'Our leaders did not understand the gravity of the threat'
Commission catalogues string of 9/11 failures
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday July 23, 2004
The Guardian
The US government failed to protect the American people
through a fatal lack of imagination, the commission into the
September 11 attacks said yesterday.
The withering 567-page report found fault with almost every
government department and agency involved in
counter-terrorism, but stopped short of ruling definitively whether
the attacks should have been prevented, and did not attempt to
apportion blame between the Clinton and Bush administrations.
But the commission concluded: "What we can say with
confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the US
government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the
progress of the al-Qaida plot.
"Across the government, there were failures of imagination,
policy, capabilities and management," the report said, adding:
"The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not
believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat."
Yet the report concludes that "we cannot know whether any
single step or series of steps would have defeated" the 19
hijackers.
Following the report's publication, the commission chairman,
Thomas Kean, said: "Nineteen men armed with knives, box
cutters, Mace and pepper spray penetrated the defences of the
most powerful nation in the world. They inflicted unbearable
trauma on our people and at the same time they turned our
international order upside down."
President Bush said he welcomed the report, repeating his
claim that before September 11, he had had "no inkling that
terrorists were about to attack our country".
However the report, which contains minute detail of the plot, the
hijackers, and the aftermath of the atrocities, highlights the
opportunities that were missed by intelligence services, which
were aware that an attack was coming.
The report notes that in 2001 "intelligence reporting consistently
described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous
level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in
turmoil".
George Tenet, who recently resigned as the CIA director, told
the commission: "The system was blinking red". By late July,
Mr Tenet said, it could not "get any worse".
Despite pressure from the Bush administration, the commission
found no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaida. In
particular, it declared "the available evidence does not support" a
Czech report of a meeting in Prague between the lead
September 11 hijacker, Muhammad Atta, and an Iraqi agent.
Instead, it found evidence of at least passive Iranian complicity
in al-Qaida's movements, noting that eight of the 19 hijackers
travelled through Iran without having their passports stamped.
The commission's report estimated that the September 11
conspiracy cost a total of between $400,000 and $500,000
(£217,000 to £270,000) but came to no conclusions over the
source of the money. It absolved the Saudi government of
funding the conspiracy, and argued that the money transfers
involved were "unremarkable and essentially invisible amid the
billions of dollars flowing around the world every day".
The plot, the commission found, was the work of "a determined
and capable group of plotters". But it added: "The group was
fragile and occasionally left vulnerable by the marginal, unstable
people often attracted to such causes. The enemy made
mistakes. The US government was not able to capitalise on
them."
The report lists the squandered opportunities to disrupt the plot,
including the CIA's failure to put two of the hijackers, whom it
had been following as al-Qaida suspects, on an immigration
watchlist, a failure to act on warnings by FBI field agents that
al-Qaida might be training pilots to commandeer commercial
planes, and a failure to spot doctored passports.
"These examples make a part of a broader national security
picture where the government failed to protect the American
people," Mr Kean said. "The United States government was
simply not active enough in combating the terrorist threat before
9/11."
Mr Kean, a Republican former governor of New Jersey, said it
was not the commission's job to assign blame on a particular
administration. Instead, he said: "Any person in a senior
position within our government during this time bears some
element of responsibility for our government's actions."
The commission also faulted Congress for failing to monitor the
intelligence and counter-terrorist agencies properly and
recommended it create a single committee to oversee homeland
security. "So long as oversight is undermined by current
congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American
people will not get the security they want and need," the
commissioners wrote.
President Bush said the report contained "some very
constructive recommendations" and promised "where the
government needs to act, we will". But his administration
opposes the bipartisan commission's principle advice, the
unification of America's 15 intelligence agencies under a national
intelligence director with cabinet rank.
It has not committed itself on a parallel recommendation to
create a national counter-terrorism centre, along the lines of
unified military commands.
The president's Democratic challenger, John Kerry, embraced
the report, accusing the administration of failing to do enough in
the wake of the attacks to make the country safer. He called for
a rapid implementation of the commission's recommendations.
"If I am elected president and there has still not been sufficient
progress on these issues, I will not wait a single day more. I will
lead," Mr Kerry said, promising to convene a "emergency
security summit" to deal with the terrorist threat.
That threat was as great as ever, Mr Kean, said, noting that:
"Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even
greater magnitude is now possible and even probable. We do
not have the luxury of time. We must prepare and we must act."
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