Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

WORLD TRADE CENTER AND PENTAGON ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 • 707to penetrate money-laundering banks, and to allow sharing of grandjury information with law enforcement and intelligence agencies; theact also expanded authority to conduct wiretaps in intelligence casesand expanded the use of wiretaps to intercept all telephone and Internetcommunications by suspects identified in warrants. The eventsof September 11 also led to measures to improve air travel securityand the creation of the Office of Homeland Security to oversee andcoordinate homeland security measures.On 27 November 2003 the U.S. Congress created the NationalCommission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, betterknown as the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the attacks andto make policy recommendations to prevent similar attacks. Thecommission was constituted as a bipartisan body consisting of fiveDemocrats and five Republicans rather than a nonpartisan body ofexperts, which led to later criticisms that the commission lackedthe expertise needed for such an investigation and was influencedoverly by the partisan biases of its members. In its final report,published on 22 July 2004, the commission recommended changesin both the international and domestic policies of the U.S. government.The global strategy would require better identification ofterrorist groups and pending threats, the elimination of sanctuariesin nations suffering from what has been described as the gray-areaphenomenon, and support for states threatened by internal Islamicfundamentalist insurgencies, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.The domestic policy recommendations included measures to promotemore sharing of intelligence among U.S. federal agencies,such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CentralIntelligence Agency (CIA), which had formerly compartmentalizedand not shared their data, to promote more cooperation of intelligencesharing between U.S. national and state government policeand emergency response agencies, and to create a national directorof intelligence above the Director of Central Intelligence whowould assume the latter’s former responsibility for coordinating intelligenceand analysis across the various federal agencies chargedwith intelligence functions. These recommendations led to the passageof the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Actof 2004, signed into law on 17 December 2004, which created theDirectorate of National Intelligence (DNI) and the National CounterterrorismCenter (NCTC).