Sept. 11

Sept. 11 report: 'Failings' exploited

The 575-page review, to be released today, doesn't fault Presidents Bush or Clinton,but suggests vast changes.

WASHINGTON - The Sept. 11 commission's final report concludes the hijackers exploited "deep institutional failings within our government" over a long period but does not blame President Bush or former President Bill Clinton for the mistakes, administration officials familiar with the findings said Wednesday.

The report describes the patience and determination of the 19 hijackers and said they probed for weaknesses in airline and border procedures, taking test flights to gauge security.

A surveillance video that surfaced Wednesday shows four of the hijackers passing through security gates at Dulles International Airport shortly before boarding the plane they would crash into the Pentagon. In the video, the hijackers can be see undergoing additional scrutiny after setting off metal detectors, then being permitted to continue to their gate.

The Sept. 11 commission has spent 20 months looking into how the hijackers were able to mount the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, killing nearly 3,000 people and demolishing the World Trade Center's twin towers.

White House officials and congressional leaders were briefed Wednesday on the panel's findings, and Bush is to receive a copy of the 575-page report today just before it is released to the public.

Bush, bracing for a report that will be sharply critical of the government's intelligence-gathering, said that he looked forward to reading the report and that the administration is doing everything possible to prevent another terrorist attack.

"Had we had any inkling whatsoever that terrorists were about to attack our country, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect America," he said. "I'm confident President Clinton would have done the same thing. Any president would."

One administration official said the report concludes that Bush and Clinton took the threat of al-Qaida seriously and were genuinely concerned about the danger posed by al-Qaida. It finds that neither president was to blame for failing to stop the attacks, which were the culmination of years of planning.

While administration officials offered a preview of the report, their summary was far from a complete accounting of the findings.

Less than four months before the presidential election, the commission's work has ignited partisan debate over whether Bush took sufficient steps to deal with terrorism in the first year of his administration.

As expected, the report will call for creating a Cabinet-level national director of intelligence with authority over the CIA, FBI and other agencies. The White House administration is reserving judgment on that recommendation, and officials doubt it could be approved by Congress this year.

The panel's report also will sharply criticize Congress for failures in its role as overall watchdog of the nation's intelligence apparatus, officials said. And to help prevent terrorist attacks, the panel will call for wholesale changes in the way lawmakers oversee intelligence and domestic security agencies, administration officials said.

The report will propose that the House and Senate establish permanent committees on domestic security with jurisdiction over a wide range of activities that is spread among dozens of competing committees, officials said.

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

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

The proposals 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.

The report lists a series of missed operational opportunities to stop the hijackers, such as the bungled attempts to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and the FBI's handling of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested before the hijackings and has been accused of conspiring in the plot.

- Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

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