and we need more spying because????? seems they had MORE than enough information to make sure we were NEVER attacked....but they are incompetent.....
Hijacker Chats Years Before 9/11 Detailed
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By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The government intercepted conversations by early
1999 indicating that two Sept. 11 hijackers-to-be were connected to a
suspected al-Qaida facility in the Middle East, but the National Security
Agency did not pass on the information to other agencies, a congressional
report on intelligence failures concludes.
The NSA interception was the first evidence in
American possession that eventual hijackers
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were
connected to each other and to al-Qaida, but
some of that information was not brought to the
attention of other agencies until early 2002 after
Congress began investigating pre-Sept. 11
failures, according to excerpts of the report to be
released Thursday.
The Associated Press obtained excerpts from
officials who had read it after it was declassified.
The document criticizes the performance of all
the major U.S. terrorism-fighting agencies for
missing signs and miscalculating the growing
threat of a terror attack on U.S. soil but
concludes none had information that "identified
the time, place and specific nature of the attacks
that were planned for Sept. 11, 2001," and killed
more than 3,000 people in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania.
"Beginning in 1998 and continuing into the
summer of 2001, the intelligence community
received a modest, but relatively steady, stream
of intelligence reporting that indicated the
possibility of terrorist attacks within the United
States," the report states.
It notes there was repeated information dating to
1994 that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s
network would like to use aircraft as weapons to carry out the attacks, and
the targets ranged from embassies to airports.
"Nonetheless, testimony and interviews confirm that it was the general view
of the intelligence community ... that the threatened bin Laden attacks
would most likely occur against U.S. interests overseas," the report noted.
As for the opportunity to have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks, the report
states: "No one will ever know what might have happened had more
connections been drawn between these disparate pieces of information."
The report runs about 900 pages in its unclassified form and makes several
revelations, including that the CIA (news - web sites) had received
unconfirmed intelligence before the attacks that suspected Sept. 11
mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been in the United States as
recently as May 2001.
It states that NSA began intercepting conversations in the fall of 1998 from
an undisclosed al-Qaida location in the Middle East and that analysis of
those communications in early 1999 divulged that al-Hazmi was mentioned
by name and al-Mihdhar was mentioned as "Khaled."
NSA subsequently concluded that "Khaled" was the eventual hijacker,
al-Mihdhar, the report states. The two were aboard the plane that crashed
into the Pentagon (news - web sites).
"These communications were the first indication that NSA had of a link
between al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi," the report says. "They were not reported
in NSA SIGINT (signal intelligence, or electronic intercepts) reporting
because the persons were unknown, and the subject matter did not meet
NSA reporting thresholds," the report says.
It adds that the standards inside NSA for when to report such information
varied greatly depending on the analyst.
Beyond its own interception, the NSA also received similar electronic
eavesdropping information in 1999 from another unidentified intelligence
agency and did not pass that information on, either.
"For an undetermined reason, NSA did not disseminate the report," the
report stated. "It was not until early 2002 during the joint inquiry, that NSA
realized it had the report in its databases and subsequently disseminated"
the information to CIA, Congress and other intelligence agencies.
In testimony before the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee, NSA's
director, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, conceded "our performance in retrospect
could have been better." But he added, "This was not some culturally based
failure to share information."
Hayden said that even though NSA did not share the 1998-99 interceptions,
U.S. intelligence by 2000 had al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar "in our sights. We
knew of their association with al-Qaida." Before that time, he said, the
information about their connections to al-Qaida in the intercepts was
"unexceptional" among the masses of information the agency collected.
The interception by the super-secretive NSA, the government's premier
electronic eavesdropping agency, is one of numerous signs of growing
terrorist threats against the United States that were missed by U.S.
intelligence before Sept. 11, the report states, citing examples in which
different agencies had pieces of the puzzle.
For instance, the CIA separately received information that al-Hazmi and
al-Mihdhar were present at a January 2000 meeting of al-Qaida
operatives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that was monitored by Malaysian
authorities. By the time, CIA recognized the significance of the
information and shared it with the FBI (news - web sites), the two
hijackers had slipped into the United States.
And the FBI had an informant in whose home the two hijackers stayed in
San Diego but the various agencies did not connect the dots, the report
states.
The report criticizes U.S. intelligence for reacting slowly to raw
intelligence in 2001 that Mohammed, al-Qaida's director of operations
who is now in U.S. custody, may have been coming in and out of the
United States undetected "as recently as May 2001 and was sending
recruits to the United States to meet colleagues already in the country."
The information, though considered unverified, "did not cause U.S.
intelligence to mobilize even though it contained apparently significant ...
information," the report states.
More broadly, the report that "the hijackers were not as isolated during
their time in the United States as has been previously suggested. Rather,
they maintained a number of contacts both in the United States and
abroad."
It also cites tensions and miscommunications between the CIA and
Pentagon. "Senior U.S. military officials were reluctant to use U.S.
military assets to conduct offensive counterterrorism efforts" partly
because they believed "the intelligence community was unable to provide
the intelligence needed to support military operations," the report states.
The report spends substantial time discussing failures by the FBI, now
well-documented, to shift its priorities from crime-fighting, which had
been at the heart of its mission for decades, to preventing terrorism
before Sept. 11.
For instance, agents in charge of FBI offices across the country were
instructed early in 2000 to scour their communities for al-Qaida
operatives but they made only spotty progress before the hijackings,
according to officials.
The FBI's top terrorism official, Dale Watson, and the White House's
anti-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, told a meeting of FBI supervisors
in March 2000 that there was a high probability that al-Qaida "sleeper
cells" were working on U.S. soil and that identifying them should be a top
priority, the officials said.
Clarke told the joint congressional committee that investigated the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that he later visited a
half-dozen FBI field offices to reinforce the message and returned with
the assessment that the job of getting the FBI to focus on the terrorist
group headed by Osama bin Laden was like "trying to ... sort of turn this
big Queen Mary luxury liner," the congressional report states.
To emphasize the importance of the mission, Watson told the supervisory
agents that their future promotions and bonuses would be based in part
on their performance in tracking al-Qaida cells, according to Clarke and
others who attended the meeting.
"They were somewhat taken aback," Clarke, now a private security
consultant, told the AP in an interview.
Clarke said that in the months after he and Watson made the
presentation, there was some but "not a lot" of evidence that the FBI's
field offices had made progress tracking terrorists.
The report says that Watson, who retired last year after serving as
assistant director for counterterrorism, tried in the period before Sept. 11
"to get more control of field offices" but that he believed the special
agents in charge were "focused more on convicting than disrupting"
terrorists.
___
Associated Press writer Curt Anderson in Washington contributed to this
report. |
