9/11 REPORT: JOINT CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRY

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yesterday. The U.S. intelligence community "failed to fully capitalize" on information that might have allowed agents to unravel the hijack plot, the joint committee concluded, and bungled clues that should have led the FBI to two or more of the terrorists before they could act. The joint committee's report represents the fullest examination so far of the U.S. response to the growing threat from the violent Islamic fundamentalists gathered under the al Qaeda umbrella of multimillionaire Osama bin Laden. Based on an examination of more than 500,000 documents and testimony at nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions last year, the report paints a picture of a poorly organized, understaffed and sometimes half-hearted effort, in agencies across the government, that missed the warning signs and failed to add up the clues. In more than 800 pages of findings, recommendations and narrative detail, the joint committee amplified existing knowledge of the unsuccessful effort to deal with al Qaeda before the attacks, and cast new light on certain aspects of that effort. Beyond the FBI failures, the committee found: CIA Director George J. Tenet was "either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of Intelligence Community resources necessary to combat the growing threat." U.S. military leaders were "reluctant to use . . . assets to conduct offensive counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan" or to "support or participate in CIA operations directed against al- Qaeda." "There was no coordinated . . . strategy to track terrorist funding and close down their financial support networks"; the Treasury Department even showed "reluctance" to do so. The National Security Agency, which collects signals intelligence around the world, took an overly cautious approach to collecting intelligence in the United States and offered "insufficient collaboration" with the FBI's efforts. One of the joint committee findings remained classified, but it appeared from surrounding material that the finding dealt with covert CIA actions to disrupt, capture or even kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. While Tenet had spoken of "war" against bin Laden and the CIA had developed a secret strategy known cryptically as "the Plan" for dealing with him, "the CIA's actual efforts to carry out covert action against [bin Laden] in Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001 were limited and do not appear to have significantly hindered [al Qaeda's] ability to operate," the committee wrote. While U.S. agencies failed to come up with a coordinated counterterrorism effort, the report noted, bin Laden trained 70,000 to 120,000 terrorist recruits at other camps in Afghanistan, and intelligence sources reported that al Qaeda was completing a "support structure" inside the United States that could mount multiple attacks. The joint committee concluded: "Although relevant information . . . regarding the attacks was available to the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, 2001, the Community too often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance." President Bush praised the "hard work and careful thought" reflected in the report, and said the failings identified in it have been corrected. "Our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working together more closely than ever and are using new tools to intercept, disrupt and prevent terrorist attacks," Bush said in a statement. But Democratic presidential candidates said the report shows the need for still more reform of the intelligence apparatus, and they criticized the administration's refusal to declassify large sections of the report. Committee staff members wrangled for months with the administration and intelligence agencies over how much could be made public. Even so, long passages remained classified, including nearly 28 pages of material on possible Saudi support for the hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. Other passages were declassified only after the committee staff agreed to make undisclosed changes in the text. An independent, bipartisan panel, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), is in the middle stages of its own investigation of the failure to prevent the attacks. The inquiry found that the intelligence community recognized before Sept. 11 "that a radical Islamic network that could provide support to al Qaeda operatives probably existed in the United States." In June 2001, according to CIA documents reviewed by the panel, al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- already under indictment for his alleged role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center -- was recruiting people to travel to the United States to "establish contact with colleagues already living there" for the purpose of planning acts of terrorism. The report contradicts early suggestions by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that the hijackers lived in social isolation while in this country, making their actions and intentions difficult to learn. Instead, the report quotes from an internal FBI analysis that states the six hijack leaders were involved with a "much greater number of associates than was originally suspected." The group, the report said, "maintained a web of contacts both in the United States and abroad," among them associates from universities, flight schools, jobs and mosques. "Other contacts provided legal, logistical or financial assistance, facilitated U.S. entry and flight school enrollment or were known from . . . activities or training" related to bin Laden. In particular, the report raises questions about the role of several men who aided hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who moved to San Diego after attending a January 2000 al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the attacks may have been planned. They died when the American Airlines plane they hijacked crashed into the Pentagon. The two were befriended upon their arrival in California by a Saudi named Omar Bayoumi, an employee of the Saudi civil aviation authority who had been the subject of a counterterrorism investigation begun in 1998. Bayoumi, who had large amounts of cash from Saudi Arabia, put down a security deposit and first month's rent on an apartment for the conspirators and set them up with a translator, a man whose brother is the subject of a counterterrorism investigation. After Sept. 11, when the FBI renewed its investigation of Bayoumi, agents found he "has connections to terrorist elements," including ties to al Qaeda, the report said. A search of his apartment turned up jihadist literature, and his salary was paid by a man whose son's photograph was found in an al Qaeda safe house in Pakistan. The FBI also determined after the attacks that another Saudi man who had befriended the San Diego hijackers, Osama Bassnan, "is an extremist and a bin Laden supporter." The FBI was aware of Bassnan previously and received reports that in 1993 he hosted a party in Washington for Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric now imprisoned for his role in the first World Trade Center attack. "However, the FBI did not open an investigation" at the