Posted on 07/10/2002 10:55:07 PM PDT by mjp
Edited on 07/10/2002 10:57:36 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
— WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Members of the House-Senate intelligence committees investigating the failure of U.S. agencies to uncover the Sept. 11 attack plot say they have not found any single piece of information that could have prevented the attacks, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
"As far as I know, there is no smoking gun," said Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Without any evidence pointing to a single intelligence breakdown, the panel is working on identifying and fixing problems in the U.S. intelligence system, members told the newspaper.
One of the main criticism of U.S. security agencies has been that they failed to share intelligence among themselves and that there might have been information, if properly analyzed, that would have allowed the United States to prevent the attacks, which destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, damaged the Pentagon and killed about 3,000 people.
From what their investigation has uncovered so far, panel members have concluded that knowledge of no one piece of information could have prevented the attacks, the newspaper said.
"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."
However, some committee members cautioned that the investigation is not over and that some revealing memo, cable or intercept could still be uncovered, the newspaper said.
"It would be nice to find a smoking gun," said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate panel. "But absent that, we're looking for problems that need to be solved."
Shelby told the Post 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."
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