Readers Of The Final 9-11 Commission Report "Could Conclude The Attacks Were Preventable"

9-11 Commission members tell the Associated Press that readers of the Commission's final report could conclude the attacks were preventable:

The 10-member panel has been reviewing portions of the draft, the bulk of which is a factual accounting of events, including intelligence failures that could lead readers to conclude the attacks were preventable, four commissioners told The Associated Press in separate interviews.

A separate section detailing the panel's recommendations remains under intense review, with no agreement yet on the widespread measures needed to shore up the communications breakdowns that allowed the hijackers to succeed, the commissioners said.

[. . .]

The commission was established by Congress in 2002 to investigate government mistakes before the attacks and recommend ways to improve the nation's protection against terrorists. It has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including President Bush, and reviewed more than 2 million documents.

The bipartisan panel's final report is due July 26. However, portions of it, dealing with factual findings leading up to and including the attacks, already have been drafted and sent to the White House for vetting and declassification, commissioners said.

[. . .]

The commissioners who spoke to the AP said the panel wants to avoid blaming individuals to avert charges of partisanship that could undermine their work.

"We're going to say everything we need to say, but there's not going to be a political gotcha," said Republican commissioner Slade Gorton, a former senator from Washington. "It's very important that it be factual and leave major conclusions to the people of the United States. There are huge numbers of facts which are not in dispute."

[. . .]

Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste said members remain hopeful they can produce a unanimous report, although some are holding out the option of inserting editorial notes if commissioners disagree on certain points or want to flag a particular individual as blameworthy.

"The failure to thwart the 9/11 catastrophe was in part the result of the failure to communicate both internally and externally about information collected by our intelligence agencies," he said. "Had there been effective use of the information, the possibility exists the 9/11 plot could have been disrupted."

[. . .]

Other sections of the final report will detail the CIA's missteps, including a failure to recognize the threat posed by al-Qaida and an overreliance on suspect sources for information. The commission has attributed the problems in part to the loose-knit nature of the intelligence community, which didn't always cooperate because CIA Director George Tenet lacked adequate authority.

I've got mixed feelings about this AP report. On the one hand it's not right to judge pre 9-11 actions or inactions of people through a post 9-11 lens. Reality is perceived much differently before and after the attacks. On the other hand the intelligence agencies exist to find and connect the dots. I'll wait and see how many dots the 9-11 Commission reports. I'll be surprised if the report reveals anything new.

UPDATE: ABCNEWS.com reports that one of the missed opportunities to prevent the 9-11 attacks was failure of the CIA to inform the FBI that two of the hijackers, Nawaq Alhazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, arrived in California in January 2000:

"On Sept. 10, all we knew was that they should be put on the visa watch list, and we should attempt to locate them," said former acting FBI Director Tom Pickard during his testimony before the 9/11 commission today.

The CIA picked up the men's trail at an al Qaeda planning session in Malaysia and tracked them on flights into the United States. It could have been a golden opportunity for the FBI.

"[The FBI] could have put them under surveillance. We could have had their phones monitored. If they were using computers, we could have been up on the computers, and we would have known what they were doing 24 hours a day," said retired FBI agent Jack Cloonan, now an ABCNEWS consultant.

Cloonan was the senior agent in the FBI's Osama bin Laden squad in New York, and was directly involved in the last-minute search for the two men.

[. . .]

The two hijackers rented an apartment in San Diego from an FBI source, but the agent handling the source had no reason to suspect the men. One of the hijackers, Alhazmi, was even listed in the San Diego phone book.

Neighbors even saw the men training on a jet flight simulator and knew they were taking flight lessons in Arizona the summer before the attacks.

"The reason why this happened is that people didn't do their job," said Cloonan. "It's not a system failure. It's human error."

I don't accept the assertion that if the FBI had been told about
Nawaq Alhazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar it could have prevented the attacks.

Comments

[Myria]

Coulda/woulda/shoulda is always a dicey proposition. It's easy to "know" something after the fact and imposible to "unknow" what happened and put yourself truly in the shoes of those in those times.

Myria