time. Bassnan and his family received charitable support from Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and members of the joint inquiry have complained they have had to press the FBI to determine whether any of those or other royal family funds may have been used to aid the hijackers. The few passages that were declassified portray the Saudi government as uncooperative in the fight against terrorism both before and after Sept. 11. Bandar rejected any suggestion that his government was doing anything less than cooperating fully. "In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people," he said in a statement. "The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even knew about September 11th is malicious and blatantly false." Other people known to the FBI were in contact with Almihdhar and Alhazmi. The two were close to a Muslim cleric in San Diego, identified by law enforcement sources as a Yemeni named Anwar Awlaki. Awlaki and the conspirators moved from San Diego to Falls Church in 2001 and became associated with Dar al-Hijrah mosque. The report said that German police discovered a phone number for the mosque in the home of self-described hijacking mastermind Ramzi Binalshibh after the attacks. In addition, the hijackers worked and socialized with two San Diego businessmen who had been investigated for possible ties to terrorist groups. The FBI was in prime position to unravel the hijacking plot had its San Diego field office known what the CIA and FBI officials in Washington and New York knew: that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had slipped into the United States in 2000. They had rented a room in San Diego from a longtime FBI informant. In testimony to the joint committee, a San Diego field agent expressed confidence that, if the information had reached him, there would have been a "full court press." The two conspirators would have been found, he said. And that might have led to cracking the plot. The San Diego informant has said he did not find the men suspicious and never told his FBI handlers their full names. Yesterday, it was clear the panel is skeptical of the informant's truthfulness. The report said that he made "inconsistent" statements to the FBI on Sept. 11, that the results of a polygraph were "inconclusive," and that he failed to tell the FBI of the hijackers' contacts with four people he knew the bureau was monitoring. The FBI refused to produce the informant for an interview, and his lawyer did not respond to written questions, the report said. In a statement yesterday, Mueller, who took office just days before the attacks, called the FBI "a changed organization" whose primary focus now is preventing terrorism. An FBI spokesman defended its work in San Diego. "These individuals came into contact with people we were investigating, but there was nothing about them that was suspicious." He said the FBI is not investigating any of the men with whom the two hijackers were in contact. Staff researchers Lucy Shackelford and Margot Williams contributed to this report. A History of Missed Connections U.S. Analysts Warned of Potential Attacks but Lacked Follow-Through By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post July 25, 2003 Those privy to the intelligence community's classified reports on domestic terrorism had plenty of reason to lose sleep in the spring and summer of 2001. Analysts warned of potential attacks by unspecified terrorists in New York and California, and by operatives of Osama bin Laden somewhere in the United States. CIA sources in Afghanistan picked up chatter about an unspecified, impending attack, and the National Security Agency monitored at least 33 communications suggesting an imminent attack, according to a congressional investigative report issued yesterday. Bin Laden operatives were dropping out of sight, and according to some classified warnings, headed for the United States and Canada. The classified alarms reached a crescendo at the beginning of July, when top U.S. officials were warned that bin Laden was in the throes of advanced preparations for a major attack, most likely against an American or Israeli target. "The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests," they were told. But in the critical month of August, the government's complex and balky counterterrorism machinery failed to move fast enough to stop accelerating preparations for an attack. A Frenchman of Arab descent was detained in Minnesota after his flight training aroused suspicion; the CIA posted a request for detention of two Saudi men with worrisome al Qaeda connections, both already in the United States. But U.S. officials did not develop a strategy able to match a peril that only some analysts believed was grave and immediate, according to the historical record in the joint report by the House and Senate intelligence committees. Because of now familiar shortcomings in internal cooperation and communication, the U.S. government never came close to disrupting the Sept. 11 attacks. It was not, the committees said, for lack of opportunity. Instead, scattered moments of superb intelligence-gathering and analysis were either not noticed or not heeded. And no one pulled together disparate bits of information from immigration, intelligence, aviation and other federal records into a comprehensive and actionable tableau of motive, plot, preparation and imminent danger. The well-documented ability of the hijackers to stay many steps ahead of their disorganized U.S. government foes is, after all, the principal reason why almost all the intelligence agencies implicated in the disaster have been at least partly reorganized and why the Department of Homeland Security was created from 21 agencies with 180,000 employees. But the report -- and particularly its detailed chronology of events in the last weeks when the attack might have been prevented -- makes clear that the disaster was the result as much of lapses in government follow-through as it was the result of defects of intelligence. For example, the July 2001 "Phoenix" memo, written by an FBI agent in Arizona, warned about "an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" taking flight training. It urged the agency to collect data on flight schools and foreign students, and to discuss the potential threat with other intelligence agencies. The memo appears especially prescient now, because one of the men mentioned in the memo was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 with a senior al Qaeda facilitator, Abu Zubayda. But the memo was not shared with the CIA, aviation or immigration authorities. Moreover, it "generated little or no interest" among the top FBI officials in Washington and New York who received it, the committees concluded. In their report, the lawmakers decried that "the best example of . . . creative, imaginative, and aggressive analysis of relevant intelligence" they saw during the probe never got any traction. August was the month that senior government officials were warned in a widely circulated classified report that al Qaeda apparently had a support structure in the United States. It was also the month that a document specifically written for the president warned of bin Laden's long-held desire to conduct attacks within the United States, and his possible preparations for airplane hijackings. In