WASHINGTON, 25 March 2004 — CIA efforts to stop Osama Bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks were hindered by confusion over whether intelligence officers were allowed to kill the Al-Qaeda leader, a federal commission said yesterday.
The CIA also had depended too much on Afghan indigenous groups to attack Bin Laden and CIA Director George Tenet understood its chances of succeeding were only 10 percent to 20 percent, the federal commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said in a preliminary report.
If officers at all levels of the agency questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy that policy-makers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy, “the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to 9/11,” the report said.
Tenet appeared before the panel yesterday, the second day of hearings with Bush and Clinton administration officials as the commission examines diplomatic, military and intelligence efforts to stop Al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and Washington.
The commission’s findings are to be released this summer and are likely to provide fodder for both Republicans and Democrats in their fall election campaigns.
Also appearing yesterday was Richard Clarke, counterterrorism adviser in both administrations. In a newly published book, Clarke accuses President Bush of ignoring the threat posed by Al-Qaeda until the day of the attacks.
Clarke’s charges were strongly rebutted Tuesday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. They said they were going beyond past practices of carrying out retaliatory strikes and had been developing a strategy for defeating Al-Qaeda.
Tenet told the commission, “Clearly there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced.”
In August 2001, the CIA gave Bush a highly secretive assessment on whether terrorists might attack the United States. It included no “specific, credible information about any threatened attacks in the United States,” according to a second report released by the commission yesterday.
The White House was not informed about investigations that revealed that two Al-Qaeda operatives — both future hijackers — were in the United States or about the FBI investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States with being a Sept. 11 conspirator.
The panel’s report said the CIA’s deputy director of operations, Jim Pavitt, told Bush shortly after he was elected that Bin Laden was one of the gravest threats to the country.
The CIA later told the White House that “the only long-term way to deal with the threat was to end Al-Qaeda’s ability to use Afghanistan as a sanctuary for its operations.”
Bush in late 2001 ordered US military forces, with British assistance, to help Afghan’s Northern Alliance depose the Taleban government that had been sheltering Bin Laden. Bin Laden was not found, and sporadic military action has been ongoing there ever since against Al-Qaeda and Taleban remnants.
After intelligence agencies began seeing strong indications in June and July 2001 that a terrorist attack was likely, some CIA officials were frustrated when some policy-makers questioned the intelligence. But Tenet, who was briefing Bush daily, “told us that his sense was that officials at the White House had grasped the sense of urgency he was communicating to them,” the report said.
The report said that the CIA also ran into major problems. President Clinton had issued several orders for the CIA to capture Bin Laden in an ambush.
While Clinton administration officials believed those orders authorized the CIA to kill Bin Laden, many CIA officials — including Tenet — believed they were authorized only to capture Bin Laden.
