Many Reforms Stymied on Capitol Hill

The congressional report on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks released Thursday directs blame at the CIA, FBI and other agencies for missing a series of opportunities to head off the disaster.

Yet numerous recommendations for preventing a reprise have run into trouble on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

That raises the question of whether the same agencies are missing opportunities now.

A number of recommendations made in December by the inquiry’s authors, and repeated in Thursday’s final report, have not been carried out or are works in progress with much to be done.

And while Congress and the Bush administration have created an alphabet soup of new agencies and terrorism-fighting forces after the Sept. 11 attacks, they have yet to be tested in many ways.

The idea of a centralized terrorism information center to address a major blunder identified by investigators -- the failure of the CIA and the FBI to share intelligence -- has been up and running for only 11 weeks.

Moreover, the Bush administration has put the new hub, known as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, under the control of the CIA, even though the report singles out the agency for sitting on information about two of the hijackers months before the attacks. The investigators had urged that the terrorism clearinghouse be made part of the Department of Homeland Security to avoid turf wars.

Another recommendation -- to develop a single national list of suspected terrorists -- also has not been followed up. A recent General Accounting Office report found a dozen such “watch lists” in nine different federal agencies.

Critics say the lack of uniformity and reporting standards creates confusion. Thursday’s report, a joint effort of the Senate and House intelligence committees, found that the failure of the CIA to put two hijackers on a State Department watch list allowed them to slip through the law enforcement net until just weeks before the attacks -- and by then it was too late for the FBI to react.

“Corrective measures for the intelligence community’s failures were known and acknowledged two years ago, but they have still not been implemented,” Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democratic presidential candidate, said in a statement Thursday.

Some experts wonder whether policymakers have spent too much time and money re-engineering the bureaucracy and not enough addressing the kinds of nuts-and-bolts concerns that investigators have raised.

“What the congressional committees need to be doing now is walking through these failure points and asking the question, ‘Have they been fixed?’ ” said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group specializing in technology issues. He is not optimistic about what they might find.

One of the report’s most stunning revelations, for example, is that two of the hijackers rented an apartment from a longtime FBI informant in San Diego. The FBI contends that the informant had no way of knowing whether the renters were terrorists.

In an ideal world, Dempsey said, the informant or his handler should have been able to check a central list to see whether the U.S. government considered the men to be terrorists. “They clearly couldn’t at the time,” Dempsey said. “I fear the answer is still no, but I am not sure if anyone has asked that question.”

The agencies say they have made great progress and are better prepared to foil acts of terrorism than they were two years ago. “The picture of the FBI today shows a changed organization,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in a prepared statement Thursday, in response to the report.

Since Sept. 11, the bureau has more than doubled the number of agents working on counter-terrorism matters, spent millions on overhauling its aging computer network, and launched scores of regional terrorism task forces that work with state and local officials.

Still, law enforcement officials remain far behind in their ability to communicate with each other and use technology as a weapon against terrorism, another area where the report’s authors found the government to be seriously lagging.

The Department of Homeland Security, which was created out of 22 agencies four months ago, is still primarily focused on bringing its internal systems together and is just beginning to tackle the idea of coordinating with anti-terrorism partners such as the Justice or State departments.

“The information is flowing, but it can flow better when we have more compatible systems,” said Asa Hutchinson, Homeland Security’s undersecretary for border and transportation security, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.

At the same hearing, Mueller was challenged on progress that the bureau had made in hiring more Arab-speaking agents; the report has recommended that the bureau boost its hiring of “agents and analysts with the linguistic skills needed in counter-terrorism efforts.”

Of nearly 1,000 new FBI agents hired in the fiscal year after Sept. 11, six were Arabic-speaking, according to data Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) obtained from the FBI and disclosed at the hearing.

“The picture that emerges,” Feingold said, “is the FBI seeking to hire only minimal numbers of language-proficient agents who would be actually helpful in investigations of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups based in the Arab or Muslim world.”

And last week, he said, one of the FBI’s few Arab American special agents filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington alleging that he was discriminated against and systematically excluded from the Sept. 11 investigation because of his ethnicity.

Mueller said the bureau attempted to resolve the dispute with the Arab American agent out of court. He said he shared the concern about the low hiring levels, and that the FBI was working to address them.

“Everybody in the bureau understands that if we could clone a number of [Arabic-speaking agents], we would be more than happy to do so,” he said.