mid-August, U.S. immigration agents detained Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national enrolled at a Minnesota flight school, for overstaying his visa. They acted after local FBI agents became suspicious that he was involved in a hijacking plot, but decided -- based on what the agency later determined was an erroneous interpretation of the law -- that they could not search his belongings. In those belongings, the committee's report said, were papers linking him to suspected al Qaeda operatives. On Aug. 21, the Minneapolis FBI field office sent an e-mail to headquarters in Washington, saying that the U.S. Secret Service should be warned about Moussaoui's threat potential. If he seized an aircraft flying from London to New York, "it will have the fuel on board to reach DC," the e-mail said. But the committees found that the headquarters' message, in response to the e-mail and eventually issued on Sept. 4, did "not provide any analysis of Moussaoui's actions or plans," put his actions in context, or even describe what threat he posed. Even the government's anti-terrorism agencies were recognizing their own failures. On the day of Moussaoui's detention, a CIA Counter-Terrorism Center report had concluded that "for every UBL [Usama Bin Laden] that we stop, an estimated 50 operatives slip thought our loose net undetected. . . . It is clear that UBL is building up a worldwide infrastructure which will allow him to launch multiple and simultaneous attacks with little or no warning." Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar -- who would become two of the principal hijackers - - were perfect illustrations. Although Alhazmi had been in the country for more than a year and Almihdhar arrived in New York on July 4, poor communication between the CIA and the FBI left key authorities ignorant of their August whereabouts and their links to an al Qaeda operative implicated in the bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy vessel at port in Yemen. The committees ticked off the mistakes: The CIA had designated both as "terrorist operatives" in January 2000 and warned that Alhazmi's travel may be in support of terrorist missions. Almihdhar had been the focus of an intensive CIA search in Thailand that year, but not in the United States. A CIA directive in December 1999 had demanded that "terrorist personality information" be flagged for the State Department and others. But a CIA officer told the committee he decided not to tell an FBI agent about Almihdhar's U.S. visa at a key meeting in June because the information would "not mean anything" to the agent. Finally, on Aug. 23, the CIA sent a notice to the State Department, Customs and Immigration Services -- but not to the Federal Aviation Administration -- requesting that Almihdhar and Alhazmi be added to their watch lists and formally denied entry to the United States. They knew that Almihdhar was already here, but sought to ensure he would be stopped if he tried to leave. The State Department acted the next day, and then revoked Almihdhar's visa two days later. But in a critical omission, officials at the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the FBI's Financial Review Group -- which both have the power to tap into private credit card and bank data -- were not informed, the committees said. Officials of both groups said later that had they been told, they could readily have located Alhazmi and Almihdhar, who were using credit cards to supplement their income from funds sent from overseas. The next day, CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center alerted stations around the world about Moussaoui. The FBI followed up with its own general alert about the arrest on Sept. 4, but failed to request any particular action or link him to a broader threat of an al Qaeda attack. On Aug. 24, according to the committee, the hijackers began to purchase their airplane tickets. An FBI agent in New York requested a full criminal investigation of Almihdhar, but an unnamed FBI headquarters official rejected the request, citing the absence of conclusive information about Almihdhar's involvement in a substantial federal crime, and the need to maintain a "wall" between intelligence and any criminal probes. The New York agent protested that "someday someone will die" because the FBI's reticence was protecting only bin Laden, not potential victims. But the protest had no effect, and no probe was launched; also, no FBI check was made on Alhazmi. The search was largely limited to checking to see if Almihdhar was registered at a New York Marriott hotel or had a driver's license. Neither turned up any information, and so FBI agents in Los Angeles were asked to look for Almihdhar and check airline records, the committee said. The new anti-bin Laden presidential directive was declared ready for the president's consideration on Sept. 10. That same day, the NSA obtained two intercepts quoting suspected terrorists predicting a significant development on Sept. 11. The intercepts were not translated until Sept. 12, the committee said in a heavily redacted passage of the report, "because of the nature of the processes involved." On Sept. 11, Almihdhar and Alhazmi boarded American Airlines flight 77 without difficulty and hijacked it during its flight before crashing it into the Pentagon. White House, CIA Kept Key Portions of Report Classified By Dana Priest Washington Post July 25, 2003 President Bush was warned in a more specific way than previously known about intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda terrorists were seeking to attack the United States, a report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks indicated yesterday. Separately, the report cited one CIA memo that concluded there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi individuals provided financial assistance to al Qaeda operatives in the United States. These revelations are not the subject of the congressional report's narratives or findings, but are among the nuggets embedded in a story focused largely on the mid-level workings of the CIA, FBI and U.S. military. Two intriguing -- and politically volatile -- questions surrounding the Sept. 11 plot have been how personally engaged Bush and his predecessor were in counterterrorism before the attacks, and what role some Saudi officials may have played in sustaining the 19 terrorists who commandeered four airplanes and flew three of them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. To varying degrees, the answers remain a mystery, despite an unprecedented seven-month effort by a joint House and Senate panel to fully understand how a group of Arab terrorists could have pulled off such a scheme. The CIA refused to permit publication of information potentially implicating Saudi officials on national security grounds, arguing that disclosure could upset relations with a key U.S. ally. Lawmakers complained it was merely to avoid embarrassment. The White House, meanwhile, resisted efforts to pin down Bush's knowledge of al Qaeda threats and to catalogue the executive's pre-Sept. 11 strategy to fight terrorists. It was justified largely on legal grounds, but Democrats said the secrecy was meant to protect Bush from criticism. And while the report contains extensive details about counterterrorism policy and operations under President Bill