- WASHINGTON -- The long-awaited
report into the September 11 attacks will list as many as 10 missed opportunities
under the Bush and Clinton administrations to detect or foil the terrorist
hijackings, it was reported yesterday.
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- But the report of nearly 600 pages, to be released today,
does not suggest the attacks should have been stopped. Rather it concedes
that many of the opportunities were long shots, according to the Washington
Post.
-
- Six of the "operational opportunities" are
reported to have occurred during the eight months of President George W
Bush's administration before the September 11 attacks, and four were under
his predecessor Bill Clinton.
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- They are reported to include a failure by the CIA to
add two of the 19 hijackers' names to a terrorist watch list, the FBI's
arrest in August 2001 of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is accused of being the
"20th" hijacker, and several failed attempts to kill or capture
Osama bin Laden.
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- "There were clearly many opportunities out there
that were not taken advantage of," one commissioner told the Washington
Post. "From that some will conclude it could have been prevented,
others will say it might have been prevented, and the rest will say it's
impossible to tell. We said we couldn't get an answer to this."
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- With the campaign for November's presidential election
heating up, both sides are expected to seize on the commission's findings.
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- The campaign team of Senator John Kerry, Mr Bush's Democratic
challenger, will highlight the report's conclusion that al-Qa'eda had a
closer relationship with Teheran than Baghdad, in a further challenge to
the administration's case for the Iraq war.
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- While Iran is not accused of foreknowledge of the September
11 plot, the report suggests that it gave safe passage through Iran to
many of the hijackers and in late 2001 gave safe haven to fugitive al-Qa'eda
leaders.
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- Republicans will argue that the report concludes that
Mr Bush is no more at fault than Mr Clinton. "The report is not a
blame game," Tom DeLay, the leader of the Republican majority in the
House of Representatives, said yesterday after being briefed on the report.
"There were failures on all fronts."
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- The leaks came after the Democrats moved to neutralise
the potential damage of the row over one of Mr Clinton's former national
security advisers, who is under investigation for removing classified papers
on terrorism from the National Archives.
-
- Samuel "Sandy" Berger has resigned as one of
Mr Kerry's foreign policy advisers amid Democratic concern that the saga
could overshadow the largely positive coverage that has marked the countdown
to next week's party convention.
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- Mr Berger has admitted he took copies of classified memos
last autumn as he prepared his testimony for the September 11 commission.
He also admitted he took out with him handwritten notes. But his lawyer
said he took them "inadvertently".
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- Democrats were convinced the leak of the investigation
was deliberately timed to overshadow the impact of today's publication
of the report.
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- The report calls for an overhaul of the co-ordination
of intelligence including a new cabinet-level post. However, this already
met with stiff opposition in Washington.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=JVQYU5WVDZ
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