Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable

April 5, 2004 - New York Times
Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, April 4 ?- The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.

Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush's closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week.

In a joint television interview, the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, indicated that their final report this summer would find that the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable.

They also suggested that Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, would be questioned aggressively on Thursday about why the administration had not taken more action against Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and about discrepancies between her public statements and those of Richard A. Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, who has accused the administration of largely ignoring terrorist threats in 2001.

"The whole story might have been different," Mr. Kean said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," outlining a series of intelligence and law enforcement blunders in the months and years before the attacks.

"There are so many threads and so many things, individual things, that happened," he said. "If we had been able to put those people on the watch list of the airlines, the two who were in the country; again, if we'd stopped some of these people at the borders; if we had acted earlier on Al Qaeda when Al Qaeda was smaller and just getting started."

Mr. Kean also cited the "lack of coordination within the F.B.I." and the bureau's failures to grapple with the implications of the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was arrested while in flight school and was later linked to the terrorist cell that carried out the attacks.

Commission officials say current and former officials of the F.B.I., especially the former director Louis J. Freeh, and Attorney General John Ashcroft are expected to be harshly questioned by the 10-member panel at a hearing later this month about the Moussaoui case and other law enforcement failures before Sept. 11.

Mr. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House Intelligence and International Relations committees, said, "There are a lot of ifs; you can string together a whole bunch of ifs, and if things had broken right in all kinds of different ways, as the governor has identified, and frankly if you'd had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented." He said the panel would "make a final judgment on that, I believe, when the commission reports."

Mr. Kean has made similar remarks in the past, but commission officials said it appeared to be the first time Mr. Hamilton, the chief Democrat on the panel, had said publicly that he believed the attacks could have been prevented.

Mr. Kean and other members of the commission also agreed in interviews Sunday that the Bush administration's skepticism about the Clinton administration's national security policies might have led the Bush White House to pay too little attention to the threat of Al Qaeda.

Also appearing on "Meet the Press," Karen P. Hughes, one of Mr. Bush's closest political advisers and an important strategist for his re-election campaign, rejected the suggestion that the attacks could have been prevented.

"I just don't think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror of that day," Ms. Hughes said. "If we could have in either administration, either in the eight years of the Clinton administration or the seven and a half months of the Bush administration, I'm convinced we would have done so."

Since Mr. Clarke made his charges against the Bush administration in a new book and in highly publicized testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, public opinion polls have suggested that while Mr. Bush's overall approval rating is unchanged, public support for his handling of terrorism has slipped.

The commission has said it intends to make its final report public on July 26, which Congress has set as the commission's deadline, although Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said there could be a struggle with the White House over whether the full document can be declassified. Large portions of the Congressional report on the Sept. 11 attacks remain secret at the insistence of the White House.

Mr. Kean said Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff, had set up a special declassification team to "look at the report in an expedited manner and try to get it out just as fast as possible ?- nobody has an interest in this thing coming out in September or October in the middle of the election."

Despite allegations from Congressional Republican leaders that Mr. Clarke is not telling the truth, he received new support for his account on Sunday from a prominent Senate Republican, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

On the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Lugar said he did not recall any contradictions between Mr. Clarke's testimony to the Sept. 11 commission and information he had previously provided to the joint Congressional investigation of the attacks. Asked if he would join his Republican colleagues in attacking Mr. Clarke's credibility, Senator Lugar replied, "I wouldn't go there."

The commission, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is expected to send staff members to the White House on Monday to begin reviewing thousands of classified Clinton-administration foreign policy documents that the White House acknowledged last week it had not turned over.

Responding to criticism from former Clinton aides, the White House explained that it had withheld the files from the commission because they duplicated other material, were not responsive to the commission's requests or contained "highly sensitive" national security information. The White House has agreed to allow the commission's staff to review the documents but has made no promise on giving any of them to the panel.

"We have to ascertain for ourselves that we have had access to what we need," said a commission spokesman, Al Felzenberg.