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Special agents testify at 9/11 hearingsReport focuses on communications failures
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. intelligence agencies "missed opportunities" to pursue two of the September 11 hijackers for a year and a half before the attacks -- partly because of the agencies' failure to share information, a joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees said Friday. The inquiry said intelligence officials also had information that could have helped lead them to track a third hijacker. A report delivered at a hearing on Capitol Hill said the U.S. intelligence community had information identifying Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi "as suspected terrorists carrying visas for travel to the United States as long as 18 months prior to the time they were eventually watch-listed on August 24, 2001." The two men attended a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 that was believed to be a gathering of people "associated with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network" -- a network the director of central intelligence had declared "war" on two years earlier, according to the joint inquiry. "There were numerous opportunities during the tracking of these two suspected terrorists when the CIA could have alerted the FBI and other U.S. law enforcement authorities to the probability that these individuals either were or would soon be in the United States," the report says. "That was not done, nor were they placed on watch lists denying them entry into the United States." In fact, the report says, the two men lived openly in the United States. They used their real names on an apartment lease in San Diego in 2000. The report says intelligence officials also had limited information involving Salim al-Hazmi, Nawaf's brother. All three took part in hijacking American Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon. The report says the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies did not share critical information that could have led to the three hijackers being prevented from entering the United States or tracked more closely once here. The report also says intelligence agencies were limited in their ability to pursue the hijackers because of government policies restricting the use of intelligence information for criminal investigations. "The intelligence community possessed no intelligence or law enforcement information linking 16 of the 19 hijackers to terrorism or terrorist groups," the report says. After joint inquiry staff director Eleanor Hill delivered the report at the hearing, several special agents addressed lawmakers. A New York special agent, who did not give his name, told lawmakers that "walls" barring intelligence agencies from sharing information in criminal investigations prevent investigators from being able to fully do their jobs. The agent said that beginning in early 1999 he was part of the FBI case squad responsible for the overall investigation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. But a few weeks before the September 11 attacks -- during the fourth week of August 2001, when it was learned that al-Mihdhar was in the country -- FBI headquarters decided to open an intelligence case. Neither "I nor any of the other 'criminal case' investigators assigned to track al Qaeda could attempt to locate him," the agent said. The agent said he sent an e-mail to the FBI headquarters analyst overseeing the matter. The agent wrote, "Someday someone will die ... the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.'"
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