9/11 Report Assails Failures

WASHINGTON —  The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks concluded Thursday that the U.S. government had been hobbled by “failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management,” and warned that sweeping reforms were needed to prevent another catastrophic terrorist strike.

In its devastating and detailed final report, the independent commission faulted the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for failing to understand the terrorist threat or to make it a top priority.

It documented dozens of intelligence breakdowns and squandered opportunities to detect or disrupt the plot. It scolded Congress for inadequate oversight. And it laid out an exceedingly ambitious reform agenda that called for the overhaul of key elements of U.S. foreign policy as well as a vast restructuring of the nation’s intelligence community.

After a 20-month investigation in which it interviewed the top officials of two administrations, the commission stopped short of saying whether the attacks were preventable.

“Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them,” the report stated.

But the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts before Sept. 11 were so inadequate, the report observed, that none of the measures the U.S. was pursuing “disturbed or even delayed the progress of the Al Qaeda plot.”

Above all, the report attributed the success of the hijackers to an inability by U.S. government leaders to envision a strike on the scale of Sept. 11, or even to give serious consideration to the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons, even though the scenario had been the subject of intelligence warnings for years.

“We did not grasp the magnitude of a threat that had been gathering over a considerable period of time,” said commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. “This was a failure of policy, management, capability and, above all, a failure of imagination.”

Because the United States has struck numerous blows against Al Qaeda and shored up domestic defenses, the commission concluded that the danger of an attack on the scale of Sept. 11 had diminished but still existed.

“Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable,” Kean said. “We do believe we are safer today than we were on 9/11. But we are not safe.”

The 567-page report represents the culmination of an investigation by a bipartisan panel formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 10-member panel reviewed 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed more than 1,200 witnesses during the course of an investigation that frequently encountered resistance from the White House.

The release of the report is expected to intensify a debate over intelligence reform and the direction of the war on terrorism -- issues that could decide the upcoming presidential election.

The commission’s conclusions and recommendations create a dilemma for the Bush administration, which has been lukewarm to some of the proposed reforms. Among them are the creation of a national intelligence czar who would outrank the CIA director and oversee all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. Another proposal calls for the establishment of a national counterterrorism center that would replace a constellation of existing “fusion centers” at the CIA and other agencies.

President Bush, who got a private briefing on the report from Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton in the Oval Office, described the recommendations as “constructive” but indicated that he was unlikely to take swift action to implement them.

“I look forward to studying their recommendations and look forward to working with responsible parties within my administration to move forward on those recommendations,” Bush told the commissioners during a brief Rose Garden appearance afterward.

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice noted that the administration had already taken steps in the direction of some of the commission’s recommendations, adding that it would be unwise to rush into sweeping intelligence changes.

“This is a time when the country is making important and long-lasting changes to how we think about the collection of, management of intelligence, and it only makes sense to take a little time and think this through,” Rice said.

But members of the commission challenged the White House to embrace reforms or propose better alternatives. They also issued sober warnings that voters would not forgive policymakers who failed to fix the nation’s intelligence and domestic security woes before any future attack.

“If something bad happens while these recommendations are sitting there, the American people will quickly fix political responsibility for failure,” said Commissioner James R. Thompson, former Republican governor of Illinois. “And that responsibility may last for generations.”

Presumed Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, released a statement Thursday endorsing the commission’s recommendations. However, even those lawmakers who welcomed the proposals said that carrying them out would be difficult and time-consuming and probably could not be accomplished this year.

One of the main proposals -- the creation of an intelligence czar -- is an idea that has been endorsed by a number of intelligence advisory panels over the last decade. It was a top recommendation of a joint House-Senate committee that completed its investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks last year.

The independent commission said in its report Thursday that the creation of a national intelligence director, as well as a counterterrorism coordination center, were critical to eliminating the confusion and information-sharing problems that plagued the American intelligence community leading up to Sept. 11.

Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that throughout the panel’s investigation, government officials found it alarmingly difficult to answer the simple question of “Who is in charge?” of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts. “Too often the answer is no one,” Hamilton said.

But the proposals also have detractors. Critics of the idea of creating an intelligence czar say that it would add another layer of bureaucracy between the president and his primary provider of intelligence data -- the CIA. The proposed reforms also face major bureaucratic impediments because they would require the Pentagon and the CIA to relinquish much of their power.

Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin, who has expressed misgivings about the creation of an intelligence czar, issued a statement Thursday welcoming what he described as a report “that will serve our nation in the fight against terrorism in the years ahead.”

The commission decided against another reform idea debated since Sept. 11, the creation of a domestic intelligence agency like Britain’s MI5, which would strip that responsibility from the FBI. “Adding a new domestic intelligence agency,” the report said, “will not solve America’s problems.”

The commission also faulted U.S. foreign policy, saying that although the country must remain focused on capturing or killing terrorists, it needed to do far more to address rising anti-American sentiment overseas.

“We need to join the battle of ideas within the Islamic world,” Hamilton said, so that young Muslims “have peaceful and productive avenues for expression and hope.” In particular, Hamilton said, the United States needs to transform its relationships with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan to foster stability and humanitarian reforms.

