CIA details errors it made before Sept 11
CIA details errors it made before Sept 11
© The New York Times Company
August 22, 2007
The 19-page report, prepared by the agency’s inspector general, also says 50 to 60 CIA officers knew of intelligence reports in 2000 that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, may have been in the United States. But none of those officers thought to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the potential domestic threat, the report says, evidence of what it calls a systemic failure.
The inspector general recommended that several top agency officials, including former director George J. Tenet, be held accountable for their failure to put in place a strategy to dismantle Al Qaeda in the years before Sept. 11, 2001. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the current CIA director, and his predecessor, Porter J. Goss, have declined to seek disciplinary action against Mr. Tenet and others named in the report.
The outlines of the report have been known since shortly after it was completed in 2005, but it had never been made public, and its release reignited a debate about whether the CIA should have done more before the attacks and whether Mr. Tenet and other officials should be held accountable.
Mr. Tenet called many of the report’s conclusions “flat wrong,” and General Hayden noted that many of those criticized in the review by the agency’s inspector general had criticized the “focus, methodology and conclusions” of the report.
Until Tuesday, the report had been kept under wraps by the spy agency, which opposed a public airing of its failures before the Sept. 11 attacks. The summary of the report was released at the insistence of Congress, over General Hayden’s objections, under the terms of a law passed this summer.
The dispute surrounding the report’s release suggests the depth of anger that remains, nearly six years later, over where blame should be assigned for the intelligence failures surrounding Sept. 11. Among the lawmakers who voiced renewed anger at the CIA’s decision not to discipline anyone was Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, who is a member of the House intelligence committee.
“Accountability is a concept the American people understand,” Mr. Holt said in a statement, adding, “I am stunned that General Hayden still does not get that message.”
Many of the report’s findings about bureaucratic breakdowns that allowed the 19 hijackers to elude the authorities and carry out the attacks have been documented elsewhere, principally by the Sept. 11 commission, but this report by John L. Helgerson, the CIA inspector, was the first to recommend that top agency officials face a disciplinary review.
The full report by the inspector general, totaling several hundred pages, remains classified. As spelled out in the executive summary that was released on Tuesday, the report found neither “a single point of failure” nor a “silver bullet” that would have allowed the CIA to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. It found that no agency employee violated the law and that none of their errors amounted to misconduct.
But the report did conclude that CIA resources devoted to counterterrorism had been mismanaged, and that some had been redirected away from Al Qaeda toward other parts of the agency’s clandestine service. It cited “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations, and to properly share and analyze critical data.”
The report does not cite the names of the officials who it says “did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” but it identifies some of them by title. Besides Mr. Tenet, the report criticizes James L. Pavitt, the CIA’s former deputy director for operations; J. Cofer Black, the former director of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center; and other top officials.
Mr. Tenet resigned from the agency in June 2004.
The recommendation that the agency establish an “accountability board” to determine possible disciplinary action was rejected in October 2005 by Mr. Goss, who was the CIA director and who argued that that punishing top officials “would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks.”
The report cited the CIA’s failure to pass intelligence about Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hamzi to other agencies as potentially significant. The CIA had identified the men in January 2000 when they visited Malaysia but never notified the State Department to put them on the terrorist watch list.
The report also said that some 50 to 60 CIA officials knew of the intelligence about the two men, a higher number than had been previously reported and that persistent surveillance of them “had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”
In a memoir published this year, Mr. Tenet cited the CIA’s efforts against Al Qaeda as one of the successes of his tenure and portrayed the agency as having been bold in sounding alarms about it in the summer of 2001. In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Tenet outlined a further defense, that the CIA’s counterterrorism efforts were embodied in “a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication” long before Sept. 11, 2001.
But the report released Tuesday included new details about what it calls a strained relationship between the CIA under Mr. Tenet and the National Security Agency, which was then led by General Hayden. It said the standoff had prevented CIA officials from gaining access to transcripts of intercepted communications between terrorism suspects, and criticized Mr. Tenet as not interceding to resolve these turf battles.
In describing the period before Sept. 11, the report said the CIA had carried out “no comprehensive analysis that put into context the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001.” It said the principal responsibility for Mr. Mohammed, who became the terrorist mastermind, had been assigned to a branch of the agency responsible for bringing terror suspects to justice, not to the one responsible for assessing threats.
As a result, it said, too little attention had been paid to accusations that Mr. Mohammed was “sending terrorists to the United States to engage in activities on behalf of bin Laden.”
In a note to agency employees on Tuesday, General Hayden made it clear that he continued to oppose the report’s release. “It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed,” he said.
But Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, praised the report and said it was broadly consistent with his panel’s findings.
