Because there is no GPO version of them, two of the staff monographs, one on terrorist financing and the other on civil aviation, will probably never be published in book form. The commission's hearings—which represent the inquiry's only unscripted venue—are not likely to be purchased by many libraries given the cost, a sum well in excess of what the GPO would likely have charged. Put another way, for the foreseeable future, the one-volume final report is the only guaranteed bibliographic entry to be found for the 9/11 Commission at depository libraries.

VITAL FACTS DENIED—If making a private publisher the printer of first resort and relying exclusively on the Internet for dissemination of supplements to the report were the first two departures from accepted practice, what the 9/11 Commission chose not to publish at all is at least equally remarkable.

Comparable investigations have made available at least some portion of the raw information upon which the respective reports were erected, even at the risk of challenging the very conclusions a particular report might have drawn. The Warren Commission, for example, decided it was far better to present the entirety of the evidence in all its rich complexity than be charged with hiding information. Other, comparable panels have weighed the evidentiary part of their responsibility differently, but in no instance was a final report released without publication of some portion of the primary documents accumulated during the investigation. This is the only method by which the public can assess the accumulated evidence and judge the soundness of the investigation itself.

The overwhelming majority of records cited in the 9/11 Report are not only unpublished—worse yet, by the commissioners' collective hand they are closed to the public until at least January 2009. Undoubtedly, there is highly classified information about intelligence sources and methods that must remain secret. But it is equally certain that the great bulk of this information could be released sooner. There is no better authority for this assertion than Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission. "You'd just be amazed at the kind of information that's classified," Kean told the New York Times. "We're better off with openness."

It's easy to talk about openness, of course, but harder to do something about it. In this case, there is a real chance to do it. The National Security Archive in Washington has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for all the documents cited in the 9/11 Report's footnotes; the results to date prove that the release of redacted documents was, after all, feasible. That the commission made no effort in this direction speaks volumes about the nature of its bipartisanship, because the timing of the availability of sources always has meaning.

What is the meaning of opening the files, now in the possession of the National Archives, only after January 2009? Well, that is the month that a new president will be inaugurated, which means vital information will have been denied at least through the November 2008 election. Neither George W. Bush nor a likely candidate related to Bill Clinton will have run for president having faced a public steeped in the primary information from the government's own files.

esignating Norton as the publisher of the 9/11 Report was not the only plum handed out during Philip Zelikow's tenure as director. Zelikow engaged in some blatant cronyism when he arranged for a colleague from the University of Virginia, Tim Naftali, to write a history of U.S. counterterrorism policy from the Johnson to the Clinton administration.

The commission's prime directive was to investigate the 9/11 attacks, of course, but a historical account of counterterrorism policy is the kind of ancillary study that comparable commissions have published. As part of its final report, the Church Committee, which investigated activities of U.S. intelligence agencies, included an invaluable 100-page study of the CIA that was based upon access to classified internal histories.

But like other aspects of the commission's work, the Naftali study was not published as part of the commission's output; it was not even deemed fit for posting on the Internet. Why was it commissioned in the first place? Naftali, a Canadian citizen at the time, could not review classified materials. His study would have to depend entirely on open sources, meaning that at best it would represent a marginal addition to public knowledge. Naftali was not even a noted expert on the subject.

Naftali's unfamiliarity with the topic probably contributed to what happened next: he belatedly turned in a work that was way too long. Indeed, because of its tone and perspective it was quickly deemed unusable, according to sources on the commission. Since there was no time left to edit it, the commissioners would not even agree to have it posted on-line as a monograph.

There's an interesting coda to this story, too. Months before the commission closed its doors, in August 2004, some staff members found it odd that Naftali was engaged in research that clearly seemed tangential to his assignment. Sure enough, once the commissioners decided to "pass" on Naftali's history and gave him permission to use the study any way he liked, he took his manuscript—which had cost U.S. taxpayers at least $15,000—and nine months later published Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism. Naftali advertises the book as having been written partly "at the request of the 9/11 Commission" and markets himself as "the official historian" of the commission.

The commissioners reportedly have gagged over this self-aggrandizement, brazen even by Washington standards. They are nonplussed that someone should have secured work from the commission through a personal favor, produced work of no usefulness to the commission, yet managed to exploit the opportunity for his own professional and financial gain.