Commission hits out at US intelligence fiasco

US officials knew the al-Qaida terrorist network was interested in hijacking planes, but never thoroughly analysed the threat to try to work out ways to prevent it, the panel looking into the September 11 attacks found.

The commission staff issued a report that found scores of problems with US intelligence-gathering before September 11, including a failure to recognise the threat posed by al-Qaida and an over-reliance on suspect sources for information.

The more than dozen “loosely associated” agencies and offices that comprise the US intelligence community “lacked the incentives to cooperate, collaborate and share information,” the Washington report said.

CIA Director George Tenet, charged with overseeing that community, did not have the powers necessary to develop a government-wide strategy to fight terrorism in the years before the attacks, the panel said.

The result, according to the commission’s investigators, was an inability to understand, infiltrate and defend against al-Qaida.

Tenet, who testified before the commission yesterday, said it would take another five years to establish the kind of intelligence-gathering capabilities needed to protect the country.

President George Bush has suggested it may be time to reform the intelligence community’s structure. But concrete proposals – ranging from an intelligence czar to an entirely new domestic intelligence agency – have yet to emerge.

Before the September 11 attacks, mountains of clues were available to the intelligence community about the threat from al-Qaida.

The commission staff reviewed hundreds of articles from briefings, circulated among the highest officials in government. Titles included Bin Laden Threatening to Attack US Aircraft, compiled in 1998, and Bin Laden Determined to Strike US, from August 2001.

Even with such warnings, no complete authoritative portraits of al-Qaida existed on paper until 1999, even though the terrorist organisation was formed more than a decade earlier, according to documents shared with the commission.

“Before the attack, we found uncertainty among senior officials about whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with for decades, or was radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced,” the staff statement said.

When it came to tracking al-Qaida, the commission found the CIA relied on “walk-ins,” people who approach US personnel at embassies and other places for a variety of reasons. The vast majority of these people were of no value.

The intelligence community’s analytical efforts involving al-Qaida were focused on preventing an attack using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, but did not consider other possibilities such as using a small sea craft to bomb the USS Cole or using hijacked or explosives-laden aircraft as weapons.

As a result, America was unprepared for such attacks, the panel said.