Multiple members of NIST have came out and said they were setup to fail, misdirected, boxed in, etc.

Seven commissioners are on record "blowing the whistle":

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Thomas Kean

Lee and I write in our book that we think the commission in many ways was set up to fail, because we had not enough money, we didn't have enough time, we've been appointed by the most partisan people in Washington. :: Commission "set up to fail"

Lee Hamilton

So there are all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail: we got started late, we had a very short timeframe - indeed we had to get it extended - we did not have eniough money, they were afraid we're gonna hang somebody, that we would point the finger :: Commission "set up to fail"

Bob Kerrey

• 911 Commissioner Bob Kerrey claims 911 was a 30 year conspiracy (alt)

Timothy Roemer

A member of the 9/11 commission said Wednesday that panel members so distrusted testimony from Pentagon officials that they referred their concerns to the Pentagon's inspector general.

The panel even considered taking the matter to the Justice Department for a possible criminal probe, commission member Tim Roemer said.

"We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting," Roemer told CNN. "We were not sure of the intent, whether it was to deceive the commission or merely part of the fumbling bureaucracy." :: 9/11 panel distrusted Pentagon testimony: Commissioners considered criminal probe of false statements, cnn.com, August 2, 2006

John Lehman

We purposely put together a staff that had – in a way - conflicts of interest. [...] All of the staff had, to a certain extent, some conflict of interest. :: 9/11 Commissioner: 'We had to go through Karl Rove', Nick Langewis, David Edwards, rawstory.com, February 3, 2008

• Lehman: Commission Purposely Set Up So that 9/11 Staff Had Conflict of Interest , georgewashington.blogspot.de

Max Cleland

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reached an agreement with the White House yesterday to gain restricted access to years of classified presidential briefings, which had been the focus of subpoena threats from the panel's chairman. [...]

Cleland called the agreement "unconscionable" and said it "was deliberately compromised by the president of the United States" in order to limit the panel's work.

"If this decision stands, I as a member of the commission cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access," he said. "This investigation is now compromised . . . This is `The Gong Show'; this isn't protection of national security." :: 9/11 panel to get access to withheld data, Laurence Arnold, Associated Press, The Boston Globe, November 13, 2003

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President Bush personally has nixed the effort of the 9-11 Commission to get all the documents in the White House, especially the Presidential daily briefs, which basically tell the Commission and the American people what the President knew and when he knew it in regards to the potential attack on 9-11 and the attack itself and the follow-up. He has personally nixed that information coming to 9-11. That means to me that all of the members of that commission will never get to see the real documents that I think are sensitive. The President, as I think John Kerry mentioned, had time to go to rodeo, but didn’t have time to appear fully before the 9-11 commission.

Truth of the matter is, the White House has played cover-up and a slow walk to this game from the beginning. Now after sewing to the wind, they’re reaping the whirl wind. Now what they’ve done is forced the Congress to extend the 9-11 Commission two more months, which kicks the final report in July right before the Democratic National Convention. That’s not the Democrats’ fault. That’s not the 9-11 Commission’s fault. That is the fault of the White House, to slow up this thing and it never even held any public hearing for six months. [...]

One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up. :: "The White House Has Played Cover-Up" - Former 9/11 Commission Member Max Cleland Blasts Bush, Interview with Amy Goodman, Democray Now!, March 23, 2004

John Farmer

At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened. :: The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, John Farmer, 2009

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"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true." :: 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon, Dan Eggen, Washington Post, August 2, 2006

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Why do you think officials tried to obscure some of the faulty decision making and communication on 9/11?

It's almost a culture of concealment, for lack of a better word. You have someone like Sandy Berger, who by all accounts is a decent guy, taking rather extreme measures to remove documents from the National Archives and hide them at a construction site where he could retrieve them later and destroy them. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened. :: Q&A: A New Look at the 9/11 Commission, Dan Fletcher, time.com, September 11, 2009