http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=835741

09.06.05

Report Shows FBI‘s Missed Sept. 11 Chances

Report Shows FBI Missed at Least Five Chances Before Sept. 11 to Uncover Info About Terrorists

By PETE YOST Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON Jun 9, 2005 — The FBI missed at least five opportunities before the Sept. 11 attacks to uncover vital intelligence information about the terrorists, and the bureau didn‘t aggressively pursue the information it did have, the Justice Department‘s inspector general says in a newly released critique of government missteps.

The IG faulted the FBI for not knowing about the presence of two of the Sept. 11 terrorists in the United States and for not following up on an agent‘s theory that Osama bin Laden was sending students to U.S. flight training schools. The agent‘s theory turned out to be precisely what bin Laden did.

„The way the FBI handled these matters was a significant failure that hindered the FBI‘s chances of being able to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks,“ Inspector General Glenn Fine said.

When the bureau did discover the presence of hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar in the United States shortly before the attacks, „the FBI‘s investigation then was conducted without much urgency or priority,“ the report concluded.

The five missed opportunities in regard to the two hijackers stemmed from information sharing problems between the FBI and CIA and problems inside the FBI‘s counterterrorism program.

The report gave an hour-by-hour description of how CIA and FBI agents assigned to the CIA‘s bin Laden unit on Jan. 5, 2000, reviewed incoming cables containing a substantial amount of information about Mihdhar, including that he was traveling and that he had a U.S. visa. According to internal e-mail traffic cited by the report, the deputy chief of the CIA‘s bin Laden unit never gave the necessary approval for disseminating the information about Mihdhar to the FBI. Less than two weeks later, Mihdhar was in California.

The CIA shares information with the FBI and other agencies through Central Intelligence reports, or CIRs, and such a document was drafted about Mihdhar on Jan. 5, 2000, at the CIA by an FBI employee working at the spy agency‘s bin Laden unit. The deputy chief of the bin Laden unit and a CIA desk officer who was following the issue told investigators „they did not recall the CIR, any discussions about putting it on hold or why it was not sent.“

„When we interviewed all of the individuals involved with the CIR, they asserted that they recalled nothing about it,“ the report stated.

The report, a year old, is only now being released because of a court fight with lawyers for imprisoned terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui over how much of it should be disclosed. The report‘s findings mirror other investigations by Congress and an independent commission into why the U.S. government failed to thwart the attacks.

Without elaboration, the report faults the bureau for a lack of public candor.

„Shortly after the attacks, the FBI indicated that it did not have any information warning of the attacks,“ the report said. „However, information was soon discovered that had been in the possession of the FBI and the intelligence community before Sept. 11 that related to the hijacking of airplanes by extremists or that involved the terrorists who committed the Sept. 11 attacks.“

The bureau said it has taken substantial steps to deal with the issues the IG raised.

Today, „no terrorism lead goes unaddressed,“ and new policies are in place to share information among intelligence agencies, the FBI said.

The report was especially critical of the bureau for not knowing about the presence of two of the 19 hijackers who were living openly in San Diego in 2000 and who „should have drawn some scrutiny from the FBI,“ the report said.

The two Saudis, al Hazmi and al Mihdhar, rented a room in home of a longtime FBI terrorism informant, and they also befriended a fellow Saudi who had drawn FBI scrutiny in the past.

If the focus of the FBI bureau in San Diego on counterterrorism and al-Qaida had occurred earlier „there would have been a greater possibility, though no guarantee, that Hazmi‘s and Mihdhar‘s presence in San Diego may have come to the attention of the FBI before Sept. 11,“ the report said.

The head of the San Diego FBI office responded that the report greatly exaggerates the possibility that local agents could have prevented the attacks.

The informant identified the two men to his FBI handler only by their first names, and the report criticizes the handler as „not particularly thorough or aggressive“ in following up.

The two men also befriended Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who had established himself in the area. The FBI briefly investigated him in 1998 when the manager of his apartment complex reported that al-Bayoumi had received a suspicious package, had strange wires in his bathroom and hosted frequent weekend gatherings of Middle Eastern men. The FBI closed its inquiry the following year, a decision the report found appropriate.

The IG also reviewed the FBI‘s handling of Moussaoui, who was in custody before the attacks. Those portions of the document were deleted because Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in April, faces a sentencing proceeding next year that will put him on trial for his life.

Associated Press writer Seth Hettena in San Diego contributed to this report.

On the Net:
Federal court Web site on Moussaoui case:
http://notablecases.vaed.uscourts.gov/1:01-cr-00455/docs/70656/MultiDoc.html


http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/10/news/fbi.php

11.06.05

FBI‘s missed chances to catch 2 of Sept. 11 hijackers are detailed

By Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times

WASHINGTON The FBI missed at least five chances in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, to find two hijackers as they prepared for the attacks and settled in San Diego, the Justice Department inspector general said in a report made public after it had been kept secret for a year.

Investigators were stymied by bureaucratic obstacles, communication breakdowns and a lack of urgency, the report Thursday said.

The blistering findings mirror those of the Sept. 11 commission last summer and a joint congressional inquiry in 2002, but they also provide significant new details about the many bureaucratic breakdowns that plagued the FBI before the Sept. 11 attacks and they are likely to fuel questions about the agency‘s efforts to remake itself.

The Sept. 11 commission had access to an earlier version of the inspector general‘s study and incorporated parts of those findings in its final report.

In the case of the San Diego hijackers, for instance, the report disclosed that an FBI agent assigned to the CIA wanted to pass on information to the FBI about the two men in early 2000 - 19 months before the attacks - but was blocked by a supervisor at the CIA and did not follow up aggressively.

That set the stage for a series of bungled opportunities in an episode that many officials now regard as their best chance to have detected or disrupted the Sept. 11 plot.

The report stopped short of recommending disciplinary action against any FBI employees.

„What we found were significant deficiencies in the way the FBI handled these issues,“ Glenn Fine, the inspector general, said in an interview. „We don‘t believe it was misconduct on the part of individuals so much as systemic problems, but we do recommend that the FBI review the performance of individuals on its own.“

The FBI said in a statement that it had taken significant steps since the Sept. 11 attacks to address the types of problems identified by the inspector general.

„By building our intelligence capabilities, improving our technology and working together,“ said Cassandra Chandler, an assistant director at the bureau, „we have and will continue to develop the capabilities we need to succeed against all threats.“

The inspector general‘s report, totaling more than 400 pages, was completed in July 2004 in classified form.

But it was kept secret for the past year, in part because of concerns from government officials about classification issues - and in part because of objections from defense lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui, suspected of plotting to be the 20th hijacker of Sept. 11, and the judge in his terrorism case, who said the public release could compromise his prosecution.

The case of the San Diego hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, has been a source of friction between the FBI and the CIA since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the inspector general cites missteps and communication failures at both agencies.

The two men were known to have taken part in a meeting of Al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia in 2000 and entered the United States weeks later, settling in San Diego before taking part in the Sept. 11 attacks as two of the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

The FBI was aware of the Malaysia meeting but was not formally told by the CIA that al-Mihdhar had gotten a visa to enter the United States, the report found. Still, an FBI agent assigned to the CIA did know about the visa and wanted to share that and other information about al-Mihdhar‘s suspected terrorist ties with FBI officials in New York and Washington, even preparing a draft memo, the report said.

But the report found that a CIA supervisor blocked the agent from sending the memo, saying he did not have the proper authority, and after another inquiry, the agent did not follow up.

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