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The CIA's top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency's own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday. Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. "The agency did not always work effectively and cooperatively." The executive summary says U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin...

Bill Clinton denies it now, but he once admitted he passed up an opportunity to extradite Osama bin Laden.And NewsMax has the former President making the claim on audiotape. [You can listen to the tape yourself -- Click HereClinton's comments and his actions relating to American efforts to capture bin Laden have taken on renewed interest because of claims made in a new ABC movie, the "Path to 9/11," that suggests Clinton dropped the ball during his presidency. Clinton has also angrily denied claims the Monica Lewinsky scandal drew his attention away from dealing with national security matters like...

It’s understandable the Clintonistas and President Clinton are upset about the two-part ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11” to be broadcast Sunday, concluding on the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaida attack on America on Monday. Based on the 9-11 commission report and ABC News correspondent John Miller’s book, “The Cell,” the film strips away the conventional wisdom that somehow the fledgling Bush White House was responsible for 9-11 through neglect or indifference. The film strips bare the Democratic talking points, exposing them for the fraud they are, accurately depicting the chances the Clinton White House missed to kill or capture...

On Sept. 11, 2006, America marks the anniversary of the most devastating attack on our homeland since the Civil War. NewsMax.com presents a special series of articles to commemorate this event, to remember the innocent and to honor the brave heroes of that fateful day. Read our complete coverage Click Here Now. WASHINGTON -- The authors of the 9/11 Commission magnanimously reported: "We write with the benefit and handicap of hindsight. We are mindful of the danger of being unjust to men and women who made choices in conditions of uncertainty and in circumstances over which they often had little...

Last night I attended a screening of the first half of The Path to 9/11 a film that will be broadcast by ABC in two three-hour segments on September 10 and 11. Two and one-half hours is a long time to sit still watching a film, but this one was gripping and tension-filled and visually dazzling. ... One gripping scene shows Massoud's forces--and CIA agents surrounding bin Laden's encampments and then being called back when National Security Adviser Sandy Berger refuses to give a go-ahead for the operation. That scene, according to 9/11 commission Chairman Thomas Kean, an adviser to...

Israel's Lost Moment Israel's leaders do not seem to understand how ruinous its disappointing performance in Lebanon has been to its relationship with America. At critical moments in the past, Israel has indeed shown its value. In 1970 Israel saved King Hussein and the monarchy of Jordan. In 1982 they shot down 86 MiGs in one week without a single loss, revealing Soviet technological backwardnesss. Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on July 12 gave them our green light to defend themselves; an act of clear self-interest, because America needed a decisive Hezbollah defeat. Hezbollah is a wholly owned Iranian subsidiary, making Islam...

Jack Thomas's freedom is a victory for our enemies THAT Jack Thomas has had his terrorism conviction quashed by a court will please those who wish to see the law used as a weapon in the service of their ideological objections to the national defence effort in the war on terror. But it is a defeat for common sense and Australia's national security. And al-Qa'ida and its allies will interpret it as showing that Australia is intellectually enervated and incapable of understanding how serious the terror threat is. It is easy to argue that the quashing of Mr Thomas's conviction...

"It is a shame that the venerable Mike Wallace was so determined to secure this interview that he failed to recognize that he and CBS would inevitably be used skillfully by the Iranian leader," said AJC Executive Director David Harris. "Known as a tough interviewer, Wallace this time around proved inexplicably passive, perhaps hypnotized by his own unexpected fascination with the Iranian leader. As a result, he failed, among other things, to press President Ahmedinejad on his long trail of damning quotes on Jews and Israel, as well as to challenge the Iranian leader on his support of Hezbollah and...

CNN is reporting that steps could have been taken to stop the suicide hijackers of 9/11 if Zacarias Moussaoui had told investigators about his al Qaeda ties. Robert J. Cammaroto of the Transportation Security Administration said the Federal Aviation Administration could have banned short-blade knives if they had known terrorists were planning to use them to overtake flight crews.Cammaroto's three-hour appearance in the death penalty proceeding was meant to bolster prosecutors' arguments that airlines could have sufficiently tightened aviation security if Moussaoui, after he was arrested in August 2001, had told authorities about al Qaeda's plan to hijack and crash...

