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Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2002

The audit, released by the Office of the Inspector General, said that although the FBI had promised in 1999 to submit to Congress a written review of terrorist threats, it had failed to follow through.

"Such an assessment would be useful not only to define the nature, likelihood and severity of the threat, but also to identify intelligence gaps that needed to be addressed," the report said.

The FBI and other national security agencies have been severely criticized for missing leads that might have warned them about the plan to hijack airliners and use them as flying bombs in New York and the Washington area.

About 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

By early September 2001, the FBI did submit a draft of a Terrorism Threat Report, which described terrorist organizations and the nations that sponsored them. The Justice Department audit, however, deemed the report largely incomplete.

"Among the report's many omissions are assessments of the training, skill level, resources, sophistication, specific capabilities, intent, likelihood of attack and potential targets of terrorist groups," the audit stated.

"Further, the draft report does not discuss the methods that terrorists might use."

Also, the audit said that the FBI report did not include any analysis of terrorists' progress toward developing weapons of mass destruction.

'Low Profile'

The audit's authors said that they sensed from the FBI that their inquiry into terrorism issues was very low priority.

"In fact, the Terrorist Threat project had such a low profile within the FBI that it took the FBI nearly a month to identify to us anyone who was familiar with the project and the draft report," the audit said. Also Tuesday, a joint intelligence committee hearing was told that although there were indications and threats long before Sept. 11, intelligence was not shared with the agencies that needed it most.

"Our work to date indicates that the flow of information between all agencies did not necessarily keep pace with the increasing nature of the threat," said Eleanor Hill, staff director for the joint congressional inquiry into Sept. 11.

She said that, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration was not provided with a memo by the FBI that said Middle Eastern men connected to al-Qaeda were taking flight lessons in the United States. Also, Hill said, the CIA did not provide the State Department with a number of intelligence reports that included the names of many terrorism suspects until after Sept. 11.

The State Department issues visas to foreign nationals wishing to enter the United States. A number of the Sept. 11 hijackers were able to obtain visas, despite being on terrorism watch lists maintained by one or more U.S. intelligence agencies.

Hill said that although several government agencies maintain watch lists of suspected terrorists, no single agency or database exists that integrates this information.

"Law enforcement, immigration, visa and intelligence information related to the 19 hijackers was not organized in any manner to allow for any one agency to detect terrorism-related trends and patterns in their activities," she said.

In their inquiry into Sept. 11, Hill said the joint committee found government agency personnel complained of "hurdles" to information sharing.

"The reasons for this reluctance to share range from a legitimate concern about the protection of intelligence sources and methods to a lack of understanding of the functions of other agencies," she said.

Copyright 2002 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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