Report of the 9/11 Commission

112. Although some members of the House sought the creation of a Select Committee on Terrorism in the beginning of 2001, the Speaker asked the intelligence ccommittee to set up a terrorism working group instead. Under Rep. Saxby Chambliss and Rep. Jane Harman, it held several briefings before 9/11 and became a subcommittee of the Intelligence Committee immediately afterward.

113. Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, chairman of the National Security Subcommittee of the Government Reform Committee, held 12 wide-ranging hearings on terrorism between 1999 and July 2001, with special attention on domestic preparedness and response to terrorist attack.Though the intelligence oversight panels' work was largely secret, the intelligence community's annual worldwide threat testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was public testimony (typically followed by a closed session). From 1997 through 2001, the threat of terrorism rose on the priority list from third (1997-1998) to second (1999-2000) to first in 2001. See Commission analysis of congressional hearings on terrorism.

114. Congress created three commissions in 1998. One, chaired jointly by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, examined national security challenges for the twenty-first century.This commission included stark warnings about possible domestic terrorist attacks and recommended a new institution devoted to identifying and defending vulnerabilities in homeland security. See Phase III Report of the U.S. Commission on National Secu-rity/21st Century,"Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change," Feb. 15, 2001.A second, chaired by former governor James G. Gilmore of Virginia, studied domestic preparedness to cope with attacks using weapons of mass destruction and presented five reports. See, e.g., Fifth Annual Report to the President and the Congress of the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruc-tion,"Forging America's New Normalcy: Securing our Homeland, Preserving our Liberty," Dec. 15, 2003.The third, chaired by L. Paul Bremer, the former State Department counterterrorism coordinator, with vice chair Maurice Sonnenberg, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, focused specifically on terrorist threats and what could be done to prepare for them. See Report of the National Commission on Terrorism,"Coun-tering the Threat of International Terrorism," June 2000.