FBI failed to respond to terror threat - Commission

The FBI failed miserably over several years to reorganise and respond to a steadily growing threat of terrorism, the commission investigating the September 11 attacks said today.

It revealed that Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected an appeal from the agency for more funding on the day before al-Qaida struck,

“On September 11, the FBI was limited in several areas,” the commission said in a report.

It cited “limited intelligence collection and strategic analysis capabilities, a limited capacity to share information both internally and externally, insufficient training, an overly complex legal regime and inadequate resources.”

The commission released its unflinchingly critical report at the outset of two days of hearings from several current and former officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh was the first to take the witness chair. “We had a very effective programme with respect to counterterrorism prior to September 11 given the resources that we had,” he said.

That seemed a reference to internal bureaucratic wars covered in part in the commission staff report.

Former Attorney General Janet Reno said that while the FBI never seemed to have sufficient resources, “Director Freeh seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism from other areas such as violent crime.”

On September 11, 2001, the commission staff said, “about 1,300 agents, or 6% of the FBI’s total personnel, worked on counterterrorism.”

Reno was the day’s second witness, following Freeh.

Cofer Black, the former head of CIA counterterrorism centre, former acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard and Ashcroft also were on the witness list for the day.

The report said the FBI had an information system that was outdated before it was installed, further hampering efforts to battle terrorism. The report also cited legal impediments – the need to separate the fruits of intelligence from criminal prosecution – as complicating anti-terrorism efforts.

Creation of a new Investigative Services Division in 1999 was a failure, the commission said, adding that 66% of the FBI’s analysts were “not qualified to perform analytical duties.”

A new counterterrorism strategy a year later again fell woefully short, and a review in 2001 showed that “almost every FBI field office’s counterterrorism programme was assessed to be operating at far below maximum capacity”.