownst to leader Mullah Omar) with the CIA through an emissary in Pakistan to tell them Bin Laden was setting something huge up in the USA.
However the Bush administration gets it right in the neck...from almost the first moment the appalling Rumsfeld said 'Iraq' and to the extent that when they were orchestrating the bombing of Afghanistan post 9/11 the general in charge was driven to distraction by being ordered to start turning his attention to Saddam and Iraq...the Bush admin invented intelligence to implicate Iraq -- Atta meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague when the former was clearly in the USA -- all so they could whitewash the involvement of Saudis high up in the royal family.
When a bin Laden associate divulged three names of royal princes to interrogators the trio promptly and conveniently died within a week of each other.....one allegedly of 'thirst'......obviously not a camel then....and 28 pages revolving round Saudi and their role in 9/11 were redacted under orders of the Bush administration. Quite apart from the distasteful anecdote that the day after 9/11 Bush felt at ease enough despite the number of Saudi hijackers to smoke a cigar with the long-time Saudi ambassador to the USA Prince Bandar on the White House verandah...a photo exists but was denied to the authors.
As Summers and Swan observe in this spellbinding account the Iraq misadventure resulted in 168,000 deaths based on false intelligence against a country 'many Americans had been falsely led to believe bore some if not all the responsibility for the attacks of September 11." They conclude: "The 3,000 who died in NY, Washington, and the field in Pennsylvania, the many hundreds who have died since from exposure to the toxins they breathed in at Ground Zero, and all their grieving relatives, deserved better than to have had their tragedy mainpulated in such a way." This book should stand as a testament to those awful events of 9/11, the nihilistic terrorism leading to mass murder of Bin Laden etc and the appalling mismanagement before during and after by the authorities. A masterpiece.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthony Summers has written many other books, notably "Not in Your Lifetime" about the Kennedy assassination. I like the writing of Summers and Swan. The subject of this book is an extremely difficult one to read about in detail due to the death and destruction that happened on that terrible day. Reading the awful accounts told in the book of each of the plane hijackings that morning reminded me of watching the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan. Excruciating. In order to tell the story accurately, it must be told in detail without any sugar coating. That is exactly what Summers and Swan do, and the book covers the attacks on 9/11 and then delves into the life of Osama bin Laden, how he started a movement, and then covers the recent bios of many of the hijackers.

What I REALLY like about this book (and I suspect why some will not like it) is that the authors don't hold back in indicting the government of Saudi Arabia in the murder of thousands of Americans. Moreover, the link between the Saudis and the US administration at the time of 9/11 is highlighted, and the authors have done the research to show that the CIA, FBI, and national security apparatus in the US simply dropped the ball. They had the opportunity to stop these attacks, if they had simply followed their own intelligence. But the communication between agencies was either not there or very ineffective. People should have gone to prison for their failure to do their jobs because in a very real way it led to thousands of innocent deaths. That is not to say the terrorists are not to blame, they certainly are. But it is also the Saudi government that provided monetary support to Al Qaeda because bin Laden was a favored son...this went to the highest reaches of the Saudi royal family. And yet...the US did nothing in response to Saudi Arabia. Oil is thicker than blood apparently. The authors make the point that W Bush also withheld part of the 9/11 documents presumably because they reflected so poorly on his administration and our relationship with the Saudis. The material therein would have, and probably should have, led to Bush's impeachment.

Saudi Arabia basically paid for thousands of Americans to die on 9/11. We rely on cheap Saudi oil. So we looked the other way, and we are still looking the other way. That is the cold, hard reality. The people that come out looking the worst in the book are Cheney (as he should), Condi Rice (she apparently was dismissive or unconcerned when presented with intelligence on impending terrorist threats), and George Tenet, CIA director (who just didn't move on information regarding several of the terrorists, and they were allowed to enter the country when they should have been detained).

It is an important book because it tells the truth about 9/11. If you want to know the truth, read the book. If you wish to believe that our government was blameless in these events, you will not like the book.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

After nearly 20 years since the tragedy of 9/11 a lot has been written and reported on the why's and wherefores of what happened and so there wasn't much I didn't know about this truly shocking Autumn day back in 2001.

Summers and Swan give an unbiased, truthful account and it was refreshing to see it written as such. You will often find true accounts stories, particularly written by those from the same nation as the events that took place, very biased towards their country's side, and such wording as 'we kicked their arses' or 'obviously we were the stronger nation' come out. This, of course, is a natural repose, but it does detract somewhat from what actually happened. Summers and Swan don't do that. They give you straightforward, down the line facts, or at least facts as far as they know, and that is all. No dressing it up, no bias, no BS. And this made it more enjoyable for me. However...

