A new report says the FBI repeatedly missed chances to find the 911 hijackers — and that it wasn’t happenstance but some deeply ingrained systemic problems. The Washington Post reports:
The inability to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking plot amounts to a “significant failure” by the FBI and was caused in large part by “widespread and longstanding deficiencies” in the way the agency handled terrorism and intelligence cases, according to a report released yesterday.
In one particularly notable finding, the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concluded that the FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of two of the suicide hijackers — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — after they first entered the United States in early 2000. The report says the hijackers-to-be should have drawn more FBI scrutiny.
While we do not know what would have happened had the FBI learned sooner or pursued its investigation more aggressively, the FBI lost several important opportunities to find Hazmi and Mihdhar before the September 11 attacks,” the report said.
The report adds some new details about how the FBI fumbled the ball:
In the case of Alhazmi and Almihdhar, the report said the FBI missed at least five opportunities to possibly locate the pair after Almihdhar was first identified in connection with a Malaysian meeting of al Qaeda operatives.
Even after the FBI learned that the pair had reentered the United States in August 2001, “the FBI did not pursue this as an urgent matter or assign many resources to it,” the report found, noting that “it was given to a single, inexperienced agent without any particular priority.” Agents within the bureau were also hampered by disagreements over the hazy rules governing the separation between criminal and intelligence investigations.
In the end, the report concludes, “the FBI was not close to locating Mihdhar or Hazmi when they participated in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”
In Washington, the FBI’s official response is that it has already taken “substantial” steps to rectify some of the problems raised in the report.
But officials in San Diego, where some of the key hijackers had resided, were far more blunt.
One FBI official, in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, in effect compared the criticism to TV’s Mr. Ed: he called it “a dead horse.”
FBI officials in San Diego, weary of accusations that agents bungled chances to intercept two Sept. 11 hijackers living under their noses, lashed out Thursday at the same conclusions in yet another report.
“It’s frustrating. It’s a dead horse,” said Chris Meyer, a supervisor of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. “We’re trying to explain ourselves the best we can but we’re looking ahead trying to prevent the next attack. We’ll be glad when this is all behind us.” …
The report found that hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar should have been unmasked through two people known to the FBI: Omar al-Bayoumi, a friend who helped the hijackers find an apartment, and Abdussattar Shaikh, an FBI “asset” who rented them a room in his Lemon Grove home.
The terrorists, who crashed a jet into the Pentagon, spent most of 2000 in San Diego County. They used their names, which were known to the CIA, to obtain driver licenses and travel documents. Alhazmi’s name and phone number were listed in the Pacific Bell white pages.
Current and former FBI officials in San Diego said they saw important contradictions in the report: Even while criticizing agents for failing to discover the terrorists through al-Bayoumi, who had been investigated by the FBI before Sept. 11, the report did not fault agents for closing his case. A landlord had reported that al-Bayoumi received a suspicious package, and that he frequently hosted parties for Middle Eastern men….
The FBI had no legal basis to investigate an informant’s housemates, the officials said. Most importantly, the FBI was not told that the CIA had identified the pair as al-Qaeda operatives who were believed to be somewhere in the U.S.
“How were we supposed to find them when we didn’t know we were looking for them?” said William Gore, who was in charge of the San Diego FBI office on Sept. 11, 2001. “If we’d have known, we were trained investigators. We would have picked up the phone book and found him (Alhazmi).”
“If we knew what the CIA knew, we’d have been in an ideal situation to locate these people but obviously we weren’t, which the report points out.”
Indeed, the degree of vigilance on September 10 belongs to another era of greater perceived security for Americans. Inter-agency cooperation is one of the areas presumably improved since then. But a great issue is the overall perception: on Sept. 10 most Americans surely felt suggestions that Americans could be under attack by terrorists living in our own country was inaccurate, at best, and tinged with paranoia at worst.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.