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Posted on 10/02/2002 7:11:04 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
A July 10, 2001 memo from a Phoenix FBI agent warning about terrorist suspects training at American flight schools was not shared with the Federal Aviation Administration until months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Claudio Manno, assistant under secretary for intelligence at the Transportation Security Administration, told lawmakers Tuesday that the FAA did not receive the so-called "Phoenix memo" until May of 2002.
"I don't think there is a more graphic description of how dysfunctional this system is," said an incredulous Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "You can't explain that to the public, that something that important, that significant was available in the summer of 2001, can't find its way to your agency until May 2002."
The Phoenix memo was just one example of agencies failing to share information cited in a 25-page report outlined by Eleanor Hill, the chief investigator of the congressional inquiry into the intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
Information sharing is a problem primarily because there is no one agency or data base that integrates all of the terror leads and intelligence flowing into government agencies, Hill told the special session of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
Instead, each agency has its own data base, which cannot communicate with other government data bases.
Each year, the federal government spends about $50 billion on information technology, "but the systems purchased are not compatible between the agencies of the federal government or with state and local entities," said Hill.
Better communication among agencies may have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks, witnesses said.
The State Department, for example, placed Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 19 al-Qaida operatives who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, on its watch list after receiving an alert from the CIA on August 23, 2001.
However, the Transportation Department did not receive the same alert.
"Had we had information that those two individuals presented a threat to aviation or posed a great danger, we would have put them on the list and they should have been picked up in the reservation process," Manno said.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the FAA issued a series of written circulars alerting the airline industry about the possibility that terrorists might take over planes or plant explosives on them, Hill said.
None of the FAA warnings mentioned using planes as missiles even though the intelligence community has been aware of radical Islamic groups threatening to do so at least a dozen times dating back to 1994.
Most of the testimony from federal officials at the State Department, Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that the sharing of information has vastly improved since last fall's attacks.
But Baltimore Police Commissioner Edward Norris disagreed.
Norris cited several examples of local police being kept out of investigations involving terrorist suspects his officers had arrested on unrelated charges.
"Who do we think needs to know more than the chiefs who protect the cities' citizens?" Norris asked. "We need to know more than anybody in this country what's going on in our cities, yet we don't."
As the intelligence committees heard about information sharing issues, the Justice Department's inspector general's office released a new report Tuesday criticizing the FBI's anti-terrorism efforts.
Inspector General Glenn A. Fine's staff reviewed the FBI's management of it counterterrorism resources in the aftermath of the al-Qaida attacks, finding that the FBI failed to complete a comprehensive written assessment of the risk of terrorist threats facing the nation.
Such an assessment would be helpful in determining the nature and severity of terrorist threats, according to an unclassified summary of Fine's report.
By September 2001, the FBI had developed a draft of a "Terrorist Threat Report" describing terrorist organizations and state sponsors, but the bureau had not assessed the threat and risk of an attack on the United States, the report found.
"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," Fine's summary states.
In addition, the draft report does not discuss the possible methods that a terrorist might use. For example, there is no analysis of groups like al-Qaida developing chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, the report said.
Several reasons were cited for why the report inadequately addressed the threat: No single person was in charge of managing the report; the FBI lacked the analytical capabilities to undertake the assessment; and the assessment was such a low priority that it took Fine's staff nearly a month to find anyone at the FBI who was familiar with the report.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who took office less than a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has said information sharing is a top priority.
Each week, the FBI sends out a bulletin to some 18,000 local and state law enforcement agencies across the country to update them on possible threats.
In April, Mueller appointed Kathleen McChesney to be executive assistant director in charge of improving relationships with local and state police.
Mueller hired Mark Miller from the CIA to address analytical shortfalls in the counter terrorism division and he added 25 analysts from the CIA to the bureau to beef up its analytical unit.
"Director Mueller welcomes the report's findings and concurs with the recommendations as constructive guidance," according to a statement from the FBI. "While the audit did not asses all aspects of the counterterrorism program, many of the recommendations are part of the larger, ongoing re-engineering of the program."
Because so many people who run these agencies are already sharing an I.Q.?
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