The last 100 or so pages, retelling what happened after 9/11, did become a bit boring for me. Not so much the finding and killing of OBL (I don't think I'm giving away any spoilers here), which I found fascinating and even went on YT to see several videos on the matter, but the reports by the CIA/FBI and other organisations I found dull and very 'puff-out-cheeky' (You know that feeling when you don't want to do something but you know you have to?). I know it was fundamental to the retelling but I just personally wasn't keen on reading about it. I wouldn't have minded a few pages but the authors dedicated a whole 80-odd page segment to it, and it spoiled it for me a bit, hence the 3.5 star rating.

Overall though, if you're looking for straightforward facts and can take dull bits three-quarters through, then go for it. It is thoroughly researched and both Swan and Summers know what they are talking about.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Mild spoilers- nothing major, but I did bring up a few examples given in the book.

It took me a while to finish this book. I tend to read before I go to bed at night, and found the information I was reading more and more disturbing as I went on; thus I had to keep putting the book down as it was not allowing me to get any shut-eye from the anxiety it was giving me.

This is a thoroughly researched book, with the authors information coming from direct sources- actual government documents, official paperwork and transcripts of communications from the CIA, FBI, international governments, the 9/11 Commission report etc.....It is an easy read for people at any level- not extremely heavy despite the topic.

The book basically tells a tale of the years leading up to 9/11- what did we know? What did we miss? Who was responsible? Do the conspiracy theorists have any basis behind their claims? The authors appear unbiased- giving credit where credit is due, while squashing any falsities with solid evidence.

It then went on to tell of how the day and weeks after the attacks were handled, what we did right, what could have done better, and what we royally F'ed up. Some of the info we already know. Most of it will kick you right in the gut.

There was also a large section on the backgrounds of the terrorists themselves: what they did to prepare, why they felt that they needed to participate in such attacks, how easily they moved around the United States without any suspicion (or, when suspicion arose, little to no movement from the U.S. agencies to spoil their efforts). A main theme of this book was how the terrorists' action plans went uncontested from our government despite numerous red flags from credible sources.

Some insight was given into the terrorist mentality behind committing these acts: all came together because they have felt that their Palestinian brothers have been treated unfairly , unjustly and inhumanely by Isreal. And, because the U.S. is an ally who supports Isreal militarily and financially, that the loss of life in Palestine is indirectly and directly a result of U.S. contribution. Blood for blood in an attempt to wake up the U.S. government in pulling its support from Isreal. It is a general consensus across the board from these men, that, should the U.S. had stayed out of Palestinian affairs, that the anger and resentment towards Americans would not exist.

What I took from this book is that our government agencies are GREATLY flawed. The ego and VAST negligence of our intelligence agencies render them incompetent, ineffective and useless. While they are very capable in gathering the necessary intelligence, they utterly fail at what to do next with such info. Their competition with one another (FBI, Immigration, CIA, etc) have led them to withhold important pieces of info for their own victories. Their lack of communication and ability to plan effective strategies with such information is nonexistent. And their constant battles with bureaucracy and timely paperwork before they can take action has rendered them useless. Their battles with Clinton, Rice and Bush- who were each afraid of pulling the trigger on any action to capture these men (should they appear "stereotyping" or "racially profiling" to the pubic) was borderline infuriating considering the evidence was so overwhelming against the future terrorists. Why even have intelligence agencies if you are unable to share and use the information for prevention? Why have intelligence agencies of the info will sit, instead of be used for our nations security?

Some examples (no huge spoiler here): several domestic and international agencies found some of the would-be terrorists to have been planning a major attack the on the U.S. When the CIA found such info, they passed this info onto Immigration and asked that, should these men appear on U.S. soil, that they ought be stopped. Immigration failed to put the names on the list. Three weeks later, several of the men come into the U.S.; are immediately granted visas, and proceed to travel in and out of the U.S. several times under their real names and photos. One was eventually stopped, yet released due to bureaucracy and not being about to get a warrant on time to search his items. Another example: intelligence agencies failed to give those same names to local police departments. Looking back, investigations have found that the would-be terrorists were pulled over many times by local police (some more than twice each!) for speeding or other driving infractions.

Next, I found that both the Clinton and Bush administrations were GROSSLY negligent in the failure to stop these attacks. So grossly negligent that it makes my stomach turn to think about what I have learned in this book. When I think of how much they knew, how much they chose to ignore....and then think about those innocent people jumping out of the towers, it makes my blood BOIL.

In my opinion, based on the information presented, both administrations have blood on their hands, and they have yet to be held accountable. I am especially infuriated with George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld, who, having received message after message after message of intelligence; warning of imminent and certain danger (from both our own intelligence agencies as well as multiple countries and agencies outside of the U.S.); they chose to ignore such information time and again. BLATANTLY IGNORED. Not once, not twice, but hundreds of times, they ignored the obvious coming attacks. Some people who worked within those administrations were so furious at the avoidance and negligence of their superiors (Bush, Rice, etc), that they resigned their own positions because they were not being heard. Not only did they choose to ignore, but they were caught time and time again lying under oath, while testifying to the 9/11 commission. They have refused to give up certain top secret documents and have redacted extremely important pieces of information in some documents that have been given up. It makes my skin crawl to think that, had even one of these people taken the time to use this information for the safety of our country, that thousands of lives would have been spared, possibly millions if you count the unnecessary wars that came as a result.

