THE CIA and FBI is very responsible for failing to stop 911~~~
Memo on 9/11 Plotters Blocked
# New disclosures show that CIA information in 2000 about two Al Qaeda operatives in San Diego was squelched before reaching the FBI.
By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — A chilling new detail of U.S. intelligence failures emerged Thursday, when the Justice Department disclosed that about 20 months before the Sept. 11 attacks, a CIA official had blocked a memo intended to alert the FBI that two known Al Qaeda operatives had entered the country.
The two men were among the 19 hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
If the FBI had received the official communique from the CIA's special Osama bin Laden unit when it was ready for transmittal in January 2000, its agents likely could have tracked down the men, according to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with a newly declassified report of the Justice Department's inspector general.
Officials involved in the case of alleged would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui had attempted to block release of the report, asserting that it would compromise the outcome of his case. But Inspector General Glenn A. Fine went to court and won release of the report after deleting the section on Moussaoui.
The report does not draw major new conclusions or disclose significant new episodes about the months and years leading up to Sept. 11. Rather, it fills in blanks and provides new details about previously known matters — notably the failure to learn sooner about Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, the so-called San Diego hijackers.
An 18-month delay in the CIA's handing over of information about the two hijackers to the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies had been well-publicized. But the report's conclusion that an agent had written a memo specifically designed for transmittal to the FBI to alert the bureau to the men's presence — and that a supervisor deliberately had prevented it from being sent — is new.
The reason the CIA official, identified by the fictitious name "John," put a hold on the communique remains a mystery, the report said. It said the officials involved didn't recall the incident. Even when the author of the memo followed up a week later with an e-mail asking if it had been sent to the FBI, nothing was done.
The memo was written by an FBI agent on assignment to the CIA's special Bin Laden unit. According to the report, rather than send his memo directly to the FBI, he sent it to the deputy chief of the CIA unit because only supervisors were authorized to send such memos to the FBI.
Fine's report contains extensive new detail about that incident, as well as several already reported missed opportunities by the FBI to track down the two men.
The report stops short of concluding that any of the failures was responsible for allowing the Sept. 11 attacks to move forward. But it is sharply critical of the FBI and CIA, laying out in 371 pages a series of systemic and individual failures by the FBI in particular — both internally and when dealing with other U.S. and foreign government agencies.
The report was compiled after Congress and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III asked the inspector general to evaluate how the FBI had handled intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks. More extensive inquiries were done by a joint House-Senate committee and by the federal 9/11 commission, which reached similar broad conclusions.
The report disclosed Thursday is an abbreviated version of a top-secret report submitted in July to the FBI, CIA, Congress and the commission that investigated Sept. 11.
In an interview Thursday, Fine said it would be "too speculative" to conclude that the attacks could have been prevented had it not been for the failures outlined in his report, which was based on interviews with dozens of FBI and CIA officials and a review of thousands of top-secret internal documents.
"But there were very significant failures, both systemic and individual, and we lay out the details behind them," Fine said.
His report made 16 recommendations to improve the FBI, including better training and management of intelligence analysts, integrating FBI lawyers into counterterrorism investigations, and creating clear procedures on how to document intelligence information received in informal briefings with other agencies.
In a statement, the FBI said it generally agreed with the inspector general's findings and was already carrying out most of them.
"We enhanced our cadre of intelligence analysts with hundreds of new hires, new training and a clear career path," the FBI statement said. "We changed the criteria by which special agents, field offices and investigative programs are evaluated to emphasize intelligence-related functions."
The report identifies five junctures, from March 2000 to August 2001, when there were opportunities for the FBI to learn about Almihdhar and Alhazmi and their presence in the U.S. Each episode has been previously reported, but not in such great detail.
The report documents day-to-day contacts among FBI, CIA and other officials — identifying them with names such as "John," "Mary" and "Rob" and, in many cases, assessing their performance. It quotes extensively from e-mails they sent and handwritten notes they kept of meetings.
Typical was the mild criticism of an FBI employee, "Lynn," for failing to respond to an e-mail from colleague "Jane" about the now-famous Phoenix memo. That memo by an agent in the Phoenix bureau urged the FBI to investigate the enrollment of Middle Eastern men in aviation schools, but it was never acted upon. |
