The 9/11 Commission was chaired by Thomas Kean, a two-term former governor of New Jersey from 1982 until 1990, and included five Democrats and five Republicans.

[4] Former U.S. senator George Mitchell was originally appointed as the vice chairman, but he stepped down on December 10, 2002, not wanting to sever ties to his law firm.

[6] By the spring of 2003, the commission was off to a slow start, needing additional funding to help it meet its target day for the final report, of May 27, 2004.

After its release, 9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean declared that both presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were "not well served" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Before it was released by the commission, the final public report was screened for any potentially classified information and edited as necessary.

Farmer said, "At some level of the government, at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11 ...

The CIA then failed to reveal to the commission that over a year before the attack, it had been tracking the two hijackers' entry into and whereabouts inside the United States.

[21][22] Co-chair Kean believes the CIA's failure to be forthcoming with this information to the commission was deliberate, not a mistake, saying: "Oh, it wasn't careless oversight.

Kean and vice-chair Lee Hamilton wrote a book about the constraints they faced as commissioners, titled Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.

In the book, Kean and Hamilton charge that the 9/11 Commission was "set up to fail," and write that the commission was so frustrated with repeated misstatements by officials from the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration during the investigation that it considered a separate investigation into possible obstruction of justice by Pentagon and FAA officials.