The private watchdog group formed by the former members of the 9-11 Commission is closing up shop. The announcement of its last media event—a December 5 briefing where the 9-11 Discourse Project "will issue its final assessment of progress on all 9/11 Commission recommendations"—came today. This is no surprise: The project (funded by entities like the Carnegie Corporation, the Drexel Family Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) was intended to last for just a year after the commission expired in August 2004, its mission to "educate the public on the issue of terrorism and what can be done to make the country safer." But even if this end was long planned, it doesn't mean everyone thinks the job is finished.
"I think it's really ironic that they are closing up shop at a time when their credibility is being called into question because of Able Danger," says Debra Burlingame, whose brother was pilot of the plane that hijackers flew into the Pentagon.

Able Danger is the secret military intelligence unit featured in stories published this summer in which military officers claimed that they had information about lead hijacker Mohammed Atta a year before the 9-11 attack. What's more, the sources of the story claim they told the 9-11 commission about it, but that information was left out of the final report. The 9-11 commissioners have dismissed the story as overblown, claiming in an op-ed piece just this week that their staff checked out the story and found no evidence it was true.

Able Danger isn't the only question that people keep asking. People who lost firefighters sons, husbands, and brothers still want answers regarding the issues of command & control and radio communication. "The questions that remain unanswered are the whole stuff of chapter 9," says Sally Regenhard, founder of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, who lost her firefighter son in the towers. "What happened to New York?" Others feel the commission played politics with its finding that Iraq and al Qaeda had no meaningful connections. And Burlingame feels the commission was never disposed to really examine what damage was done by the legal "wall" separating intelligence and criminal investigations at the FBI, since one of the commissioners, Jamie Gorelick, played a role in interpreting that rule during her Justice Department stint under Bill Clinton. Other commission members had similar conflicts on other issues, leading to a lot of recusals.