Clinton, it also leaves out substantial material deemed classified. The panel took testimony from former senior advisers to Clinton and Bush but did not interview either president. Still, the report offers bits of new information about both presidents and the Saudis, and lays out a possible road map for the independent commission charged by Congress to pick up the investigation of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. It also offers pointed criticism of both Bush and Clinton, concluding that neither "put the government or the intelligence community on a war footing before September 11" -- despite ample evidence of al Qaeda's dangerous designs. With respect to Bush, the congressional panel indicated that it tried to determine "to what extent the President received threat-specific warnings during this period" -- but obtained only limited information. Among the only clues cited in the report about Bush's knowledge of al Qaeda's intentions against the United States is an Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing (PDB) -- described in the report only as a "closely-held intelligence report" -- that included information "acquired in May 2001 that indicated a group of [Osama] Bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives." The PDB also said "that Bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States for years and that the group apparently maintained a support base here." It cited "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to the report. In a May 16, 2002, briefing for reporters, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the PDB was a historical look at bin Laden's methods dating to 1997. She characterized the briefing as an "analytic report" that summed up bin Laden's methods of operation. "It was not a warning," she said. "There was no specific time or place mentioned." The CIA declined to declassify the PDB, and the White House, which had the authority to release it, declined to do so, citing "executive privilege." Executive privilege allows the president to withhold from public disclosure all advice and communications he receives from advisers so that they feel free to offer frank advice without fearing that it will become public. The Aug. 6 PDB came amid a barrage of intelligence reporting indicating that al Qaeda was planning attacks, somewhere, against U.S. interests. The intelligence community has said its focus was on possible attacks overseas. Deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley, who refused to testify before the panel but submitted written responses to questions, told the panel that the National Security Council held four deputy committee meetings between May and the end of July 2001 in an effort to adopt a more aggressive strategy vis-a-vis al Qaeda. The review was finalized Sept. 4, 2001. Bush had not reviewed the proposal before Sept. 11, Hadley wrote the panel. The committee also unsuccessfully sought budget information from the Office of Management and Budget to determine where in the Bush administration the decision was made not to provide more funding for counterterrorism activities. CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a closed-door session on June 18, 2002, that he had told other members of the administration that his counterterrorism budget would be as much as $1 billion short each year for the next five years. "We told that to everybody downtown for as long as anybody would listen and never got to first base," Tenet told the panel. On the issue of Saudi Arabia, the report cited a CIA memorandum that said connections between some hijackers and some Saudis living in the United States amounted to "incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists" from Saudi officials. This section of the report refers only to "foreign support." Officials from various branches of the U.S. government said those two words refer to Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the report said, further investigation of these allegations "could reveal legitimate, and innocent, explanations for these associations." The report makes no accusation that it was ever the policy of the Saudi government to support terrorism. Rather, the questionable activity involved Saudi citizens, some of whom worked for the Saudi government. The panel also took the FBI to task for not aggressively pursuing allegations against Saudi individuals, including a network of businessmen and religious figures in San Diego who, together, provided two key hijackers with seemingly unlimited money, an interpreter and other support. The report said that because Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally, "the United States had not established heightened screening for illegal immigration or terrorism by visitors from Saudi Arabia." One U.S. official told the panel "he believed the U.S. government's hope of eventually obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance to the U.S. government on this matter is contrary to Saudi national interests." Yesterday, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, issued a statement refuting the criticism of his country. "It is unfortunate that false accusations against Saudi Arabia continue to be made by some for political purposes despite the fact that the kingdom has been one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism," he said. Members of the panel offered differing assessments of the impact of the administration's efforts to keep secret certain politically sensitive subjects. "We were never able to get much of the material we requested from the National Security Council," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), former ranking member of the House intelligence committee. "The nation was not well-served by the administration's failure to provide this critical information." Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he doubted Bush was complacent about warnings he received. "The intelligence community was providing him information. He wasn't AWOL," Goss said. "In hindsight, it might take on a little more significance . . . but it's a huge stretch to say the president had information he should have acted on." Agencies failed to grasp pre-Sept. 11 terrorist threat, lawmakers find By Shane Harris Gov Exec Com July 24, 2003 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI, share the blame for failing to cdisrupt d 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, ctoo often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance in terms of a probable terrorist attack. d Also, the agencies didn 9t cdemonstrate sufficient initiative in coming to grips d with the terrorist threat. According to the report, csome 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 mportant, information. d The committee 9s 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 9s authors also laid blame on the administrations of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. cBetween 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 9s] terrorist network, d the report said. The government was too dependent on law enforcement as a means of combating terrorism, and didn 9t rely enough on military or intelligence actions abroad, the report found. The committee reported that a cclosely held d 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 9s methods of operations from a historical