US Releases Final Report on Sept. 11 Terror Attack

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, July 25, 2003

US Releases Final Report on Sept. 11 Terror Attack

The United States released the final Sept. 11 report Thursday, saying the "best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot" was lost because intelligence agencies failed to act.

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The United States released the final Sept. 11 report Thursday, saying the "best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot" was lost because intelligence agencies failed to act.

The report, by a joint committee of the US House of Representatives and Senate intelligence panels, found that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for nearly two years before the attacks, knew about the terror connections between two hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who in 2000 moved to San Diego.

The report said as early as in May 2001, US intelligence agencies identified suspected mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and knew he was seeking recruits to travel to the United States for terrorist activities.

The congressional report concluded that intelligence agencies ignored important clues, failed to share information among themselves and did not pay enough attention to the likelihood of a major domestic terrorist attack.

Two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were identified by CIA after attending an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, but information about them was not widely shared in the intelligence community.

The two terrorists were not placed on a State Department watch list until weeks before the attacks and were able to freely enter and leave the United States.

The report raised new questions about Saudi links to the hijackers, saying that Omar al-Bayoumi, a student who provided the terrorists with financial help, "had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia."

The report also cited a lack of attention given to the al-Qaida and terrorism issues by the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice.

The report pointed out that the FBI failed to shift its priorities from crime-fighting, which had been at the heart of its mission for decades, to preventing terrorism before Sept. 11.

However, the 10-month investigation found that US intelligence agencies had no "smoking gun" -- no single piece of evidence that pointed specifically to the impending Sept. 11 attacks.

More than 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

After 9 public hearings and 13 closed sessions by the committee last year, the report is the most comprehensive account yet of lapses that allowed 19 Arabs to hijack four commercial airliners without being detected by intelligence or law enforcement authorities.

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