The 9/11 Commission: Justice Department's Blind Spot

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9/11 report will detail mistakes, chronology of errors
9/11 report will detail mistakes, panel says
Chronology to cite errors dating back years
Philip Shenon, New York Times
Sunday, April 11, 2004
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URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/11/MNGPH63KNC1.DTL

Washington -- With new evidence made public almost daily to show how the Sept. 11 attacks might have been prevented, the independent commission investigating them says its final report will offer a book-length chronology of the law- enforcement, intelligence and military failures that stopped the government from understanding the threat of al Qaeda until it was too late.

Many of the missed opportunities are well documented, especially those in the months before the attacks: the CIA's delay until August 2001 of raising an alert about two of the terrorists, who by then were already in the country; the FBI's failure to follow up on a warning in July from a Phoenix agent that al Qaeda terrorists might be training at American flight schools; and the bureau's failure to understand the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, the flight school student arrested in Minnesota a month later and later linked to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

But members of the bipartisan commission say that the government's missed opportunities date back many years over several presidencies and involve other branches of government, and that they will all need to be explored in the panel's final report, scheduled for release in July.

"This was not something that had to happen," said Thomas H. Kean, the chairman of the commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. Kean has gone further than other panel members in arguing that the attacks were clearly preventable.

While its final chronology will stretch across years, the commission's attention has turned to the nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks -- a period in which President Bill Clinton handed over power to President Bush and Bush's new team tried to reorganize the way the government dealt with the threat of terrorism. It was also the period in which most of the suicide hijackers entered the United States and made their final preparations for attack.

The period has come under special scrutiny by the commission as a result of the accusations of Richard Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism director, who said in a new book and in testimony to the panel that Bush and his top aides cared little about terrorist threats before Sept. 11.

Had they cared, he asserts, the government might have had a chance to tie together what now seem to have been obvious clues available to the government in late 2000 and early 2001 that al Qaeda was about to attack in America.

At least some of the clues were presented directly to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, when he received an intelligence briefing on al Qaeda threats in the United States.

In her long-awaited testimony to the commission on Thursday, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, acknowledged that the briefing contained a blunt warning that Osama bin Laden intended to attack "inside the United States" and that the FBI had detected a "suspicious pattern" that could suggest plans for a domestic hijacking.

In his earlier testimony, Clarke said that if the intelligence agency, the bureau and other government agencies had been forced by Rice and others in the White House to share all of their available information about al Qaeda threats in the summer of 2001, "even without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I could have connected those dots."

One of the most important of those dots was sitting in the files of midlevel analysts at the intelligence agency, which has acknowledged that it knew in 2000 about the danger posed by two operatives who were later among the Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi; they had attended a terrorist planning meeting in January 2000 in Malaysia.

But the FBI, long the institutional nemesis of the CIA, was not alerted until August 2001, when the agency asked that the two men be added to a terrorist watch list that would have blocked their entry into the country. It was too late. Although both men were living openly in San Diego, the bureau did not find them in time, and it is not clear that anyone at the bureau tried very hard.