I say that this is a must-read for all. It is important that we have knowledge of such information, if anything, to be increasingly aware of how our government and its agencies are being run. We must demand MORE form them, NOW.

[Stephen J. Golds · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly researched, comprehensive account of September 11th and another well sourced, engrossing biographical analysis by Summers.

The day of infamy that dramatically changed the world for decades to come, increased governments reach into covert and overt surveillance of citizens, launched two failed, costly wars and changed the Middle East, America and Europe dramatically in the years that followed.

The heart wrenching accounts of the people on the airplanes and in the towers were very sad and well written bringing a tear to the eye. The people involved really were heroes.

I was disappointed that Summers tried his best to quash any and all conspiracy theories relating to 9.11 considering that he has been one of the most high profile and well researched proponents of conspiracies relating to the JFK conspiracy. He dedicated a whole chapter to building 7 but I still don’t believe it fell down demolition style due to fire.

How much did CIA really know about the hijackers and Bin Laden?
How much information did the Bush Administration ignore leading up to that day? Were Saudi Arabia funding Bin Laden and how much did Saudi play a part in September 11th?
There are still many unanswered questions brought to the fore within this book...

That being said, I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants a comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing but defining moments of the new century.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most people, I can vividly remember the events of September 11, 2001. What I didn't understand was how Iraq came into this, and the conspiracy theories surrounding the World Trade Center. This book starts on the morning of 09/11 and follows the events as they happened. The authors were able to pinpoint the first person to die (an Israeli commando) well before the World Trade Center travesty. They recreated most of that awful day, based on phone calls, air traffic control records, and records from the 09/11 commission. They explain the decision to shoot down flight 93 and by whom it was made. They go into some depth about the hijackers lives during their final months. Most of all, they list the signs that everyone missed that indicated what was going to happen well before it actually did. There is some discussion of conspiracy theory, most of it about the government planting a bomb, but didn't cover certain ideas, about jet fuel being able to melt steel and all of that, which I would have liked to read about. They do cover the war in Iraq and the capture of Osama bin Laden and it does get into politics a little more than I would have liked. Overall this is a good book that covers all of 09/11 from the terrorist's first ideas all the way to the memorials for the dead. This might suffice as a text for younger generations.

[Pieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Eleventh Day is a well written account of the events of 9/11. Summers and Swan devote a large part of the book to analysis. It gives insight into Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, the hijackers, and the path that led to 9/11. At the same time it asks the crucial question of how far the intelligence services could have prevented the attacks. What information was known, when, and by whom?

The authors do not avoid conspiracy theories. Their research shows clearly and convincingly that there is no ground for the various alternative explanations at the moment they did their research. Their critical view also extends to the 9/11 Commission itself, highlighting what was included, what was left out, and how political interests twisted the truth. Leading politicians are not spared when it becomes clear that they mainly sought to protect themselves.

The book appeared at the moment Bin Laden was finally caught, which they managed to include at the very last moment. This gives the work a strong sense of timeliness.

It is highly recommended if you want a thorough and critical book on 9/11.

[Peter Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had been in my must read collection for years but only now have I got round to it and yet for all that it is still a fascinating and well laid out book.

It starts with an overall look of what happened on 9/11 itself, sparring no details on the horror of the day. The book then effectively resets to years before to the days of the Clinton administration and the history of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda itself leading back up to 9/11 itself covering all the errors that could have prevented the tragedy. Their were A LOT OF ERRORS most specifically relating to the total lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA as well as the seemingly lack of interest from the Bush administration who do not come out of this book very well.

A must read for anyone who wants to learn about the events of 9/11 and the lead up to them.

[Studvet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive and commanding in its detail. Can bogle the mind a bit with keeping track of people because of non - familiarity with Arab names. Would like to see it updated to current thinking and with any subsequent information. Illustrated well the devastating mistakes made at the top and the buck - passing and attempts to rewrite history to suit and to cover lapses. With lack of cooperation between agencies and wilful unwillingness to change mindset, it is obvious this should have been prevented. Such is the result of human behaviour failings, as ever has been in human history. Some people deserve credit as recognised the potential threat and did their job but were not taken notice of at the top.

[Krysten · Rating 4 out of 5]

(For the record, the version I read has a much more subtle and artistic cover than the photo on goodreads)

This was a pretty thorough accounting of the lead-up to 9/11, the many failures/fuckups/obfuscations of the government and the 9/11 Commission, and the aftermath, including that Iraq had nothing to do with it. It points out a lot of logical flaws and downright untruths of the government without veering into conspiracy territory and shows that the attacks were very much related to the US's relationship with Israel. I learned or re-learned a lot of details that have been blurred in the 20 years since the events.