9/11: US failed to act on terror threat

THE US Government failed to appreciate the threat posed by al-Qaida who exploited those lapses to carry out the deadliest assault ever on American soil, the chairman of the 9/11 commission said yesterday.

In issuing the panel's 567-page final report, commission chairman Tom Kean said none of the government's efforts to thwart a known threat from al-Qaida had "disturbed or even delayed" Osama bin Laden's plot.

"(They) penetrated the defences of the most powerful nation in the world," Mr Kean said. "They inflicted unbearable trauma on our people and, at the same time, they turned international order upside down."

While faulting institutional shortcomings, the report did not blame President George W Bush or former President Bill Clinton for mistakes contributing to the 2001 attack. Mr Kean and commission vice-chairman Lee Hamilton presented Mr Bush with a copy of the report yesterday morning. Mr Bush thanked them for a "really good job" and said the panel makes "very solid, sound recommendations about how to move forward."

"I assured them that where the government needs to act we will," Mr Bush said.

The commission recommended the creation of a new intelligence centre and high-level intelligence director to improve the nation's ability to disrupt future terrorist attacks. An intelligence-gathering centre would bring a unified command to the more than dozen agencies that collect and analyse intelligence overseas and at home.

Running the centre would be a new Senate-confirmed national intelligence director, reporting directly to the president at just below full Cabinet rank, with control over intelligence budgets and the ability to hire and fire deputies, including the CIA director and top intelligence officials at the FBI, Homeland Security Department and Defence Department. The panel also determined the "most important failure" leading to the attacks "was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat."

The commission identified nine "specific points of vulnerability" in the September 11 plot that might have led to its disruption had the government been better organised and more watchful. Yet the report concludes that, despite these opportunities, "we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated" the 19 hijackers. Mr Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, appealed for political unity at the heights of America's power. "The US government has access to vast amounts of information but it has a weak process, a weak system of processing and using that information. Need to share must replace need to know."

Mr Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the 9/11 attacks "were a shock, but should not have come as a surprise". "By September 2001, the executive branch of the US Government, the Congress, the news media, and the American public had received clear warning that Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers," Mr Kean said.

The highly anticipated report provided new details on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, noting that Osama bin Laden began exploring a possible alliance in the early 1990s.

In one new disclosure, the report says that an Iraqi delegation travelled to Afghanistan in July 1998 to meet with the ruling Taliban and with bin Laden.