Bad news for some of the conspiracy buffs amongst us:
Panel Finds No 'Smoking Gun' in Probe of 9/11 Intelligence Failures
By Dana Priest and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 11, 2002; Page A01
washingtonpost.com
After six months of culling through intelligence files and nearly a dozen closed-door hearings, the House-Senate intelligence committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has uncovered no single piece of information that, if properly analyzed, could have prevented the disaster, according to members of the panel.
"As far as I know, there is no smoking gun," Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said yesterday.
Without any evidence pointing to a single intelligence breakdown, the panel has turned to the broader task of identifying and fixing more systemic weaknesses within the country's $30 billion intelligence system, members said.
The shift in focus constitutes a significant evolution for a committee that formed this year amid expectations it would uncover damaging evidence of intelligence missteps that would prove potentially embarrassing to the Bush administration. Instead, it now seems unlikely that the administration, or any senior official in the intelligence community, will be held accountable for failing to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"We've spent the first couple of weeks on where we've been," Bayh said. "Now we need to pivot and focus on where we need to go. I hope we're in the process of shifting from a place where people were looking to assign blame and instead focusing on systemic problems and improvements."
Some committee members cautioned that the investigation is not over and that some revealing memo, cable or intercept could still be uncovered. "It would be nice to find a smoking gun," said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate panel who has been a fierce critic of CIA Director George J. Tenet. "But absent that, we're looking for problems that need to be solved."
Shelby said he still expects to find "a lot of pieces of information that, had they been correlated, analyzed and disseminated, you could have had a different outcome."
Just a month ago, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies were reeling from a series of revelations of apparent pre-Sept. 11 blunders.
There was the disclosure that FBI headquarters had not acted on a request by the bureau's Phoenix field office for an investigation into whether terrorists were potentially training at U.S. flight schools. Then there was the revelation that President Bush had been briefed in August about possible attacks by al Qaeda in the United States that included the prospect of hijacking commercial airliners.
That report was followed by the disclosure that FBI headquarters had blocked a request from the Minneapolis field office for a search of the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker" who was arrested a month before the September attacks. And there was a subsequent revelation that the NSA, the nation's premier eavesdropping agency, had intercepted two Arabic conversations on Sept. 10 with imprecise warnings that something significant would happen the following day but did not translate them until Sept. 12.
These revelations suggest the government missed some important clues that could have led officials to focus more of their attention on averting a potential attack in the United States rather than overseas. But panel members have concluded that none of these pieces of information -- on their own -- could have prevented the attacks. And they now understand that, at least from what their investigation has uncovered to date, there are no critically damaging disclosures to come.
"We're not looking for negligence or one episode," said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "There are many contributing factors."
The House-Senate panel has taken testimony from Tenet, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the head of the NSA, and other officials in private sessions. But it has postponed public hearings, originally set for June, until after Labor Day. It has not given the intelligence agencies a witness list, areas of inquiry or a schedule for witnesses' appearances.
The committee spent its first month in closed sessions on what one member called "Terrorism 101" sessions.
The delays and lowered expectations about the panel's findings have prompted some members to question whether they will have the time to finish the investigation before the end of this Congress, when many lawmakers' terms on the Senate and House intelligence panels expire.
The committee has already decided to delay recommending any changes to the intelligence system until after Congress creates the Department of Homeland Security.
Pelosi will leave the committee next session after serving 10 years, the limit permissible under House rules. But she said she is not worried about passing such a huge job to new members with less experience. "I feel confident handing it over to whomever comes next," she said. "We have very capable people waiting in the wings."
Rep. Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), who has pushed for the creation of an independent commission to examine the implications of the terrorist attacks, said it was unrealistic to expect the inquiry "to complete its task before the end of the 107th Congress. That probably will not be accomplished."
Committee members have identified several substantial reforms: better dissemination of intelligence between the various agencies; using technology to penetrate computerized communications; increasing the United States' ability to spy on terrorist networks with CIA and friendly foreign agents; and constructing a domestic intelligence capability that can prevent and preempt attacks on U.S. soil. |