perspective. However, those briefings didn 9t 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 cundercut. d Intelligence critics have said for years that organizational and budgetary problems have hampered the agencies 9 ability to respond to terrorism. The report reveals several details, however, about the history of the government 9s counterterrorism efforts: · Senior military officials cwere reluctant d to take action against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 partly because they believed the intelligence agencies couldn 9t provide them with useful information for conducting strikes. The military did participate in counterterrorism efforts cto counter d bin Laden 9s 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 csignificant increase in information d that indicated bin Laden and al Qaeda cintended to strike against U.S. interests in the very near future. d 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 cterrorists 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, d the report said. Intelligence officials have reportedly dismissed the congressional report in private, saying it offers few conclusions about intelligence lapses that haven 9t 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 9s 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 9s requests for budget increases. cI'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, d Tenet told investigators. He said his agency was short about $1 billion annually. cYou get what you pay for, d he said. cIf you don 9t pay at the front end, it ain 9t going to be there at the back end. d A number of intelligence experts have taken issue with the notion that the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable. The committee 9s 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 9t have seen the attacks coming. Analysts couldn 9t have anticipated the Sept. 11 attack 9s csophistication, the elegance, the precision with which [al Qaeda] pulled it off, d said Ralph Peters, a former Army intelligence officer who served the Executive Office of the President during the Clinton administration. cEven had our warnings been taken seriously, there 9s a good chance [the attack] would not have been prevented. d Report of 9/11 Panel Cites Lapses by C.I.A. and F.B.I. By DAVID JOHNSTON NY Times July 25, 2003 WASHINGTON, July 24 4 A Congressional report released today provided a scathing critique of the performance of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. before the September 2001 terrorist attacks and recommended several changes, including the creation of cabinet level national intelligence chief, that go beyond what the administration has proposed. The report, by a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committees, found that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had failed to heed repeated warnings that al Qaeda intended to strike in the United States. It referred to one newly disclosed intelligence document from December 1998 that said: "Plans to hijack U.S. aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals had successfully evaded checkpoints in dry run at NY airport." The report concluded that in the months before the hijackings, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. did not comprehend the gravity and imminent nature of the threat inside the United States and failed to assess all of the available information about the risk of an attack. As a result, the report said, the agencies missed opportunities that would have "greatly enhanced" the chances of disrupting the terrorist plot. At one point, the nearly 900-page report took issue with an assertion to the committee by the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the bureau had known of no terrorist sympathizers who had contact with any of the 19 hijackers before the hijackings. The report identified 14 people it said was known to the F.B.I. who had dealings with four of the would-be hijackers. In a later appearance before committee members, Mr. Mueller said he had not intended to mislead them. Over all, the report provides new insights into the hijackings and fresh details about the activities of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. before the attacks. The panel's inquiry, which included nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions, is the most comprehensive and bleak assessment of lapses and missteps by the country's two main intelligence agencies. Some members of the panel said the committee's findings showed that the hijackings might have been thwarted. "The attacks of Sept. 11 could have been prevented if the right combination of skill, cooperation, creativity and some good luck had been brought to task," said Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a former chairman of the Senate intelligence panel and co-chairman of the inquiry. Mr. Graham is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. But other leaders of the investigation said the inquiry left unanswered questions. "I can tell you right now I don't know exactly how the plot was hatched on 9/11," said Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House intelligence committee. "We still cannot fill in a lot of the blanks." Representatives of the country's intelligence agencies have said the report offers little new information. Since the attacks, they say, they have taken many steps to expand and improve their counterterrorism efforts 4 including moves to share information and investigate terrorist threats more aggressively. Mr. Mueller said in a statement today, "While the report provides a snapshot of the F.B.I. at September 11, 2001, the picture of the F.B.I. today shows a changed organization." President Bush, in another statement, said his administration had "transformed" how the government pursues terrorists, noting the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to reorganize counterterrorism efforts. "The best way to prevent future attacks is to hunt down the terrorists before they strike again," Mr. Bush said. "America and our allies have continued the relentless pursuit of the global terror network. Many of those directly involved in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks are confirmed dead or now in custody. We will not relent until al Qaeda is completely dismantled." Several counterterrorism officials described the report today as misleading and said it drew together disparate facts whose relevance in advance of the attacks had been extremely hard to understand. "What you have here is a narrative composed of all the information that the government now possesses about the Sept. 11 attacks," one senior law enforcement official said. "As the information was gathered over time 4 like a collection of puzzle pieces 4 by a number of agencies over a period of time, no one person or agency had the the complete picture of Sept. 11 we have now." The report said that the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had amassed a huge amount of information about al Qaeda before the attacks, but it found that none of the intelligence offered a "smoking gun" that indicated exactly how, when or where the attacks would take place. Even so, by the time of the attacks, the report said, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had collected "significant and relevant" information about some of