Inquiry Focuses on Data Sharing

U.S. immigration and transportation officials testified Tuesday that they could have helped apprehend two of the Sept. 11 hijackers if intelligence agencies had shared key information collected before the attacks.

In the latest hearing to highlight Sept. 11 failures, witnesses from a range of federal and local government agencies said that they were repeatedly left out of the intelligence loop before the attacks and that such problems persist.

At least two of the hijackers “should have been picked up in the [airline] reservation process,” but they were never entered into the system because the CIA hadn’t notified authorities that the two Al Qaeda suspects had entered the U.S., said Claudio Manno, an assistant undersecretary at the Transportation Security Administration.

Similarly, State Department and immigration officials said they could have helped locate the two men, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, but weren’t asked until shortly before the attacks.

Even then, the FBI made a “routine” request for visa records that implied no urgency to the matter, said Francis Taylor, counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department.

Had the FBI mentioned that the two men were wanted because of ties to the terrorist network, he said, State Department and immigration officials probably could have located them swiftly. “We have the capacity to do that, we know how to do that, but we were not asked to do that,” Taylor said.

Despite stepped-up efforts at sharing information since Sept. 11, the problems are far from being fixed, several witnesses said. When the United States was put on alert last month for possible attacks around the Sept. 11 anniversary, for example, top officials in Baltimore received no independent notice from Washington.

“We learned about the ‘orange’ alert the way everybody else in America did, on television,” said Edward Norris, police commissioner in Baltimore. He also said that his department has asked repeatedly for an FBI briefing on terrorism inquiries in Baltimore but that the bureau has yet to respond.

Tuesday’s hearing was part of an ongoing investigation of Sept. 11 by the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Information sharing has been identified as a chronic problem.

Eleanor Hill, staff director for the congressional inquiry, noted Tuesday that more than 1,500 CIA reports containing terrorist names were not provided to the State Department’s watch-listing program until after Sept. 11.

Some of the failures are technological, she said. The U.S. spends about $50 billion a year on computer systems, but many are so incompatible that information can’t travel from one system to another.

There also are security issues: State and local officials often lack clearances necessary to view sensitive intelligence.

But often, Hill said, the more serious obstacles to information sharing are “cultural, organizational [and] human.”

She singled out the FBI’s handling of the so-called Phoenix memo, in which an Arizona agent sounded unheeded alarms in the summer of 2001 about Middle Eastern men in U.S. flight schools.

Had aviation officials learned of the memo before the attacks, “we would have started to ask a lot more probing questions of the FBI,” Manno said.

Manno said the Federal Aviation Administration had sought during the 1990s to call airlines’ attention to growing terrorist threats, even distributing a CD to industry officials mentioning “the possibility of suicide attacks.”

But Manno had no explanation for why the FAA didn’t push the airline industry in the late 1990s to strengthen cockpit doors or take other security measures even after the agency had become aware of foiled plots to hijack planes and crash them into targets.

In the rush to correct their information sharing practices, intelligence agencies have released a flood of data in certain cases.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has added 14,000 names to its terrorism watch list over the last year, many of them supplied by the CIA after the agency changed its notification policy, said Joseph R. Greene, assistant INS commissioner for investigations.

Greene said the INS has conducted 6,500 joint interviews with the FBI since the attacks, making 526 immigration violation arrests.