Bin Laden's phone There's been a lot of press this month about the U.S. missing a chance to catch Osama bin Laden because he stopped using a satellite phone in August 1998. While some Clintonites and President Bush blamed the press for writing that he used such a phone, we thought there was another plausible reason: August 1998 was when the U.S. tried to kill bin Laden in an air strike. Such events would likely make the terrorist leader change his methods. Anyway, we came across a speech, delivered in April 2002, that reveals the U.S. continued to gain valuable...

Time did well in selecting Bono plus Bill and Melinda Gates as its charitable Persons of the Year, but I wish it had also put a non-celebrity -- maybe a volunteer Katrina relief worker -- on its cover. It would have been good to honor one of the 9,000 Southern Baptists from 41 states who volunteered 120,000 days during the two months after the hurricane hit. During that time, they served 10 million meals and pushed forward cleanup and recovery efforts. Or how about someone from the Salvation Army: Those folks served nearly 5 million hot meals and over 6.5...

9/11 Commission Blew Their Chance By Debra Saunders It's truly a shame that the panelists on the 9-11 commission were such self-important windbags -- their 41 recommendations, they never fail to remind, were (all bow) "unanimous and bipartisan" -- that they blew their chance to make this country safer. Don't' get me wrong. Washington has been unconscionably slow in doing the practical things needed -- such as providing a radio spectrum for emergency first-responders -- to make America more secure. The panel also was right to criticize the Senate for larding a homeland security spending bill with pork. That said,...

The Republican Party has had over ten years to get it's act together, after taking control of the House and the Senate of the United States.  For around five years, Congress had to combat what some people might term 'a mafiosa type individual' serving as Commander in Chief.  Whether you or others agree with that, the fact is that the Congress had it's hands full countering the incumbent president.  Still, come victories were won. Investigations came and investigations went.  At least some of them were so poorly run, that people on the street knew more about the facts of the...

"The terrorists saw our response to the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings in the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole," Bush noted, after getting an update on the war on terror at the Pentagon. "The terrorists concluded that we lacked the courage and character to defend ourselves and so they attacked us," the president added, in quotes picked up by United Press International.

Wrangles stopped arming of plane PREVIOUSLY unseen footage of Osama Bin Laden taken by a CIA spy drone reveals how close the Americans came to killing the Al-Qaeda leader two years before the September 11 attacks. The pictures were filmed by a Predator unmanned aircraft and show Bin Laden, in white robes, with a small group of followers at a training camp near Khost in eastern Afghanistan at the end of 1999. The drone was one of the first to be used in Afghanistan by the CIA, but because of bureaucratic wrangles it was unarmed. The pictures, thought to be...

August 18, 2005 -- A veteran Army intelligence officer said yesterday the elite military intelligence unit known as Able Danger might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks — if it had been allowed to alert the FBI that Mohamed Atta was living in the country. "My first reaction was, 'We had him.' It was a sinking feeling in my stomach," Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer told The Post in an interview yesterday, describing how he felt after learning that Atta was one of the hijackers. Shaffer said that before the attacks, in 2000, Able Danger used complex computer analysis...

(CBS) In the Persian Gulf, in late July 1996, American warships, a full complement of military hardware, and nearly 4,000 Marines, sailors and SEALs, were praying they could pull off the mission of their lives. They had been assigned to grab the man, who before September 11th, had killed more Americans than any other terrorist. His name is Imad Mugniyah, and U.S. intelligence believed they had tracked him to the waters of the Persian Gulf, aboard a merchant ship, the Ibn Tufail. Marine commander John Garrett helped plan this top-secret mission to take down the ship, and take Mugniyah into...

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission), an independent, bipartisan commission created by congressional legislation...is chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks...

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohamed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of an al-Qaida cell operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress. snip In the summer of 2000, the intelligence team, known as "Able Danger," prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the FBI, Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania and the former intelligence official said...

My colleagues in the news media are dutifully reporting a breakdown in the FBI that led directly to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijacking disaster. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the FBI. And I have no doubts incompetence, bad judgment and bureaucratic snafus plagued the FBI leading up to the al-Qaida attack that killed 3,000 Americans. But neither the Justice Department inspector general's report, nor the press coverage of it, are connecting some very obvious dots that point the finger directly at political decisions by political appointees in the Clinton White House. Here are the facts...