the men who turned out to be hijackers. Intelligence agencies circulated warnings inside the government in June and July 2001 saying that imminent attacks causing "major casualties" could occur without warning. The report concluded, "The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of Sept. 11." "As a result," the report said, "the community missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers, to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States and finally to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack." The report found that for nearly two years before the attacks, the C.I.A. had known of the terrorist connections of two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who in 2000 moved to San Diego and had numerous contacts with an F.B.I. informant. An unidentified F.B.I. agent who was responsible for the informant told the committee, in previously undisclosed testimony, that if the C.I.A. had told the F.B.I. what it knew about Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi, "it would have made a huge difference." "We would immediately go out and canvas the source and try to find out where these people were," the agent testified. "If we locate them, which we probably would have, since they were very close, they were nearby, we would have initiated investigations immediately." The report said the informant had told the F.B.I. that he never knew that Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were part of a terrorist plot. It concluded that the agent's beliefs about the possibility of finding the men were speculative. "What is clear, however," the report said, "is that the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot." The report also renews a focus on Saudi Arabia and whether anyone in the kingdom may have known about the hijackings in advance. Saudi officials have denied any advance knowledge. But the report says that Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi student who befriended two of the hijackers and helped pay their expenses, "had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia." Some of the committee's findings were disclosed last December when it completed its seven- month investigation. The panel's final report was classified and disputes between the panel and intelligence agencies about what should remain secret continued until today's release of a declassified version of the report. The report revives the political issue about how well the F.B.I. and C.I.A. performed and whether the Bush administration has moved aggressively enough to address the agencies' failings. The findings suggest that lawmakers in both parties believe that more far-reaching changes may be necessary to protect Americans from terrorism. Some lawmakers said they were angered by deletions demanded by the Bush administration and the intelligence agencies. They said the administration should disclose more details, particularly from a heavily edited 28-page chapter about the role played by Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments. "I just don't understand the administration here," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "There seems to be a systematic strategy of coddling and cover-up when it comes to the Saudis." C.I.A. officials would not discuss the report today, referring to testimony to the joint committee last October by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. At the time, Mr. Tenet defended the C.I.A. and said it had an aggressive operation in place to deter al Qaeda. In his statement, Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, said the agency had already acted on many of the committee's recommendations. But so far, the Bush administration has shown little interest in the panel's most hotly debated proposal, to create an intelligence chief to oversee a large number of intelligence agencies that now report to different cabinet officials. On Terror, Doubts Anew After a Scathing Report By ERIC LICHTBLAU NY Times July 25, 2003 WASHINGTON, July 24 4 The report today on intelligence failures may force the Bush administration to confront a vexing question that the White House thought it put to rest months ago: how best to prevent another terrorist attack. The findings, providing an even more damning indictment of the intelligence community than many had predicted, are already prompting fresh debate over whether the federal government should create a national intelligence czar or even strip the F.B.I. of its domestic intelligence duties in favor of a wholly new agency. Senior administration officials say they are convinced that they have already developed an effective recipe of reforms to fight terrorism. They include establishing a new center run by the C.I.A. to better coordinate and analyze terrorist threats, redefining the mission of the F.B.I. to prevent attacks, and creating the biggest new federal department in almost a half- century: the Department of Homeland Security. "Since Sept. 11, 2001," President Bush said in a statement today after the Congressional report was released, "my administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks." But many analysts said the scathing report is likely to raise doubts about whether the administration has gone far enough, and as President Bush enters the election season, it could give political ammunition to his Democratic rivals. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was co-chairman of the joint Congressional panel. At a news conference today, Mr. Graham made clear he believed cultural and "institutional resistance" by government agencies contributed to the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. "If people want to place blame, there's plenty of blame to go around," Mr. Graham said. Another presidential contender, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, has advocated creating a new domestic intelligence agency, modeled after MI-5 in Britain, to fill the role now played by the F.B.I. Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council aide on terrorism who has written extensively on the subject, said it was not clear that the structural changes put in place by the White House would do enough to reverse the longstanding problems in communication and cooperation identified by Congressional investigators. "The question is whether the administration is prepared to do the kind of bureaucratic head- banging that's needed to force everyone to work together," Mr. Benjamin said, "and the jury is still really out on that. So far, I'd have to give the changes a pretty low grade." The Congressional findings paint a picture of a counterterrorism system that was essentially dysfunctional in the months and years before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. did not talk to one another at critical junctures, threats and warnings were sometimes ignored, intercepted conversations between terrorist suspects often went untranslated, and American officials missed chances to "unravel the plot" before it occurred, the report found. Typical of the missteps was the handling of a memorandum sent by an F.B.I. agent to Phoenix in a memorandum to headquarters in July 2001, outlining concerns about the possibility that Osama bin Laden had started a coordinated effort to send operatives to the United States for flight school training. The agent noted an "inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" taking such training in Arizona and recommended that the F.B.I. compile a list of civil flight schools, discuss the concerns with other intelligence agencies, and consider seeking authority to obtain visa information on flight students. But Congressional investigators found that senior terrorism officials at F.B.I. headquarters never saw the memorandum until after the Sept. 11 attacks, a reflection of the bureau's computer woes and its organizational problems. And intelligence officials at other agencies said they were never consulted about the issue either. The episode demonstrated how important strategic analysis at the F.B.I. 4 often considered a "poor stepchild" in the bureau's pecking order 4 "took a backseat to operational priorities" before the Sept. 11 attacks, the report concluded. Administration officials said they had tried to create a new mindset toward counterterrorism operations, promoting better cooperation between agencies, carrying out new training programs and reassigning some 1,200 F.B.I. agents to work on terrorism. The ultimate indicator of how successful those changes have been, administration officials say, is that there have been no further terrorist attacks on American soil to date. But the joint committee pushed today for still greater changes, including the creation of a cabinet-level intelligence czar, the creation of a national center to maintain a centralized terrorist "watch list," and the elimination of "obsolete barriers" to interagency coordination. It also urged a full review to determine whether anyone should be held accountable for the intelligence failures of Sept. 11. Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, said his agency had already moved to carry out 10 of the committee's 19 recommendations, including improved terrorism analysis and better training of agents. But other recommendations, like the idea of a cabinet-level official to oversee intelligence, could meet resistance from the Bush administration. An even more controversial idea is the MI-5 proposal to create a new domestic intelligence agency, which the administration has opposed. Informant for F.B.I. Had Contacts With Two 9/11 Hijackers By JAMES RISEN NY Times July 25, 2003 WASHINGTON, July 24 4 The F.B.I. may have missed its best chance to prevent the Sept. 11 plot when one of its informants developed close ties to two of the hijackers living in San Diego, yet never alerted the bureau to the impending attacks, according to a Congressional report released today. The declassified report by a House-Senate committee focuses closely on the incidents in San Diego, where Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi settled soon after arriving in the country in early 2000. The informant told his F.B.I. handler they were "good Muslim Saudi youths" who had come to America to go to school. The bureau's failure to grasp the significance of the contacts provides a case study in the lapses of American counterterrorism efforts before Sept. 11. "The informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on," the report concludes, "would have given the San Diego F.B.I. field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot." The F.B.I. missed the opportunity in large part because the C.I.A. had failed to share information with the bureau about the two hijackers, who had attended a meeting of al Qaeda in Malaysia. The report said that was a major reason that the F.B.I. could not exploit the information it had from its San Diego informant. Moreover, it was not until August 2001 that the C.I.A. urged that the two be placed on a list to prevent their entry into the United States, after they were already in the country. The episode also raises questions about the role Saudi Arabia may have played in supporting the two while they lived in San Diego. Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi rented an apartment and obtained California driver's licenses in their real names and soon began taking flight lessons in San Diego. Mr. al-Midhar left San Diego in June 2000, flying to Oman and did not return to the United States until July 2001, but Mr. Alhazmi stayed in the San Diego area until December 2000, when he moved to Arizona with another hijacker, Hani Hanjour. While in San Diego, Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi had "numerous contacts with a longtime F.B.I. counterterrorism informant," said the Congressional report, which does not identify the informant. In the summer of 2000, the informer briefly mentioned to his F.B.I. handler that he had met two young Saudis, and gave the F.B.I. agent their first names. But the agent did not pursue the matter, since he did not see any connection between the two and any terrorism plots. "During a debriefing in the summer of 2000, the informant told me that the informant met two individuals the informant described as good Muslim Saudi youths who were legally in the United States to visit and attend school," the F.B.I. agent told the committee. "According to the informant, they were religious and not involved in criminal or political activities. At some later point, but before Sept. 11, the informant told me their names were Nawaq and Khalid. The informant did not tell me their last names prior to Sept. 11, 2001." The informant later told the F.B.I. that he did not know the two Saudis were plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, and the agent told the Congressional committee that he believed the informant was "duped" by the hijackers. Still, the joint committee's report raises questions about the role of the informant and his credibility. Several other individuals in San Diego whom the F.B.I. was watching also had contacts with the hijackers, yet those relationships also failed to raise alarm bells at the bureau. A local Muslim imam, who was the subject of a counterterrorism inquiry at the time, acted as the spiritual adviser for the two hijackers. Meanwhile, unresolved questions surround the strange relationship that developed in San Diego between the two hijackers and a man from Saudi Arabia, Omar al-Bayoumi. Mr. al- Bayoumi met the two soon after their arrival in the United States and helped them settle in San Diego, allowing them to stay at his apartment for several days and co-signing a lease on their apartment. Just before Mr. al-Bayoumi first met the two men at a Los Angeles restaurant, he held a closed-door meeting at the Saudi consulate, the F.B.I. later was told. And Mr. al-Bayoumi, who worked for the Saudi civil aviation authority, seemed to have access to large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Congressional report said. "One of the F.B.I.'s best sources in San Diego informed the bureau that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power," the report states. The bureau had earlier taken an interest in Mr. al Bayoumi, but had dropped its inquiry before he developed a relationship with the two hijackers. The relationship between Mr. al Bayoumi, who is no longer in the United States, and the two hijackers while they lived in San Diego has raised questions about possible connections between Saudi officials and the Sept. 11 attacks, links that Saudi Arabia has strenuously denied. Much of the Congressional report's discussion of Saudi Arabia was not declassified, and was heavily