CIA and FBI failed to act on terror data

PRIOR to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the CIA failed to act on intelligence it had about hijackers, the FBI was unable to track al-Qaida in the United States, and key National Security Agency communications intercepts never were circulated, an American congressional investigation has concluded.

But even had these and many other failures not occurred, no evidence surfaced in the probe by the House and Senate intelligence committees to show that the government could have prevented the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

A 900-page declassified version of the report being released yesterday was expected to provide fresh details of the September 11 plot and government failures but no "smoking guns."

"Anybody who makes an assertion that this could have been prevented is making a political statement because there is no evidence, no information that was shared with the top people in our government that could have led them to believe this was going to happen," said Congressman Ray LaHood, a house intelligence committee member. "It wasn't there."

Yet the report makes clear there were ample warning signs that Osama bin Laden was planning attacks within the United States.

The NSA, the nation's key signals intelligence agency, intercepted conversations by early 1999 indicating that two future hijackers were connected to a suspected al-Qaida facility in the Middle East, but that information was not passed on to other agencies.

The NSA intercept was the first evidence in US possession that eventual hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were linked to each other and to al-Qaida, the terror network blamed for September 11 and other attacks. But some of that information was not brought to the attention of other agencies until early 2002 after Congress began investigating pre-September 11 failures. The two men were aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

In early 2000, the CIA had learned independently of the al-Qaida connections of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, but they were not placed on terrorism watch lists that might have prevented their entry into the United States. And the two lived with a longtime FBI informant in San Diego, who never suspected the plot and who did not learn of the CIA's information until after September 11.

"As a result, the FBI missed the opportunity to task a uniquely well-positioned informant who denies having any advance knowledge of the plot to collect information about the hijackers and their plans in the United States," the report says.

The NSA had also intercepted "some communications that indicated possible impending terrorist activity" between September 8 and 10, but these were not translated or disseminated until after the attacks.

"The CIA's failure to watch-list suspected terrorists aggressively reflected a lack of emphasis on a process designed to protect the homeland," the report says.

The FBI was unable to identify and monitor effectively the extent of activity by al-Qaida.