The CIA was tracking two US-based terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks nearly two years beforehand, but failed to tell authorities that could have stopped them.
Newsweek magazine revealed yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency became aware of one of the two terrorists, Nawaf Alhazmi, a few days after he attended an al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000.
Agents also discovered that another of the men, Khalid Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa for the US.
The magazine said that, when the two men returned to the US from the Kuala Lumpur meeting, the CIA did not notify the FBI, which could have tracked the men (the CIA cannot spy within the US), or the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which could have turned them away at the border.
Instead, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in the United States and attended 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.
Three thousand people died in the attacks outside Washington and in New York and rural Pennsylvania.
The FBI says the two terrorists' frequent meetings with the other September 11 hijackers could have provided a road map to the entire cast, Newsweek reported, citing unidentified CIA and FBI officials. But the FBI did not know it should be looking for them until three weeks before the strikes, when the CIA, alerted to an imminent attack, rediscovered the file.
A search for the men ensued, but they had gone to ground in preparation for the attacks.
FBI director Robert Mueller yesterday struggled to reassure his critics that the agency had thwarted subsequent terrorist plots in the United States and abroad.
"I will tell you right now we have prevented a number of terrorist attacks around the globe since September 11," Mueller said, citing previously disclosed operations in Singapore, Paris and Spain but declining to discuss still-classified operations inside the United States.
Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican and member of a joint intelligence committee from the US Senate and House of Representatives, yesterday blasted the intelligence community.
"They don't have any excuse because the information was in their lap and they didn't do anything to prevent it," Senator Shelby said.
The turmoil in Washington contrasted with a contemplative mood at Ground Zero, where the World Trade Centre once stood in New York, as tearful families of those killed in the attack said a final farewell to their loved ones. The pit was closed last week.
- AGENCIES
Story archives:
Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
CIA had chance to stop hijackers
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