"September 11 panel says hijackers exploited 'deep institutional failings'"

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Congress faulted in 9/11 report 
Carl Hulse and Philip Shenon
The New York (NY) Times 


WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Sept. 11 commission will sharply criticize
Congress for failures as the overall watchdog of the nation's
intelligence apparatus, lawmakers and others briefed on the panel's
findings said Wednesday. And to help prevent terrorist attacks, the
panel will call for wholesale changes in the way lawmakers oversee
intelligence and domestic security agencies, the lawmakers and others
said.

The panel's report, to be made public today, will propose that the House
and Senate establish permanent committees on domestic security with
jurisdiction over a range of activities now widely spread out.

The report will also recommend that the existing intelligence committees
have much broader discretion over intelligence policy and spending while
raising the alternative of a House-Senate intelligence panel, the
officials said.

Although much of the focus on the commission's work has to this point
been on failings within the intelligence agencies and executive branch,
the significant changes proposed for Capitol Hill illustrate that the
panel determined that Congress also fell short in executing its own
responsibilities.

Other details emerged about the panel's final report, including a
recommendation that the government create a National Counterterrorism
Center to absorb a variety of existing operations, including a year-old
Terrorism Threat Integration Center now housed at the CIA.

In addition, officials said that a proposed new national intelligence
director would be subject to Senate confirmation.

Meanwhile Wednesday, a law firm released a portion of a surveillance
tape taken at Dulles International Airport showing several hijackers
being pulled aside for extra scrutiny on the morning of Sept. 11.
Commission investigators found in an interim report released in January
that three of the five hijackers who boarded American Airlines Flight
77, which crashed into the Pentagon, had set off metal detectors but
were eventually allowed to proceed. Investigators think the hijackers
were probably carrying box cutters or makeshift knives used in the
hijacking.

The video, released by the Motley Rice law firm, which represents 52
families in a suit against the airlines, shows an airport screener
hand-checking the baggage of one hijacker, Nawaf al-Hazmi, for traces of
explosives before letting him continue onto Flight 77 with his brother,
Salem, a fellow hijacker.

The video also shows hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Majed Moqed setting
off metal-detectors as they pass through security. Moqed set off a
second alarm, and a screener manually checked him with a handheld metal
detector. The tape was released to Associated Press Television and
received widespread airplay on Wednesday.

In another disclosure on the eve of the report, a passenger manifest was
released showing that at least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden,
accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the
United States on a charter flight eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks,
which were masterminded by Bin Laden's Al-Qaida network.

One passenger on the flight, Omar Awad bin Laden, a nephew of the
Al-Qaida leader, had been investigated previously by the FBI because he
had lived with Abdullah bin Laden, a leader of the World Assembly of
Muslim Youth, which the FBI suspected of being a terrorist organization.

The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who
obtained the manifest from officials at Boston's Logan Airport.
Lautenberg's office was given the document in recent weeks.

Dale Watson, a former FBI counterterrorism chief, said Wednesday that
FBI agents "scrubbed the people who were leaving and I was informed none
of them were anybody we needed to detain."

Turf wars

The proposals in the commission report involving Congress are certain to
touch off fierce turf wars in the House and Senate, where lawmakers
historically protect the power they wield through their responsibility
for setting policy and budgets for federal agencies. Such jurisdictional
fights have for years blocked similar proposed changes in the
intelligence area, but some lawmakers said Wednesday they should not
stand in the way of the changes recommended by the panel.

"If we're going to, based on the findings of this report, respond and
improve, we are going to have the challenge of overcoming the
institutional inertia which is a product of a lot of what we have in
Washington, D.C.," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee,
who along with other lawmakers and President Bush was briefed on the
report by the panel's leaders Wednesday. "That's going to be the
challenge for us as leaders."

"Before, this was unpredictable," the House Democratic leader, Rep.
Nancy Pelosi of California, said as she urged strong consideration for
the proposals. "Now it is predictable, and we all have a heightened
responsibility to avoid another tragedy."

At present, the House has a temporary special committee on homeland
security while the Senate has none, dispersing responsibility for those
concerns through its existing panels such as defense, appropriations and
commerce. The shortcomings of even the House approach were exhibited
earlier this month when an effort to write comprehensive homeland
security legislation for next year broke down in jurisdictional disputes
with other committees.

Major changes

Congressional aides with long experience in the intelligence field said
the proposals for the intelligence panels would represent major changes
and will encounter significant resistance.

Currently, the intelligence panels have authority for setting policy for
the intelligence agencies. They share that power with the House and
Senate armed services committees, because the military controls such a
large segment of the intelligence apparatus. The actual spending for the
agencies is established through the appropriations committees, mainly by
a subcommittee responsible for military spending.

Under the panel's recommendation, as described by the lawmakers and
aides, the intelligence committees would gain much greater control over
policy and spending, a significant shift in the congressional approach.
Aides said the report would also urge consideration of a joint
House-Senate committee responsible for intelligence agencies. That, too,
would be rare because House and Senate committees usually draw up
individual items of legislation and then work out the differences in
conference committees.

In other areas of the commission's investigation, some findings have
been disclosed over the months in voluminous interim reports. They are
amplified by the unanimous endorsement of the commissioners in this
final release.


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