-Caveat Lector-
No there was not a single smoking gun, but over a
dozen. Here comes the whitewash. Gavin.
Panel Finds No 'Smoking Gun' in Probe of 9/11
Intelligence
Failures
By Dana Priest and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 11, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52296-2002Jul10.html
After six months of culling through
intelligence files and nearly a
dozen
closed-door hearings, the
House-Senate intelligence committee
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks
has
uncovered no single piece of
information that, if properly
analyzed, could have prevented the
disaster, according to members of
the
panel.
"As far as I know, there is no
smoking gun," Sen. Evan Bayh
(D-Ind.), a member of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence,
said
yesterday.
Without any evidence pointing to a
single intelligence breakdown, the
panel has turned to the broader
task
of identifying and fixing more
systemic weaknesses within the
country's $30 billion intelligence
system, members said.
The shift in focus constitutes a
significant evolution for a
committee
that formed this year amid
expectations it would uncover
damaging evidence of intelligence
missteps that would prove
potentially
embarrassing to the Bush
administration. Instead, it now
seems
unlikely that the administration,
or
any senior official in the
intelligence
community, will be held accountable
for failing to prevent the attacks
on
the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.
"We've spent the first couple of
weeks on where we've been," Bayh
said. "Now we need to pivot and
focus on where we need to go. I
hope
we're in the process of shifting
from
a place where people were looking
to
assign blame and instead focusing
on
systemic problems and
improvements."
Some committee members cautioned
that the investigation is not over
and
that some revealing memo, cable or
intercept could still be uncovered. "It would
be nice to find a smoking gun,"
said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), the ranking
Republican on the Senate panel who
has been a fierce critic of CIA Director
George J. Tenet. "But absent that,
we're looking for problems that need to be
solved."
Shelby said he still expects to
find "a lot of pieces of information that, had they
been correlated, analyzed and
disseminated, you could have had a different
outcome."
Just a month ago, the CIA, the FBI,
the National Security Agency and other
intelligence agencies were reeling
from a series of revelations of apparent
pre-Sept. 11 blunders.
There was the disclosure that FBI
headquarters had not acted on a request by the
bureau's Phoenix field office for
an investigation into whether terrorists were
potentially training at U.S. flight
schools. Then there was the revelation that
President Bush had been briefed in
August about possible attacks by al Qaeda in
the United States that included the
prospect of hijacking commercial airliners.
That report was followed by the
disclosure that FBI headquarters had blocked a
request from the Minneapolis field
office for a search of the computer of
Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th
hijacker" who was arrested a month before the
September attacks. And there was a
subsequent revelation that the NSA, the
nation's premier eavesdropping
agency, had intercepted two Arabic conversations
on Sept. 10 with imprecise warnings
that something significant would happen the
following day but did not translate
them until Sept. 12.
These revelations suggest the
government missed some important clues that could
have led officials to focus more of
their attention on averting a potential attack in
the United States rather than
overseas. But panel members have concluded that
none of these pieces of information
-- on their own -- could have prevented the
attacks. And they now understand
that, at least from what their investigation has
uncovered to date, there are no
critically damaging disclosures to come.
"We're not looking for negligence
or one episode," said Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(Calif.), ranking Democrat on the
House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. "There are many
contributing factors."
The House-Senate panel has taken
testimony from Tenet, FBI Director Robert S.
Mueller III and Air Force Lt. Gen.
Michael V. Hayden, the head of the NSA, and
other officials in private
sessions. But it has postponed public hearings,
originally
set for June, until after Labor
Day. It has not given the intelligence agencies a
witness list, areas of inquiry or a
schedule for witnesses' appearances.
The committee spent its first month
in closed sessions on what one member called
"Terrorism 101" sessions.
The delays and lowered expectations
about the panel's findings have prompted
some members to question whether
they will have the time to finish the
investigation before the end of
this Congress, when many lawmakers' terms on
the Senate and House intelligence
panels expire.
The committee has already decided
to delay recommending any changes to the
intelligence system until after
Congress creates the Department of Homeland
Security.
Pelosi will leave the committee
next session after serving 10 years, the limit
permissible under House rules. But
she said she is not worried about passing such
a huge job to new members with less
experience. "I feel confident handing it over
to whomever comes next," she said.
"We have very capable people waiting in the
wings."
Rep. Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.),
who has pushed for the creation of an
independent commission to examine
the implications of the terrorist attacks, said
it was unrealistic to expect the
inquiry "to complete its task before the end of the
107th Congress. That probably will
not be accomplished."
Committee members have identified
several substantial reforms: better
dissemination of intelligence
between the various agencies; using technology to
penetrate computerized
communications; increasing the United States' ability
to
spy on terrorist networks with CIA
and friendly foreign agents; and constructing
a domestic intelligence capability
that can prevent and preempt attacks on U.S.
soil.
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