Aftermath News
9/11 - BEING SPUN AND COVERED UP AS EXPECTED
Thu Sep 19 05:18:37 2002
208.152.73.33

BEING SPUN AND COVERED UP AS EXPECTED.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36754-2002Sep18.html


9/11 Probers Say Agencies, Officials Failed to Heed Data

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 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 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 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, DC, 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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