WASHINGTON, 25 July 2003 — Prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA failed to act on intelligence it had about hijackers, the FBI was unable to track Al-Qaeda in the United States, and key National Security Agency communications intercepts never were circulated, a congressional investigation has concluded.
But even had these and many other failures not occurred, no evidence surfaced in the probe by the House and Senate intelligence committees to show that the government could have prevented the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
A 900-page declassified version of the report being released yesterday was expected to provide fresh details of the Sept. 11 plot and government failures but no “smoking guns.” Excerpts of the report were provided to The Associated Press before its official release.
“A lot went wrong,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, said yesterday on NBC’s “Today” show. “If there had been a sharing of a lot of information at the right time between the CIA, FBI, NSA and so forth, maybe things would have been different leading up to Sept. 11, but there’s no smoking gun,” he said.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., asked if he thought the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented, said on CBS’ “The Early Show” he thought the answer “is probably yes. The most significant set of events, in my opinion, are in the section of the report that has been censored and therefore won’t be available to the American people.”
Said Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill.: “Anybody who makes an assertion that this could have been prevented is making a political statement because there is no evidence, no information that was shared with the top people in our government that could have led them to believe this was going to happen. It wasn’t there.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the report “confirms the importance of the strong, aggressive stance we have already taken to better protect the American people at home and abroad.”
McClellan cited as examples creation of the new Homeland Security Department, improved information sharing between government agencies and efforts to freeze terrorist assets. Responding to criticism that key portions of the classified report remain secret, McClellan said that “80 percent” is being made public, with only the most sensitive national security sections staying under wraps.
The report makes clear there were ample warning signs that Osama Bin Laden was planning attacks within the United States, and several opportunities to learn about the plot were missed by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
For instance, the NSA, the nation’s key signals intelligence agency, intercepted conversations by early 1999 indicating that two future hijackers were connected to a suspected Al-Qaeda facility in the Middle East, but that information was not passed on to other agencies.
The NSA intercept was the first evidence in US possession that eventual hijackers Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi were linked to each other and to Al-Qaeda, the terror network blamed for Sept. 11 and other attacks. But some of that information was not brought to the attention of other agencies until early 2002 after Congress began investigating pre-Sept. 11 failures. The two men were aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
In early 2000, the CIA had learned independently of the Al-Qaeda connections of Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi, but they were not placed on terrorism watch lists that might have prevented their entry into the United States. And the two lived with a longtime FBI informant in San Diego, who never suspected the plot and who did not learn of the CIA’s information until after Sept. 11.
“As a result, the FBI missed the opportunity to task a uniquely well-positioned informant — who denies having any advance knowledge of the plot — to collect information about the hijackers and their plans in the United States,” the report says.
The NSA had also intercepted “some communications that indicated possible impending terrorist activity” between Sept. 8 and Sept. 10, but these were not translated or disseminated until after the attacks.
“The CIA’s failure to watch-list suspected terrorists aggressively reflected a lack of emphasis on a process designed to protect the homeland,” the report says.
