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Probers say failure { September 19 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36754-2002Sep18.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36754-2002Sep18.html
9/11 Probers Say Agencies Failed to Heed Attack Signs
By Dana Priest and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 19, 2002; Page A01
U.S. intelligence agencies received many more indications than previously disclosed that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was planning imminent "spectacular" attacks in the summer of 2001 aimed at inflicting mass casualties, according to the preliminary findings of a joint congressional intelligence panel report released yesterday.
Although the panel's staff unearthed no single intelligence report foreshadowing the particulars of the Sept. 11 strikes, the investigators assert that U.S. agencies failed to commit adequate resources and analysis to understanding and apprehending al Qaeda terrorists. They also say that policymakers failed to alert the public to the gravity and immediacy of the threats they were receiving.
The report suggests that al Qaeda's fascination with using airplanes as terror weapons was more widely known within intelligence circles than Bush administration officials have acknowledged. While administration officials have previously stressed that much of the intelligence in the months leading up to Sept. 11 was focused on threats overseas, the new report also documents repeated indications that bin Laden and his network were especially interested in carrying out attacks on U.S. soil.
In July 2001, for instance, the CIA warned senior government officials that "based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."
The report was formally released at the first public hearing of a House-Senate intelligence panel that has been probing failures relating to the Sept. 11 attacks. It immediately revived the debate over whether the government did all that it could to detect and thwart the hijackings, which killed more than 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field.
It also brought new calls for a more in-depth, independent inquiry and for answers about President Bush's actions regarding al Qaeda threats in the months and days leading up to the attacks.
The White House refused the panel's request to put on the public record what Bush had been told about bin Laden and possible attacks prior to Sept. 11, according to the committee staff. Bush receives a daily intelligence briefing which included some of the most serious threat reporting.
White House spokesman Sean McCormick said last night that "in the interest of protecting the confidentiality of information and advice provided to the president and his senior advisers, White House lawyers asked that references to specific information that was provided to the president be removed from the report."
While the staff report strove for a tone of detachment, the testimony of two family members killed in the attacks offered an emotional coda to the hearing.
"September 11 was the devastating result of a catalogue of failures on behalf of our government and its agencies," said Kristen Brietweiser, whose husband perished on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. "Our intelligence agencies suffered an utter collapse in their duties and responsibilities leading up to and on September 11."
Representatives of the CIA and the FBI did not testify at yesterday's hearing but afterward offered their standard defense from criticism of their performance, that the congressional report contained only a fraction of all the threat information that the agencies collected in the period before Sept. 11. They said that most of the intelligence was too vague to act on.
"This was a small percent of what was coming in," said one CIA official. "What about the trains, cars, bombs, camels . . . there were a lot more dots out there that don't connect to anything."
The congressional report covers a time period that includes actions taken during Bill Clinton's presidency as well as the Bush administration. It offers considerable new information about threat intelligence collected prior to Sept. 11, especially in the summer of 2001:
¥ Thirty-three communications were collected by the National Security Agency between May and July indicating a "possible, imminent terrorist attack," the report said.
¥ In May 2001, the CIA learned supporters of bin Laden were planning to infiltrate the United States; that seven were on their way to the United States, Canada and Britain; that his key operatives "were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom," and that bin Laden associates "were planning attacks in the United States with explosives."
¥ Two months later, in July 2001, the CIA's counterterrorism center reported that an individual who had recently been in Afghanistan indicated, "Everyone is talking about an impending attack."
¥ On Sept. 11, as the planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI's Los Angeles field office received search requests for two suspected terrorists, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, known bin Laden associates who were believed to be involving in plotting an attack. At the time, both were on board one of the hijacked aircraft.
The report portrays a dramatic concern at senior levels, and in particular at the CIA, that did not, in all cases, reach frontline field personnel.
In a Dec. 4, 1998, memo to his deputies, for example, CIA Director George J. Tenet issued guidance "declaring, in effect, war" with bin Laden.
"We must now enter a new phase in our effort against bin Laden," Tenet wrote. "We are at war. . . . I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside the CIA or the Community."
But the panel's staff director, Eleanor Hill, said yesterday that Tenet's fervor did not "reach the level in the field that is critical so [FBI agents] know what their priorities are." Some FBI agents interviewed, in fact, "were not focused on al Qaeda," she said. Likewise, the FBI's analytic unit had been "gutted" by transfers to other units, she noted.
FBI and CIA officers and analysts on the frontlines were frequently overwhelmed by the volume of intelligence information they were expected to assess. "There was no massive shift in budget or reassignment" of people to counterterrorism after Tenet's declaration of war, Hill said.
Tenet's war memo came at a time of significant threat reporting, some of it quite specific and alarming, according to the report:
¥ In November 1998, bin Laden and senior associates had agreed to allocate reward money for the assassination of four top intelligence agency officers. The bounty for each was $9 million.
¥ In August 1999, the U.S. government learned al Qaeda had targeted for assassination the secretaries of state and defense and the CIA director.
¥ In December 1998, an intelligence assessment concluded that bin Laden "is actively planning against U.S. targets . . . keenly interested in strike the U.S. on its own soil."
On the question of whether the intelligence community should have been more alert to the possibility of al Qaeda hijacking planes and flying them into buildings, the report contradicts assertions by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others that this was not a tactic under active consideration.
Beginning in 1994, the report said, the intelligence agencies received information, some of it from foiled plots or interrogations and court testimony from terrorists, that one tactic being employed by al Qaeda was to use airplanes as flying bombs.
Among the new warnings related to airplanes:
¥ The FAA and FBI were told in August 1998 that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an airplane loaded with explosives into the World Trade Center from a foreign country. The FAA dismissed the report as unlikely, while the FBI's New York field office tucked it away in its "bombing repository file."
An FBI spokesman said yesterday that the 1998 report "was not ignored, it was thoroughly investigated by numerous agencies" and found to be unrelated to al Qaeda.
¥ A September 1998 report said that al Qaeda might be planning to detonate an explosives-laden aircraft at a U.S. airport.
¥ Later that same year, officials received another report indicating "a bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas."
These specific reports came after authorities disrupted a series of other terrorist plots in the early- to mid-1990s involving airplanes, including a well-publicized 1995 plot in the Philippines to crash airplanes into CIA headquarters and other targets.
"While this method of attack had clearly been discussed in terrorist circles, there was apparently little, if any, effort by Intelligence Community analysts to produce any strategic assessments of terrorists using aircraft as weapons." Without this intense focus, Hill suggested, that tactic was never elevated in importance above all others.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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