9/11 Staff Statement

A prepared statement by the staff of the Sept. 11 Commission with findings from their work so far. Provided by the commission:

"Law Enforcement, Counterterrorism, and Intelligence Collection in the United States Prior to 9/11"

Members of the Commission, with your help, your staff has developed initial findings regarding law enforcement and intelligence collection in the United States prior to the 9/11 attacks. These findings may help frame some of the issues to be discussed during this hearing and inform the development of your judgments and recommendations.

This statement reflects the results of our work so far. We remain ready to revise our understanding of this topic as our investigation progresses. This staff statement represents the collective efforts of a number of members of our staff. Caroline Barnes, Christine Healey, Lance Cole, Michael Jacobson, Peter Rundlet and Doug Greenburg did most of the investigative work reflected in this statement.

We were fortunate in being able to build upon strong investigative work done by the Congressional Joint Inquiry and by the Department of Justices Office of the Inspector General. We have obtained excellent cooperation from the FBI and the Department of Justice, both in Washington and in six FBI field offices across the United States.

"The Role of the FBI"

The FBI played the lead role in the governments domestic counterterrorism strategy before September 11. In the 1990s, The FBI's counterterrorism efforts against international terrorist organizations included both intelligence and criminal investigations. Consistent with its traditional law enforcement approach, most of The FBI's energy during this period was devoted to after-the-fact investigations of major terrorist attacks in order to develop criminal cases.

Investigating these attacks always required an enormous amount of resources. As most of these attacks occurred overseas, many of The FBI's top terrorism investigators were deployed abroad for long periods of time. New York was the "Office of Origin" for the al Qaeda program and consequently where most of The FBI's institutional knowledge on al Qaeda resided. Working closely with the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Intelligence Community, the FBI's New York field office was often successful in these investigations, and many of the perpetrators of these plots were identified, arrested, prosecuted and convicted. We will summarize a few of the major episodes.

_World Trade Center Bombing: On February 26, 1993, six people were killed and over a thousand injured when a truck bomb exploded in the