- NEW YORK (Reuters)
- Months before the September 11 attacks, the CIA knew two of the hijackers
were in the United States and that they were connected to the al Qaeda
organisation, Newsweek reported on Sunday.
-
- According to the report that will hit newsstands on Monday,
the intelligence was never passed along to the FBI, which now asserts that
if it had known, agents could have uncovered the terrorist plot.
-
- Newsweek said the CIA became aware of one of the terrorists,
Nawaf Alhazmi, a few days after he attended a secret planning meeting of
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda in Malaysia in January 2000.
-
- Agents also discovered that another of the men, Khalid
Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him
to enter and leave the United States at will.
-
- The magazine said the CIA did nothing with the information,
neither notifying the FBI, which could have tracked the two men, or the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, which could have turned them away
at the border.
-
- Instead, Newsweek said that for a year and nine months
after the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived
openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver's
licences, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools. On the
morning of September 11, they boarded one of the four hijacked airliners,
American Airlines Flight 77, and crashed it into the Pentagon.
-
- Some 3,000 people died in the attacks outside Washington
and in New York and rural Pennsylvania.
-
- Appearing on the "Fox News Sunday" programme,
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said he had been given the Newsweek
report but had not "had a chance to digest this story ... to read
it thoroughly and get the details".
-
- Nonetheless, Ashcroft added: "We are at war. We
need to seize on every possibility for preventing additional attacks. That
is our strategy. That is our responsibility, and we need to coordinate
the activities between our agencies."
-
- Newsweek said the information was held at the CIA's Counterterrorism
Center, the base camp for the agency's war on bin Laden. The magazine said
that when Almihdhar's visa expired, the State Department, not knowing any
better, issued him a new one in July 2001, even though the CIA had linked
him to one of the suspected bombers of the USS Cole in Yemen in October
2000.
-
- The FBI now is asserting that the two terrorists' frequent
meetings with the other September 11 hijackers could have provided federal
agents with a road map to the entire cast, the magazine said. But the FBI
did not know it was supposed to be looking for them until three weeks before
the strikes, when CIA Director George Tenet, worried an attack was imminent,
ordered a review.
-
- An all-points bulletin was sent on August 23, 2001, launching
law enforcement agents on an urgent and futile search for the two men.
-
- Newsweek said FBI officials have prepared a detailed
chart showing how agents could have uncovered the terrorist plot if they
had learned about Almihdhar and Alhazmi sooner, given their contacts with
at least five of the other hijackers.
|
