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OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SECTION 4/19/2004 - Violent promises at funeral as Hamas swears revenge for Israeli attack - Bremer says Iraqi army unprepared for insurgents 9/11 files show urgent warnings By David Johnston and Jim Dwyer, New York Times WASHINGTON - Earlier this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: In a calm voice, Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats. At first, however, Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, 'Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that that it wasn't air rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking." For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by al-Qaida had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government. The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on al-Qaida's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated Osama bin Laden was intent on striking U.S. soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration. While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings - including one that al-Qaida seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country - had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month earlier. The information produced by the commission so far has led six of its 10 members to say or suggest the attacks could have been prevented, though there is no consensus on when, how, or by whom. The commission's chairman, Thomas Kean, a Republican, has described failures at every level of government, any of which, if avoided, could have altered the outcome. While the commission was created to diagnose mistakes and to recommend reforms, its examination has powerful political resonance. The panel has reviewed the records of two presidents, Bill Clinton and George Bush. Bush said last week that none of the warnings gave any hint of the time, place or date of an assault. Over a two-week stretch this month, the commission pried open some of the most closely guarded compartments of government, revealing the flow and details of previously classified information to two presidents and their senior advisers, and the performance of intelligence and law enforcement officials. The inquiry has gone beyond the report of a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committee in 2002, which chronicled missteps at the middle level of bureaucracies. Urged on by a number of families of people killed in the attacks, the Kean commission has used a mix of moral and political leverage to extract presidential communications and testimony. Among the new themes that have fundamentally reshaped the story of the Sept. 11 attacks are: - Al-Qaida and its leader, bin Laden, did not blindside the United States, but were a threat recognized and discussed regularly at the highest levels of government for five years before the attacks, in thousands of reports, often accompanied by urgent warnings from lower-level experts. - Clinton and Bush received regular information about the threat of al-Qaida and the intention of the bin Laden network to strike inside the United States. Each president made fighting terrorism a stated priority, failed to find a diplomatic solution and viewed military force as a last resort. At the same time, neither grappled with the structural flaws and paralyzing dysfunction that undermined the CIA and FBI, the two agencies on which the nation depended for protection. By the end of his second term, Clinton and the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, were barely speaking. - Even when the two agencies cooperated, the results were unimpressive. Kean, the chairman, said he viewed the reports on the two agencies as indictments. In late August 2001, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, learned the FBI had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after he had enrolled in a flight school. Tenet was given a memo titled, "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But he took no action, he testified, and did not tell Bush about the case. During the Clinton years, particularly at the National Security Council, the commission has found, there was uncertainty about whether the threat posed by al-Qaida and bin Laden justified military action. Much of the debate was provoked by Richard Clarke, who led anti-terrorism efforts under Clinton and Bush and argued for aggressive action. "Former officials, including an NSC staffer working for Mr. Clarke, told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands," according to one interim commission report. "Such differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war. Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act upon such beliefs at great cost or at high risk." In the first eight months of the Bush administration, the commission found, the president and his advisers received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood. The most dramatic came in the Aug. 6 memo presented in an intelligence briefing the White House says Bush requested. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the memo was declassified earlier this month under pressure from the commission. After referring to a British tip in 1998 that Islamic fundamentalists wanted to hijack a plane, the memo goes on to warn: "Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." Kerrey said Bush showed "good instincts" by asking for the material, but said the call from Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 - which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in the day's first attack - showed that the threats and alarms were not passed down the line. The Clinton response Throughout Clinton's eight years in office, law enforcement and intelligence agencies tracked al-Qaida through a succession of plots in the United States and overseas. The commission found evidence that counterterrorism became a priority for the Clinton security team. But the panel said the effort was stymied by bureaucratic miscommunications, diplomatic failures, intelligence lapses and policy miscalculations. On the intelligence side, the commission discovered confusion about crucial issues. White House aides believed, for example, that Clinton had authorized actions to kill bin Laden, but CIA officers thought they were legally permitted to kill him only during an attempt to capture him. Throughout the 1990s, the panel found, law enforcement and intelligence experts, often in lower-level jobs, repeatedly warned that bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. The threat was plainly stated in documents disclosed by the commission. But the CIA's attempts to thwart bin Laden's network through covert action were ineffectual, the commission found. The agency's "Issue Station," which was set up in 1996 to hunt down bin Laden, had a half-dozen chances to attack the al-Qaida chief, but each time agency higher-ups balked. A plan to kill him in February 1999 was called off at the last minute because of concerns that he might be with a prince from the United Arab Emirates who was regarded as a useful ally in counterterrorism, the commission reported. In October 2000, two Qaida suicide bombers in a small boat packed with explosives attacked the Navy destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. Clinton did not retaliate, but Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, warned his successor, Condoleezza Rice, that "she would be spending more time on terrorism and al-Qaida than any other issue." The Bush review Warned of the al-Qaida threat during the transition, Bush's national security team started work in March 2001 on a comprehensive strategy to eradicate the network. But the effort seemed to plod ahead almost in isolation from the urgent notices by the CIA. Most of the threat warnings, but not all, pointed overseas. At the end of May, Cofer Black, chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center, told Rice the threat level stood at "7 on a scale of 10, as compared to an 8 during the millennium," the period around January 2000. In response, U.S. embassies were warned to take precautions. The State Department warned Americans traveling overseas. The CIA intensified operations to disrupt terror cells around the world. Tenet took his terror warnings directly to Bush. Rice said at least 40 meetings between the CIA director and the president dealt "in one way or other with al-Qaida." Tenet later said, "The system was blinking red," adding that no warning indicated that terrorists would fly hijacked commercial aircraft into buildings in the United States. On July 5, 2001, Rice and Andrew Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, had asked Clarke to alert top officials of the country's domestic agencies. "Let's make sure they're buttoning down," Rice said. The aviation administration issued threat advisories, but neither the agency's top administrator nor Norman Mineta, the secretary of transportation, was aware of the increased threat level, said Jamie Gorelick, a commission member, at a hearing last week. Copyright and permissions

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