redacted in the version released today. What is clear, however, is that the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego F.B.I. field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot. The Road to the Panel's Final Report By JEFF GERTH NY Times July 25, 2003 WASHINGTON, July 24 4 The release of the Congressional report on the Sept. 11 attacks is the culmination of a protracted, occasionally bumpy and often secret investigation into the intelligence failings that led to them. Congress decided in December 2001 to form a joint committee made up of the intelligence panels of both houses. Its purpose was to conduct a thorough review of what had happened, to address questions raised by families of the attacks' victims, to assess the accountability of government agencies and officials, and to reduce the risk of future attacks. The joint-committee structure paralleled that of the two intelligence committees: its leaders were the chairmen and the vice chairmen of the House and Senate panels, two Republicans and two Democrats. The first staff director was L. Britt Snider, former inspector general at the C.I.A. and a longtime associate of George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence. Two months after being selected, Mr. Snider resigned in April 2002 after it was learned that he had hired for the staff a C.I.A. officer who was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. One month after that, the committee selected a replacement, Eleanor Hill, a lawyer who was a former inspector general at the Pentagon. A week later, on June 4, the committee belatedly held a meeting that got down to business. Over six months, the panel held hearings, most of them closed, and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents. It eventually uncovered new information and became more aggressive in raising questions about the government's performance before Sept. 11. One outcome of that development was President Bush's decision to drop his opposition to an independent commission that would conduct a broader inquiry. That commission, created by Congress last year, is scheduled to complete its work in 2004. The joint Congressional committee finished its report last December and issued a version that deleted classified portions. For the next seven months, Ms. Hill and her colleagues debated with government officials about how much of the removed information could be declassified. The report today includes some recently declassified material, but significant portions remain secret. Report Is Wary of Saudi Actions U.S. officials fear Riyadh may have given hijackers financial, logistic aid. Lawmakers urge more facts be made public. By Josh Meyer Los Angeles Times July 25, 2003 WASHINGTON 4 Top U.S. officials believe the Saudi Arabian government not only thwarted their efforts to prevent the rise of Al Qaeda and stop terrorist attacks, but also may have given the Saudi-born Sept. 11 hijackers financial and logistic support, according to a congressional report released Thursday. Those suspicions prompted several lawmakers to demand that the Bush administration aggressively investigate Saudi Arabia's actions before and after Sept. 11, 2001 4 in part by making public large sections of the report that pertain to Riyadh but remain classified. The passages, including an entire 28-page section, detail whether one of America's most reluctant allies in the war on terrorism was somehow implicated in the attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the full report. The joint House-Senate committee that investigated the attacks found no "smoking gun" showing that Saudi officials knowingly did anything to help the 19 hijackers 4 15 of whom were young Saudi militants 4 one of those officials said. But the committee, known as the "joint inquiry," developed "information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States." At least one of those sources, the officials confirmed, was the government of Saudi Arabia. When testifying behind closed doors last summer, neither CIA nor FBI officials were able to tell committee members "definitively the extent of such support for the hijackers globally or within the United States, or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature." The report added that the intelligence agencies had recently strengthened efforts to unravel the money trail, "at least in part due to the joint inquiry's focus on this issue." "In the view of the joint inquiry, this gap in U.S. intelligence coverage is unacceptable, given the magnitude and immediacy of the potential risk to U.S. national security," the report continued. "The intelligence community needs to address this area of concern as aggressively and as quickly as possible." FBI and CIA officials said Thursday that they were heeding the committee's request. But several senior U.S. counterterrorism officials cautioned that, despite the inquiry's concerns, they have seen no evidence to indicate that Saudi officials did anything intentionally to help the hijackers. Richard Clarke, a former national coordinator for counterterrorism in the Clinton and Bush administrations, cautioned "against saying there is a witting Saudi government connection." "I think the Saudi government was throwing around a lot of money to dubious organizations without trying to determine who was asking for it, and that a lot of the money got to Al Qaeda" 4 including some operatives in the United States, said Clark, who left the Bush administration this year. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, sharply criticized the report, saying that the "28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people." "Rumors, innuendos and untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the day," Bandar said in a statement. "The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even knew about Sept. 11 is malicious and blatantly false. "Al Qaeda is a cult that is seeking to destroy Saudi Arabia as well as the United States," Bandar said. "By what logic would we support a cult that is trying to kill us? Why would we aid criminals when we were working with the U.S. to find and arrest them? "It is my belief that the reason a classified section that allegedly deals with foreign governments is absent from the report is most likely because the information contained in it could not be substantiated. Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages." The unclassified portion of the report does not mention payments by Bandar's wife to a Saudi woman that the FBI believes may have ended up in the bank accounts of at least one of the hijackers. The nearly 900-page report was based on the interviews of hundreds of U.S. and foreign officials and a review of hundreds of thousands of FBI and CIA files. The report showed that in the years before the 2001 attacks, the FBI, CIA and other U.S. officials came to believe that the Saudi government would not help in its war on Al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden 4 a Saudi national and heir to one of the country's richest construction dynasties. "According to one U.S. government official, it was clear from about 1996 that the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to Osama bin Laden," the report said. Another U.S. official told investigators that "obtaining S

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