Following yet another revelation of intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush on Friday abruptly reversed course and announced he supported the creation of an independent commission to investigate the potential causes of the terrorist attacks.
The families of Sept. 11 victims and congressional sources familiar with the White House proposal, however, immediately charged that Bush was actually trying to undercut the scope and powers of such a panel and to prevent it from further probing intelligence failures prior to the hijackings.
“This is an attempt to gut the commission,” said Stephen Push with Families of Sept. 11. “It’s a fraud.”
The move comes just days before the Senate is to vote on a proposal to create an independent panel that would have subpoena power.
Support for the panel has grown in recent weeks, and congressional sources said Bush was jumping in at the 11th hour in hopes of influencing its final configuration.
“They will try to change every aspect of what has been proposed to ensure a weaker commission,” one Senate Democrat charged.
Push’s wife was aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon. Two of the suspected hijackers aboard that flight, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were the focus of joint hearings Friday by the House and Senate intelligence committees about lapses leading up to the attacks.
An FBI agent from New York testified about being rebuffed by the CIA for almost three months as he tried to find out what the agency knew about Almihdhar. About two weeks before Sept. 11, his bosses at FBI headquarters also rebuffed him when he suggested a full-scale criminal search for Almihdhar, because officials at FBI headquarters feared such a probe would violate the “wall” separating intelligence and criminal investigators.
Eerie prediction in letter
“Whatever has happened to this–someday someone will die,” the agent wrote in an eerily prescient e-mail to headquarters on Aug. 29, 2001, adding, “wall or not–the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had” at Almihdhar.
The FBI agent, who testified Friday from behind a screen to shield his identity, recalled how he left ground zero on Sept. 11, returned to his office and heard Almihdhar identified during a briefing as a suspected hijacker.
“I remember explaining this is the same Khalid Almihdhar that we had talked about for three months,” the agent said. “I remember a supervisor at the time saying, and rightly so, that they had done everything by the book . . . but at the same point in time, realizing how ludicrous that statement sounded to me.”
While the testimony was dramatic, equally startling were the details congressional investigators amassed revealing how CIA officials repeatedly failed to alert the FBI and other agencies that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had entered the United States or had papers granting them free access.
The CIA began tracking the suspected Al Qaeda operatives 18 months before the attack, but never alerted other agencies that it knew Almihdhar had a multiple-entry visa for the U.S. while Alhazmi had entered the country on Jan. 15, 2000.
Unhindered, the men would freely travel in and out of the United States, take flight training and live in San Diego–all before participating in the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.
Time and again, congressional investigators said, the two hijackers could have been blocked from entering the country, or followed once inside, had the CIA shared its information with the FBI or other agencies.
Investigators said Friday that CIA Director George Tenet admitted in a closed hearing this summer that his agency made “a mistake” in its handling of the case.
A CIA official who participated in the Almihdhar and Alhazmi case, and whose identify also was kept secret, was more blunt, telling the lawmakers that “every place that something could have gone wrong in this, over a year and a half, it went wrong . . . [the system] failed at every possible opportunity.”
Malaysia meeting was spark
Almihdhar and Alhazmi, both Saudi nationals, landed in the CIA’s sights when they attended an Al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. Malaysian authorities secretly photographed them among about a dozen participants.
In March 2000, when an overseas CIA station learned Alhazmi had been in the United States since one week after the Malaysian meeting, it notified CIA headquarters in a cable marked, “Action Required: None, FYI.” The information was not shared with the FBI, which could have tracked Alhazmi.
As more information about the men and others at the Malaysian meeting was gathered, the CIA began meeting with FBI officials, but still refused to share crucial information, congressional investigators said.
In a special meeting June 11, 2001, at the FBI office in New York–exactly three months before the attacks–a CIA analyst refused to tell the FBI why he was interested in Almihdhar.
The CIA official told congressional investigators he did not share the information because he lacked authorization.
Just four days after that meeting, Almihdhar, who was back in Saudi Arabia at the time, obtained a new visa allowing him to re-enter the U.S.–his final entry before the attacks. By Aug. 23, 2001, when the CIA urgently requested that the two men be added to the nation’s terrorist watch lists, both were in the country and could not be found.
The revelations followed a series of disclosures that have emerged from the congressional hearings this week.
Opposition to panel lifted
Also Friday, the White House released a copy of a letter that Nicholas Calio, Bush’s chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, sent to leading lawmakers. The correspondence said that Bush hopes a commission will be formed to “build upon the work of the congressional intelligence committees’ joint inquiry.”
Bush, who has opposed such a commission, made his offer as a vote is scheduled Tuesday on a proposal from Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to create a powerful independent panel with subpoena powers and the mandate to investigate intelligence failures. The House voted in July to approve a similar plan.
The White House insisted that it was not trying to weaken the panel. Administration officials said Bush decided to back the independent commission after his aides met repeatedly with the members of victims’ families, who have been strong supporters of an independent panel, over the last several weeks.
Bush feels the independent panel should explore such issues as the integrity of the U.S. visa program, border security and commercial aviation.