© The New York Times Company
August 22, 2007
The 19-page report, prepared by the agency’s inspector general, also says 50 to 60 CIA officers knew of intelligence reports in 2000 that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, may have been in the United States. But none of those officers thought to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the potential domestic threat, the report says, evidence of what it calls a systemic failure.
The inspector general recommended that several top agency officials, including former director George J. Tenet, be held accountable for their failure to put in place a strategy to dismantle Al Qaeda in the years before Sept. 11, 2001. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the current CIA director, and his predecessor, Porter J. Goss, have declined to seek disciplinary action against Mr. Tenet and others named in the report.
The outlines of the report have been known since shortly after it was completed in 2005, but it had never been made public, and its release reignited a debate about whether the CIA should have done more before the attacks and whether Mr. Tenet and other officials should be held accountable.
Mr. Tenet called many of the report’s conclusions “flat wrong,” and General Hayden noted that many of those criticized in the review by the agency’s inspector general had criticized the “focus, methodology and conclusions” of the report.
Until Tuesday, the report had been kept under wraps by the spy agency, which opposed a public airing of its failures before the Sept. 11 attacks. The summary of the report was released at the insistence of Congress, over General Hayden’s objections, under the terms of a law passed this summer.
The dispute surrounding the report’s release suggests the depth of anger that remains, nearly six years later, over where blame should be assigned for the intelligence failures surrounding Sept. 11. Among the lawmakers who voiced renewed anger at the CIA’s decision not to discipline anyone was Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, who is a member of the House intelligence committee.
“Accountability is a concept the American people understand,” Mr. Holt said in a statement, adding, “I am stunned that General Hayden still does not get that message.”
Many of the report’s findings about bureaucratic breakdowns that allowed the 19 hijackers to elude the authorities and carry out the attacks have been documented elsewhere, principally by the Sept. 11 commission, but this report by John L. Helgerson, the CIA inspector, was the first to recommend that top agency officials face a disciplinary review.
The full report by the inspector general, totaling several hundred pages, remains classified. As spelled out in the executive summary that was released on Tuesday, the report found neither “a single point of failure” nor a “silver bullet” that would have allowed the CIA to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. It found that no agency employee violated the law and that none of their errors amounted to misconduct.
But the report did conclude that CIA resources devoted to counterterrorism had been mismanaged, and that some had been redirected away from Al Qaeda toward other parts of the agency’s clandestine service. It cited “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations, and to properly share and analyze critical data.”
The report does not cite the names of the officials who it says “did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” but it identifies some of them by title. Besides Mr. Tenet, the report criticizes James L. Pavitt, the CIA’s former deputy director for operations; J. Cofer Black, the former director of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center; and other top officials.
Mr. Tenet resigned from the agency in June 2004.
The recommendation that the agency establish an “accountability board” to determine possible disciplinary action was rejected in October 2005 by Mr. Goss, who was the CIA director and who argued that that punishing top officials “would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks.”
The report cited the CIA’s failure to pass intelligence about Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hamzi to other agencies as potentially significant. The CIA had identified the men in January 2000 when they visited Malaysia but never notified the State Department to put them on the terrorist watch list.
The report also said that some 50 to 60 CIA officials knew of the intelligence about the two men, a higher number than had been previously reported and that persistent surveillance of them “had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”
In a memoir published this year, Mr. Tenet cited the CIA’s efforts against Al Qaeda as one of the successes of his tenure and portrayed the agency as having been bold in sounding alarms about it in the summer of 2001. In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Tenet outlined a further defense, that the CIA’s counterterrorism efforts were embodied in “a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication” long before Sept. 11, 2001.
But the report released Tuesday included new details about what it calls a strained relationship between the CIA under Mr. Tenet and the National Security Agency, which was then led by General Hayden. It said the standoff had prevented CIA officials from gaining access to transcripts of intercepted communications between terrorism suspects, and criticized Mr. Tenet as not interceding to resolve these turf battles.
In describing the period before Sept. 11, the report said the CIA had carried out “no comprehensive analysis that put into context the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001.” It said the principal responsibility for Mr. Mohammed, who became the terrorist mastermind, had been assigned to a branch of the agency responsible for bringing terror suspects to justice, not to the one responsible for assessing threats.
As a result, it said, too little attention had been paid to accusations that Mr. Mohammed was “sending terrorists to the United States to engage in activities on behalf of bin Laden.”
In a note to agency employees on Tuesday, General Hayden made it clear that he continued to oppose the report’s release. “It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed,” he said.
But Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, praised the report and said it was broadly consistent with his panel’s findings.
posted by Carlos T Mock at 9:25 AM
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