British intelligence about a terrorist suspect arrested in the United States in 2001 could have helped disrupt the September 11 plot, but an urgent request for information was treated as a low priority in London, a commission of inquiry found on Tuesday.
The finding marked the first time that Britain has been drawn into hearings by Washington’s September 11 commission, and came on a day when the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft also came under blistering attack for their alleged failure to take the al-Qaeda threat seriously enough.
A report by the commission staff published on Tuesday night said the FBI tried to find out as much as possible about a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested on August 16 as he was learning how to fly a jumbo jet on a flight simulator.
As Moussaoui, now on trial for his involvement in the September 11 plot, had once lived in London, an FBI legal attaché in London ”promptly prepared a written request of the British government for information concerning Moussaoui and hand-delivered the request on August 21.
”The case, though handled expeditiously at the American end, was not handled by the British as a priority amid a large number of other terrorist-related inquiries,” the report said.
It was only on September 13, two days after the attacks in New York and Washington killed nearly 3 000 people, that the British discovered Moussaoui had attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, the report said.
”Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense and much higher-level attention,” the commission said.
”A maximum US effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections” to the hijackers and their financiers through an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, the commission statement said.
”The publicity about the threat also might have disrupted the plot,” it concluded. ”But this would have been a race against time.”
A British official rejected the implication that a faster British response might have made an important difference.
”We had no information that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks,” the official said. ”We passed on all the relevant information as soon as we obtained it.”
On Tuesday night, US President George Bush also insisted that the attacks masterminded by Osama Bin Laden could not realistically have been foreseen.
”We knew he had designs on us, we knew he hated us. But there was nobody in our government, and I don’t think the prior government, [who] could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale,” the president said at a prime-time press conference.
However, research by the commission’s staff unearthed a string of hair-raising warnings from US intelligence in April and May of 2001, with headlines like ”Bin Laden planning multiple operations”, ”Bin Laden network’s plans advancing” and ”Bin Laden threats are real”.
Earlier it was the turn of the FBI and Ashcroft to face the blame. Another commission report published the same day described the FBI as backward-looking, resistant to change, and reliant on hopelessly outdated equipment. Ashcroft was portrayed as almost nonchalant in the face of the terrorism alert in the summer of 2001.
Thomas Pickard, acting FBI director at the time, told the commission that his appeals for more funding for his counter-terrorism budget were turned down by Ashcroft on September 10. Pickard said he only found out about the decision two days later, after the attacks had already occurred. Pickard also claimed that in the months leading up to the September 11 attacks, he warned the attorney general about the surge in intelligence about an impending attack.
However, Pickard testified that Ashcroft told him ”he did not want to hear this information any more”.
The claim was denied by Ashcroft, who also gave sworn testimony on Tuesday.
”I did never speak to him telling him I did not want to hear about terrorism,” the attorney general said. He argued that his department had had ”no higher priority than to protect citizens from terrorist attacks”.
The commission also delivered what its chairperson, Thomas Kean, a veteran Republican politician, described as ”an indictment of the FBI”. The report depicted the FBI as an old-fashioned law enforcement organisation incapable of putting together a broad strategy to combat al-Qaeda and prevent further attacks. There was no common computer database, and the few computers available were more than a decade out of date by 2001.
Louis Freeh, a former FBI director, rejected the criticism of the FBI, arguing that its shortcomings were a result of being chronically underfunded. He also opposed suggestions that responsibility for counter-terrorism be transferred from the FBI to a new domestic intelligence organisation modelled on Britain’s MI5.
”Americans, I don’t think, like secret police,” Freeh said. ”And you would, in effect, be establishing a secret police.” — Guardian Unlimited Â