9/11 intelligence report....

As you must all know by now, the joint inquiry conducted by the Senate and House intelligence committees on the Sept. 11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon finally released its report this week, after battling the Bush administration for 7 months over issues of secrecy and national security.

Bush supporters are proclaiming there's no "smoking gun" to incriminate their leader and his staff for failing to prevent the attacks. Considering how much of the report remains classified, their declarations are at the very least premature.

Smoking gun or not, the content of the report is damning enough. As David Corn in The Nation says:

The final report is an indictment of the intelligence agencies--and, in part--of the administrations (Clinton and Bush II) that oversaw them. It notes, "The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information.... As a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack.

One colossal missed opportunity occurred right here in San Diego, where an FBI informant had numerous contacts in 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. (I've read previously they were housemates for a time.) He may also have had more limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. Again, from The Nation:

In 2000, the CIA had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar--who had already been linked to terrorism--were or might be in the United States. Yet it had not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared this information with the FBI. The FBI agent who handled the San Diego informant told the committees that had he had access to the intelligence information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, "it would have made a huge difference." He would have "immediately opened" an investigation and subjected them to a variety of surveillance. It can never be known whether such an effort would have uncovered their 9/11 plans. "What is clear, however," the report says, "is that the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.

Later, in August 2001, the FBI wanted to locate al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar (not sure why), but –incredibly--they failed to inform the San Diego field office of the search. The FBI agent who was handling the informant in San Diego told the committees, "I'm sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a few days."

The White House adamantly refuses to reveal what Bush knew and when, nor to release to the committees, much less to citizens, the contents of an August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB) that contained information on bin Laden. Claims by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that the PDB contained only historical perspectives on bin Laden's methods and activities have been contradicted by an intelligence community source who told the committees the intelligence was much more specific.

Not only that, the Bush administration--who prior to 9/11, planned to de-fund counterterrorism, including the CIA unit whose business was bin Laden--refuses to declassify 25-1/2 of the report’s 27 pages on foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers.

The prevailing assumption among the journalists covering the committees--and it is well-founded--is that most of the missing material concerns Saudi Arabia and the possibility that the hijackers received financial support from there. Is the Bush Administration treading too softly on a sensitive--and explosive--subject? "Neither CIA nor FBI officials," the report says, "were able to address definitively the extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the United States or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature…

Complete column here.