Agencies failed to grasp pre-Sept. 11 terrorist threat, lawmakers find

U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI, share the blame for failing to "disrupt" the Sept. 11 attacks by keeping would-be terrorists out of the country or trying to unravel their plot, according a congressional report released Thursday.

Those agencies possessed a wealth of information stretching back years about terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, his associates and their activities. Still, none of the intelligence indicated the exact time, location and method of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the nearly 900-page joint House-Senate document, which is the most exhaustive account to date about what the government knew and when about bin Laden and his plans to attack the United States.

But the congressional investigators concluded that the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, "too often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance in terms of a probable terrorist attack."

Also, the agencies didn't "demonstrate sufficient initiative in coming to grips" with the terrorist threat. According to the report, "some significant pieces of information in the vast stream of data being collected were overlooked, some were not recognized as potentially significant at the time and therefore not disseminated, and some required additional action on the part of foreign governments before a direct connection to the hijackers could have been established. For all those reasons, the intelligence community failed to fully capitalize on available, and potentially important, information."

The committee's report is a narrative of how 19 Middle Eastern hijackers commandeered four commercial aircraft and flew them into U.S. landmarks and a field in Pennsylvania. It documents specific pieces of information intercepted by a number of agencies, including the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, that the committee deemed relevant to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report's authors also laid blame on the administrations of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "Between 1996 and September 2001, the counterterrorism strategy adopted by the U.S. government did not succeed in eliminating Afghanistan as a sanctuary and training ground for [bin Laden's] terrorist network," the report said. The government was too dependent on law enforcement as a means of combating terrorism, and didn't rely enough on military or intelligence actions abroad, the report found.

The committee reported that a "closely held" intelligence document circulated to senior government officials in August 2001 said bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the U.S. as early as 1997. National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice has said that President Bush was briefed that August on bin Laden's methods of operations from a historical perspective. However, those briefings didn't mention specific methods of attack, she said.

The committee warned that if weaknesses in the American intelligence bureaucracy are not remedied, ongoing counterterrorism efforts will be "undercut." Intelligence critics have said for years that organizational and budgetary problems have hampered the agencies' ability to respond to terrorism.

The report reveals several details, however, about the history of the government's counterterrorism efforts:

• Senior military officials "were reluctant" to take action against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 partly because they believed the intelligence agencies couldn't provide them with useful information for conducting strikes. The military did participate in counterterrorism efforts "to counter" bin Laden's network prior to the 2001 attacks. However, the committee deleted specific details of those operations.
• In the spring and summer of 2001, the intelligence agencies had a "significant increase in information" that indicated bin Laden and al Qaeda "intended to strike against U.S. interests in the very near future." Intelligence officials widely believed, however, that the attack would occur against U.S. interests overseas.
• From as early as 1994 until the summer of 2001, intelligence agencies were receiving information that indicated "terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons. This information did not stimulate any specific intelligence community assessment of or collective U.S. government reaction to, this form of threat," the report said.

Intelligence officials have reportedly dismissed the congressional report in private, saying it offers few conclusions about intelligence lapses that haven't already been heard.

Some current and former intelligence officials have defended the agencies, particularly the CIA, as having paid attention to the terrorist threat since the mid-1990s. One senior intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous, noted that CIA Director George Tenet was one of the few senior federal officials drawing attention to bin Laden's role in financing global terrorist operations in the 1990s.

The CIA circulated a document in 1996 that implicated bin Laden as a terrorist backer and as having a role in attacks on U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993.

Tenet complained in testimony to the joint committee in June 2002 that the administration denied the CIA's requests for budget increases. "I'm talking about the front end at [the Office of Management and Budget] and the hurdle you have to get through to fully fund what we thought we needed to do the job," Tenet told investigators. He said his agency was short about $1 billion annually. "You get what you pay for," he said. "If you don't pay at the front end, it ain't going to be there at the back end."

A number of intelligence experts have taken issue with the notion that the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable. The committee's findings may fuel the debate over that question.

But one veteran intelligence official, who was among a cadre of analysts studying the threat posed by global terrorism since the 1990s, and warning government officials about it, thinks even the best minds couldn't have seen the attacks coming. Analysts couldn't have anticipated the Sept. 11 attack's "sophistication, the elegance, the precision with which [al Qaeda] pulled it off," said Ralph Peters, a former Army intelligence officer who served the Executive Office of the President during the Clinton administration. "Even had our warnings been taken seriously, there's a good chance [the attack] would not have been prevented."