[b]Report slams 'deep' failings in government
Sept. 11 panel recommends intelligence czar
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 12:43 p.m. ET July 22, 2004
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by Mannie Garcia / Reuters
President Bush receives the Sept. 11 report from commission Chairman Thomas Kean, left, and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton at the White House Thursday.
In its final report released Thursday, the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks criticized "deep institutional failings within our government" — from a Congress with too many committees dealing with intelligence issues, to Clinton and Bush administrations that missed opportunities.
The “most important failure” leading to the Sept. 11 attacks, the report concluded, “was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”
The commission identified nine “specific points of vulnerability” in the Sept. 11 plot that might have led to its disruption had the government been better organized and more watchful. Yet the report concludes that despite these opportunities, “we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated” the 19 hijackers.
"What we can say with confidence," the commissioners added, "is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress" of the plot by the al-Qaida network.
The report, as expected, called for the appointment of an overall director of U.S. intelligence operations. Overseeing the operations would be a new Senate-confirmed national intelligence director, reporting directly to the president at just below full Cabinet rank, who “would be able to influence the budget and leadership” of the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department and Defense Department.
Cool reaction to intelligence czar
So far the Bush administration has reacted coolly toward the idea of an overall director, which had been suggested earlier. “I don’t think you need a czar," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Wednesday.
The commission did not recommend creation of a new domestic intelligence agency similar to Britain’s MI5, as proposed by some in Congress. Instead, the report endorsed steps already being taken by FBI Director Robert Mueller to create a specialized intelligence service within the FBI.
The commission also says the U.S. government must do more at home to guard against future terror attacks, including such things as setting national standards for issuance of drivers’ licenses and other identification, improving “no-fly” and other terrorist watch lists and using more biometric identifiers to screen travelers at ports and borders.
The commission’s chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, and its vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, personally presented President Bush with a copy of the report Thursday at the White House.
Bush said he told the commissioners "that where the government needs to act we will.” He welcomed the "very constructive recommendations" that he said offered a "common sense approach” on how to move forward in the fight against terrorism.
Kean, Hamilton and other commissioners later held a press conference to summarize the findings.
Kean said none of the government's efforts to thwart a known threat from al-Qaida had "disturbed or even delayed" Osama bin Laden's plot.
"(They) penetrated the defenses of the most powerful nation in the world," Kean said. "They inflicted unbearable trauma on our people, and at the same time they turned international order upside down."
Iraq, Afghan connections cited
The highly anticipated, 567-page report provided new details on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, noting that bin Laden began exploring a possible alliance in the early 1990s. In one new disclosure, the report says that an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan in July 1998 to meet with the ruling Taliban and with bin Laden.
Intelligence indicates that Iraq may have offered bin Laden safe haven, but he declined after apparently deciding that Afghanistan was a better location. The report says although there were some “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al-Qaida and a common hatred of the United States, none of these contacts “ever developed into a collaborative relationship” and that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
That question has been the subject of intense political debate, as critics say Bush exaggerated the contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq to justify the war. Bush, and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, insist those links were real and dangerous.
Congress gets its share of blame
The commission criticized the FBI and the CIA for failing to share information and for inaccurately analyzing intelligence, which contributed to the hijackers’ ability to carry out their plot.
The report also criticized Congress for poor oversight of intelligence gathering. Blaming institutional failures dating to the 1970s, it recommends combining the House and Senate intelligence committees and removing limits on the numbers of term members may serve on the panels.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., earlier welcomed the commission’s call for reform of the congressional oversight system. “Right now, a lot of positions in the United States Senate have not evolved with the times,” Frist told reporters Wednesday, noting that there were multiple committees in charge of overseeing and funding the sprawling intelligence community.
But House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said this week that any legislative action on the panel’s recommendations probably would not occur until after the next president was inaugurated in January, given the limited time Congress has left this year. “It’s a very difficult time to squeeze out and have the oversight and the testimony to put new legislation in place,” Hastert said.
Less bureaucracy for Ridge
Among its other recommendations, the commission called for more centralized oversight of the new Department of Homeland Security, proposing that Secretary Ridge be required to report to only one committee each in the House and the Senate. Ridge currently must report to several committees and subcommittees in both bodies.
The report also debunks what commissioners called “myths” that have built up around the terrorist strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, the officials said. Those include these findings:
The Saudi government did not fund the 19 hijackers.
Relatives of bin Laden were not allowed to fly out of the country until after air traffic was allowed to move freely after it was grounded following the attacks. Moreover, those family members had no connection to the terrorist plot.
Bush did not know about the specific threat beforehand, and there was little more that he could to prevent it.
The last conclusion echoed comments made Wednesday by White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who said, “Nothing has come to our attention to suggest we could have prevented that horrible attack from happening.”
Aggressive lobbying effort planned
Commissioners plan an aggressive lobbying effort this summer and fall to push their recommendations. The panel will split into bipartisan pairs and travel nationwide for speaking engagements and media appearances. “Commissioners have all said they hoped the report would not just go on a shelf as so many others have,” said Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the commission. “They said they hoped both presidential campaigns would endorse the recommendations and Congress would act.”
Still, the report is expected to provide fodder for arguments in the presidential campaign.
Advisers to the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have said they hope to use the report to show that the Bush administration was inattentive in the summer of 2001 to threats of a possible attack. “I'm not looking to cast blame,” Kerry said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News. “I’m looking to take America to a safer place.” But, he said, “I believe there are things we could’ve done in the last three years since 9/11 — in the last two years — we haven’t done.” He did not elaborate.
The Clinton administration, meanwhile, was under fresh scrutiny after federal authorities said they were investigating former national security adviser Sandy Berger in connection with the disappearance of highly classified terrorism documents.
Berger said he inadvertently took copies of some documents from the National Archives and later returned them but could not find two or three copies of a highly classified report that concerned al-Qaida threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration.
Felzenberg, the commission spokesman, said the Berger probe did not affect the panel’s final report.
Reuters, The Associated Press and NBC’s Keith Strickland and Les Kretman contributed to this report.