The commission also urged the adoption of new technologies to screen travelers by scanning fingerprints, retinas or other “biometric” signatures. It pushed for tougher standards for the issuance of birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other identification documents. And it recommended that cities that have been Al Qaeda targets -- particularly New York and Washington -- should get the lion’s share of federal funding for emergency preparedness.

In sharp contrast to the bureaucratic language that characterizes many advisory panel studies, the commission’s report is a lengthy narrative with sections that read like a nightmarish novel.

It opens by describing the “temperate and nearly cloudless” skies that awaited East Coast air travelers on Sept. 11 and documents in detail how the 19 hijackers boarded their flights, seized control of the cockpits and steered the vessels to their doom.

The report chronicles years of feckless efforts by the government to come to grips with the Al Qaeda threat. It cites a Sept. 4, 2001, memo written by then-White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, urging his superiors to envision a catastrophic strike and act before it was too late. The government, Clarke wrote, had for too long failed to confront a basic question: “Is Al Qaeda a big deal?”

“A week later came the answer,” the report said.

The report ticks off 10 “operational opportunities” that might have detected and potentially thwarted the Sept. 11 plot. Among them were the failure by the CIA to put the names of two known Al Qaeda figures -- and eventual Sept. 11 hijackers -- on federal watch lists even after the agency knew they had arrived in Los Angeles.

Another key blunder was a failure by the FBI to recognize the significance of the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, an alleged jihadist who was arrested in Minnesota a month before the attacks after arousing suspicion by seeking to enroll in flight school. The commission believes Al Qaeda may have been planning to use Moussaoui as a substitute for another hijacker. Moussaoui is being prosecuted in federal court in Virginia on conspiracy charges.

As expected, the report concluded there was no evidence that two San Diego-based hijackers got support from Saudi government officials. But the commission raised the question of whether Al Qaeda had sympathizers in Southern California waiting to greet the hijackers upon their arrival.

“We believe it is unlikely,” the report said, that the hijackers “would have come to the United States without arranging to receive assistance from one or more individuals informed in advance of their arrival.”

As much as it is comprehensive, the commission’s final report is also in many ways cautious. In seeking unanimity, the commissioners refrained from making potentially controversial calls or assigning blame.

Relatives of those who died in the attacks have long complained that no one at the CIA or any other agency has lost a job, been reprimanded or otherwise held accountable for widely documented failures. But Kean argued that it was “not our purpose to assign blame.”

“Our failures took place over many years and administrations,” he said. “There’s no single individual who is responsible for our failures.”

In some cases, the panel seemed to soften statements contained in earlier interim reports. Last month, for instance, it triggered a small political storm when it seemed to reject Bush administration claims that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda. But though its June staff statement concluded there was no evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between the two, the final report added a word, saying there was no “collaborative operational relationship.”

The panel also went to great lengths to avoid providing fodder for either party in the middle of a presidential election season. Hearings earlier this year produced fierce debate over the efforts of the Bush administration during its eight months in office before the attacks. But the final report offers muted criticism in nearly equal doses of both former President Clinton and of President Bush.

“They, like the rest of us, did not understand the gravity of the threat,” Hamilton said. “They did not understand that 3,000 people could be killed in an hour’s time.”

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Times staff writer Maura Reynolds contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Some recommendations

* Creation of a high-level intelligence director to oversee the nation’s 15 intelligence agencies.

* Creation of a national counterterrorism center to improve cooperation and data analysis among the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies.

* A global strategy of diplomacy and public relations to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and defeat the militant Islamic ideology that feeds such groups.

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Who’s who on the commission

The 10 members of the Sept. 11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:

Thomas H. Kean

Republican chairman

President of Drew University in Madison, N.J. Former governor of New Jersey. Appointed by President Bush after Henry Kissinger resigned in December 2002 over potential conflicts of interest.

Fred F. Fielding

Republican

Senior partner at law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding. Former counsel to President Reagan and deputy counsel to President Nixon.

Slade Gorton

Republican

Attorney at Preston, Gates & Ellis. Former U.S. senator from Washington.

John F. Lehman

Republican

Chairman of J.F. Lehman & Co., a private equity firm. Navy secretary under President Reagan.

James R. Thompson

Republican

Chairman of the law firm Winston & Strawn. Former Illinois governor.

Lee H. Hamilton

Democratic vice chairman

Director of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Former U.S. representative from Indiana. Appointed by Democratic congressional leaders in December 2002 after former Sen. George Mitchell resigned, citing a reluctance to leave his law firm.

Richard Ben-Veniste

Democrat

Partner in law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw. Former Watergate prosecutor.

Jamie S. Gorelick

Democrat

Partner at law firm of Wilmer Cutler & Pickering. Former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.

Bob Kerrey

Democrat

President of New School University in New York City. Former U.S. senator from Nebraska. Appointed by Democratic congressional leaders in December 2003 to replace former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who left to become director of the Export-Import Bank.

Timothy J. Roemer

Democrat

President of the Center for National Policy. Former U.S. representative from Indiana.

Source: Associated Press

Los Angeles Times