Sunday, April 11, 2004

Face it. The Bush administration was negligent on terrorism. Not only did people die for it, Bush used the 9/11 attacks as pretext for invading Iraq without a just cause. The United States cannot afford such inept and souless leadership. Vote for John Kerry and rid the nation of this right wing extremist plague.

April 11, 2004 NY TIMES
Panel Plans to Document the Breadth of Lost Opportunities
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, April 10 — With new evidence made public almost daily to show how the Sept. 11 attacks might have been prevented, the independent commission investigating them says its final report will offer a book-length chronology of the law-enforcement, intelligence and military failures that stopped the government from understanding the threat of Al Qaeda until it was too late.

Many of the missed opportunities are well documented, especially those in the months before the attacks: the Central Intelligence Agency's delay until August 2001 of raising an alert about two of the terrorists, who by then were already in the country; the Federal Bureau of Investigation's failure to follow up on a warning in July from a Phoenix agent that Qaeda terrorists might be training at American flight schools; and the bureau's failure to understand the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, the flight school student arrested in Minnesota a month later and later linked to the Sept. 11 hijackers.


But members of the bipartisan commission say that the government's missed opportunities date back many years over several presidencies and involve other branches of government, and that they will all need to be explored in the panel's final report, scheduled for release in July.

"This was not something that had to happen," said Thomas H. Kean, the chairman of the commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. Mr. Kean has gone further than other panel members in arguing that the attacks were clearly preventable.

"There are many examples," he said in an interview. "People got into this country with improper travel documents. People were placed on watch lists but nobody communicated that to airports. If we had acted earlier to stop Al Qaeda when it was smaller. These problems go way back, and we've got to try to learn lessons."

While its final chronology will stretch across years, the commission's attention has turned to the nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which President Bill Clinton handed over power to President Bush and Mr. Bush's new team tried to reorganize the way the government dealt with the threat of terrorism. It was also the period in which most of the suicide hijackers entered the United States and made their final preparations for attack.

The period has come under special scrutiny by the commission as a result of the accusations of Richard A. Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism director, who said in a new book and in testimony to the panel that President Bush and his top aides cared little about terrorist threats before Sept. 11.

Had they cared, he asserts, the government might have had a chance to tie together what now seem to have been obvious clues available to the government in late 2000 and early 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack in America.


At least some of the clues were presented directly to President Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, when he received an intelligence briefing on Qaeda threats in the United States.

In her long-awaited testimony to the commission on Thursday, Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, acknowledged that the briefing contained a blunt warning that Osama bin Laden intended to attack "inside the United States" and that the F.B.I. had detected a "suspicious pattern" that could suggest plans for a domestic hijacking.

On Friday, government officials provided other details about the contents of the briefing report given to the president, including a warning that Al Qaeda might have a support network in the United States and that terrorists might try to attack with explosives within American borders.

In his earlier testimony, Mr. Clarke said that if the intelligence agency, the bureau and other government agencies had been forced by Ms. Rice and others in the White House to share all of their available information about Qaeda threats in the summer of 2001, "even without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I could have connected those dots."

One of the most important of those dots was sitting in the files of midlevel analysts at the intelligence agency, which has acknowledged that it knew in 2000 about the danger posed by two Qaeda operatives who were later among the Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi; they had attended a terrorist planning meeting in January 2000 in Malaysia.

But the F.B.I., long the institutional nemesis of the C.I.A., was not alerted until August 2001, when the agency asked that the two men be added to a terrorist watch list that would have blocked their entry into the country. It was too late. Although both men were living openly in San Diego — one was listed in the telephone book — the bureau did not find them in time, and it is not clear that anyone at the bureau tried very hard.

Mr. Clarke has said that he was never informed about the presence of the two men in the United States by the bureau or the intelligence agency and that had he known, there was at least a possibility that part of the Sept. 11 attacks could have been foiled.

In light of a flood of intelligence warnings throughout the spring and summer of 2001 that Qaeda terrorists were planning a catastrophic attack against the United States, Mr. Clarke said, "I would like to think that I would have released or at least had the F.B.I. release a press release with their names, with their descriptions, held a press conference, tried to get their names on pictures on the front page of every paper."

"It's very easy, in retrospect, to say that I would have done this or I would have done that," he said. "We'll never know."

At a time when the intelligence agency was not sharing information with the F.B.I., the bureau was finding it impossible to share information within its own ranks.

Robert S. Mueller III, the bureau director, and his senior deputies in Washington said they were not informed until after Sept. 11 that F.B.I. field offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis had reported information to Washington that summer suggesting that Al Qaeda or other terrorists might be developing a plot involving commercial airplanes.

In Phoenix, a field agent reported to Washington in July that he had noted a disturbing trend at flight schools in the area, where young foreigners who might be affiliated with Islamic terrorist groups appeared to be seeking training; he urged a nationwide investigation of flight schools.

In Minneapolis, a flight school alerted the F.B.I. in August that a student, Mr. Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was acting erratically and wanted to learn only how to steer a plane, not how to take off or land.

He was quickly arrested on immigration charges, and local bureau agents urged their superiors in Washington to obtain a warrant to search his belongings, arguing that he appeared to be a Islamic extremist; the warrant was refused. He was later found to have the telephone number in Germany of a ringleader of the terrorist cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

Ms. Rice has said that she was also not alerted before Sept. 11 to the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui, to warnings from Phoenix or to the presence in the United States of Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Midhar.

And she suggested that it would have made no difference in the months before the attacks if she or President Bush had moved more aggressively to make sure that clues were being gathered and shared.

"I do not believe that it is a good analysis to go back and assume that somehow maybe we could have gotten lucky by, quote, shaking the trees," she said. "Dick Clarke was shaking the trees. The director of central intelligence was shaking the trees, the director of the F.B.I. was shaking the trees.

"I've asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done," she added. "I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack."



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