Martin Heinrich: “every one of us remembers where we were when the first plane struck the World Trade Center the morning of September 11…”

“every one of us remembers where we were when the first plane struck the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001. On that day, we watched in horror as the North and South Towers fell, terrifying debris clouds flooding the ground beneath them. We witnessed the Pentagon, the heart of our national defense, engulfed in flames as a hijacked plane crashed into it head-on, taking the lives of all the people aboard that flight and over 125 employees in the building itself. Our hearts broke as we saw yet another plane go down in an open field in Pennsylvania, after brave Americans decided to fight back and regain control of the aircraft before it reached its intended target here in this very Capitol building. From that day forward, we pledged to never forget the nearly 3,000 Americans who lost their lives that day and the thousands more who were first responders that have died since. That pledge led us to immediately establish a bipartisan commission devoted to understanding how our Nation's intelligence Agencies could have left us vulnerable to this attack. And the 9/11 Commission discovered that our intelligence community had received warnings about the dangers posed by al-Qaida but that a systemic lack of communication and coordination between intelligence Agencies that were effectively stovepiped off from one another had left glaring blindspots at the highest levels of our government.…”