9/11 Panel: CIA Could Have Unveiled Plot

The CIA (news - web sites) missed the big-picture significance of "tell-tale indicators" of impending terrorist attacks, partly because of its culture of a piecemeal approach to intelligence analysis, a federal panel probing the Sept. 11 attacks said Wednesday.

With the commission holding a second day of hearings on U.S. intelligence leading up to the 2001 hijackings, preliminary findings from the panel's latest report concluded that a more detailed look at clues prior to Sept. 11 could have unveiled the plot behind the attacks.

A more strategic analysis could have identified that the plot might require suicide hijackers who would take flight courses, the commission said. Establishing such "tell-tale indicators" could have raised red flags following a July 2001 FBI (news - web sites) report of terrorist interest in aircraft training in Arizona, and the August 2001 arrest of terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui because of suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school, it said.

"While many dedicated officers worked day and night for years to piece together the growing body of evidence on al-Qaida and to understand the threats, in the end it was not enough to gain the advantage before the 9-11 attacks," the commission said.

The panel did acknowledge the CIA was hobbled by staffing limitations and the daily demands of issuing fresh intelligence summaries to government policy-makers.

It noted, for instance, that CIA Director George Tenet recognized the need for strategic analysis against al-Qaida in late 2000 and appointed a manager in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center to create a new branch.

Tenet was to testify Wednesday along with FBI Director Robert Mueller and officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the federal Terrorist Threat Integration Center.

_An inadequate counterterror management strategy before Sept. 11. The panel said Tenet sought greater funding across the entire CIA, rather than just counterterrorism, making a build up of long-term capabilities difficult.

_A lack of an institutionalized process to learn from successes and failures, such as surprise terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998 and against the USS Cole (news - web sites) in Yemen in October 2000.

"Reviews were perceived as fault-finding, without enough constructive emphasis on learning lessons and discovering best practices," the report said.

One suggestion that has been posed to improve intelligence gathering involves possibly expanding the powers of the director of central intelligence or creating a domestic intelligence agency, such as MI5 in Britain.

Asked about such a potential overhaul, President Bush (news - web sites) said Tuesday night that he was open to suggestions.

"I look forward to seeing what the 9-11 commission comes up with," the president told reporters at a White House news conference.

Earlier Tuesday, top intelligence officials testified before the Sept. 11 commission. They blamed their failed efforts to locate key al-Qaida operatives before the Sept. 11 attacks on poor communication and limited staffing.

"We are profoundly sorry. We did all we could," said J. Cofer Black, former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center. "The shortage of money and people seriously hurt our operations and analysis."

In a day of finger-pointing, the panel's chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, said two scathing reports compiled by the commission's investigators amounted to "an indictment of the FBI," while Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) took a swipe at the Clinton administration.

The commission said delays and missteps in linking Moussaoui to the al-Qaida terrorist group in the weeks before the attacks were emblematic of chronic problems within the FBI, including limited intelligence and analysis capabilities, outdated technology, poor information-sharing and floundering attempts at reorganization.

"Despite recognition by the FBI of the growing terrorist threat, it was still hobbled by significant deficiencies," the commission said.

Louis J. Freeh, who headed the bureau from 1993 to mid-2001, bristled at Kean's "indictment" charge.

"I would ask that you balance what you call an indictment, and which I don't agree with at all, with the two primary findings of your staff," Freeh said. "One is that there was a lack of resources. And two, there were legal impediments" that made it difficult for agents to pursue terrorism investigations.

Former Attorney General Janet Reno (news - web sites) also spoke of a lack of resources but said the FBI did a poor job keeping track of the information its agents gathered.

"The FBI didn't know what it had," she said. "The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing."

Her successor, Ashcroft, defended himself against allegations that he wasn't attentive to the terrorist threat, and pointed blame at the Clinton administration for not acting in the previous eight years.

"The simple fact of Sept. 11 is this: We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies," Ashcroft said. "Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on Sept. 11 was destined to fail."

But former FBI acting director Thomas Pickard told the commission that after he began briefing Ashcroft twice a week on the threats, Ashcroft told Pickard "he did not want to hear this information any more." Ashcroft denied making that statement.

This AP/Hope Yen article has been Updated/Retitled..

Tenet: U.S. Lacks Tools to Combat al-Qaida

WASHINGTON - CIA (news - web sites) director George Tenet predicted Wednesday it will take "another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs" to combat al-Qaida and other terrorist threats.

"The same can be said for the National Security Agency, our imagery agency and our analytic community," Tenet testified before the commission investigating the worst terror attacks in the nation's history.

He said a series of tight budgets dating to the end of the Cold War meant that by the mid-1990s, intelligence agencies had "lost close to 25 percent of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment."

A needed transformation is under way, he said, and appealed for a long-term commitment in funding. "Our investments in capability must be sustained," he added.

Tenet's appearance was ironic to the core.

Several commissioners lavished praise on him for his foresight and efforts to restructure intelligence-gathering. Yet the panel's staff issued a report as the hearing opened that was sharply critical of the agency and apparatus he has lead for seven years as the nation's director of central intelligence.

"While we now know that al-Qaida was formed in 1988, at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (news - web sites), the intelligence community did not describe this organization, at least in the documents we have seen, until 1999," the report said.

As late as 1997, it said, the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center "characterized Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) as a financier of terrorism."

At the same time, though, the report said intelligence had recently received information revealing that bin Laden headed his "own terrorist organization" and had been involved in a number of attacks. These included one at a Yemen hotel where U.S. military personnel were quartered in 1992; the shooting down of Army helicopters in Somalia in 1993; and possibly the 1995 bombing of an American training mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

It also noted several that "threat reports" produced by the intelligence apparatus had "mentioned the possibility of using an aircraft laden with explosives," such as the terrorists used on Sept. 11 in attacks that killed nearly 3,000.

"Of these, the most prominent asserted a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city," it said. Others included reports of a plan to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, and of flying a plane into CIA headquarters.

Yet the counter terrorist center "did not analyze how a hijacked aircraft or other explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon," the report said. If it had "it could have identified that a critical obstacle would be to find a suicide terrorist able to fly a large jet aircraft."

Questioned by former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., Tenet said he did not speak with President Bush (news - web sites) during August, 2001, a period marked by concern over possible terrorist attacks. "He was on vacation and I was here," Tenet said, although he also added that he could have picked up the phone and called the president at any time if he had felt a need to do so.

Readily acknowledging that intelligence agencies "never penetrated the 9-11 plot," Tenet said, "We all understood (Osama) bin Laden's intent to strike the homeland but were unable to translate this knowledge into an effective defense of the country."

He bristled at some of the criticisms, including one that said intelligence services lacked a strategic plan to gather and examine information collected about al-Qaida or that they had no adequate way to integrate and disseminate it.

"That's flat wrong," he said.

John Lehman, a former Navy secretary and commission member, characterized the commission's document as a "damning report of a system that's broken, that doesn't function."

Noting that Bush has recently signaled an interest in overhauling the nation's intelligence-gathering structure, Lehman said change was coming.

Tenet, who has held his job for seven years across parts of two administrations of different parties, said he would welcome it.

In its report, the commission said the CIA missed the big-picture significance of "tell-tale indicators" of impending terrorist attacks, partly because of its culture of a piecemeal approach to intelligence analysis.

Crediting Tenet, it said he recognized the need for strategic analysis against al-Qaida in late 2000 and appointed a manager in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center to create a new branch.

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