WASHINGTON, 3 October — This is a super migraine day for employees at the FBI; and a major headache day for US intelligence agencies. On Tuesday, in two different hearings in Washington, experts blamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for undermining potential terrorist alerts by experts, and not alerting officials of the danger they posed. It also said the FBI has failed to evaluate the likelihood of future strikes. And a book published Tuesday says President Bush’s administration moved terrorism “to the back burner” until 9/11 when they took office.
Firstly, a declassified 131-page audit by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General criticized the FBI for foot dragging on intelligence after Sept. 11.
“While the FBI has taken significant steps to revamp its counter terrorism program, we believe it needs to develop a comprehensive, written assessment of the terrorist threat facing the United States,” said Inspector General Glenn Fine, who released the summary.
“Our audit concluded that such an assessment would aid the FBI as it changes it priorities and seeks to prevent, deter and disrupt terrorist attacks,” he said.
At the same time, a congressional investigator was telling Congress yesterday that two of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks might have been located before Sept. 11, but the FBI and CIA did not alert immigration officials of the danger.
The FBI office in Phoenix had sent a memorandum to FBI headquarters in Washington, warning that Islamic radicals were taking flight training classes, but the information was not shared with the Federal Aviation Administration until after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Eleanor Hill, the staff director of a joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures.
“Our work to date indicates that the flow of information between all agencies did not necessarily keep pace with the increasing nature of the threat,” Hill said.
In short, she said that bureaucratic and institutional obstacles prevented agencies from sharing intelligence on terrorists in the months and even years before the attacks.
Hill said the committee’s investigation found that “intelligence and non-intelligence personnel alike complained that a range of political, cultural, jurisdictional. Legal and bureaucratic issues are ever-present hurdles to information sharing.”
“We were told that not all threat information in possession of the intelligence community or law enforcement agencies is necessarily shared with agencies that need it the most in order to counter the threat,” she said. “For example, the FAA was not provided a copy of the FBI’s Phoenix memorandum prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and still did not have a copy two weeks after the matter had become public in early 2002.”
The FBI’s decision not to share the information with the FAA meant that the FAA was never able to warn the airlines that terrorists might hijack commercial jets and use them as missiles in suicide attacks.
“INS officials said that, had they been told to put the highest priority on that search (of the two terrorists), they would have used the Law Enforcement Support Center and might have found the two suspects prior to Sept. 11,” she said.
A new book, “The Age of Sacred Terror,” published this week by Random House, depicts the US effort on terrorism as crippled by FBI secrecy and held up by bureaucrats in the Justice, Treasure and Defense Departments.
“For the NSC working on counter-terrorism, that was crippling,” write authors Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who were director and senior director four counter-terrorism on the National Security Council staff during President Bill Clinton’s second term.
They write that White House coordinators received “a hundred or more reports” each day from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and the State Department, but that “there was never anything from the FBI. The Bureau, despite its wealth of information, contributed nothing to the White House’s understanding of Al-Qaeda.”
