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| WHAT WENT WRONG | |
 September 18, 2002 
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GWEN IFILL: And joining us to discuss what may have been known, and might have been avoided, prior to September 11, are two lawmakers trying to get to the bottom of it all: Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida-- he's chairman of the Senate select Committee on Intelligence-- and Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, the committee's vice chairman. Senator Graham, I guess we have to start with the "getting to the bottom of it all" question, which is based on what you now read in this 30-age report and the thousands of supporting documents, classified and unclassified, that you read to support it, do you think that what happened on 9/11 could have avoided? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: If the information that was known by all of the intelligence agencies had been brought together before one set of analysts who could have seen the information not as being islands but as being part of a larger continent, and if they had asked additional questions that would have developed from that putting together the continent, and frankly, with a little luck, I think there was a reasonable chance that the plot could have been unearthed before September 11 and avoided. GWEN IFILL: Those are a lot of "ifs" that you outlined there, Sen. Graham. And when you say "reasonable chance," do you mean that there was an intelligence breach that brought about this failure, this attack -- that allowed the attack to happen? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: I would say it was a systemic problem, and the systemic problem was that these agencies have been so insular and unwilling to share across agencies that there was never a point in time when the information that CIA had collected the information that the NSA, the National Security Agency, the information the FBI had brought on board was put one group of people, who could have seen it all and hopefully begun the process of developing a pattern from those blocks of information, and that, with some creativity and luck, had a reasonable chance of developing enough information that we could have intercepted the plot before it was executed. GWEN IFILL: Senator Shelby, the report details example after example of cases where it seemed as if one agency after another was tracking Osama bin Laden in one way. Let me read to you one line in the report which says: The totality of pre-9/11 is that intelligence was clearly reiterated the critically important theme of Osama bin Laden's intent to launch terror attacks inside the United States. Were these just too general, these warnings? Were they just not specific enough? SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: I think some of them-if you put it altogether, Sen. Graham was talking about it - in other words, if you fused all this information, perhaps there would have been a disruption. I don't know that we would have stopped the events of September 11. There would probably have been attempts and maybe successes-- who knows? But if you'd have to put together the information that we have learned thus far-and I believe there's a lot more to come -- in one place where they could have acted on it -- everybody would have known it and acted on it, I believe we could have had a different story. We won't know that. But that's what I'd deduct. GWEN IFILL: Well, let's just talk about the Osama bin Laden hints that were accumulated over time from these different agencies. SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Okay. GWEN IFILL: Was there any one place where these were being filtered to? Was there one person, one agency in charge of keeping track of Osama bin Laden and synthesizing all these different threats and questions that were raised? SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Well, obviously not, although we do have the counterterrorism center over at Langley and the CIA, and I believe they have made a lot of progress since 1986, when it was created. At no time that I recall in my eight years' experience on this committee did they bring it all together, did they put all the information together, and that's one of the failings, I believe, of the community. GWEN IFILL: Sen. Graham, let's talk about the details of reports, which talk about the possibility of using civil aviation as an attack weapon in this case. This report says that less than a year before 9/11, the FAA and the FBI-- I believe it's the FBI-- agreed that the possibility of using civil aviation was relatively low. Was that just a tragic miscalculation? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: It has proven to be. And what that low assessment of the threat led to is that the intelligence community did not communicate with the FAA, and the FAA in turn with commercial airline management, that this threat was possible. What airlines trained their crews to do historically in the event of a hijacking was to be passive, to acquiesce, to get the plane on the ground and then start the process of negotiations. There had been no expectation that you'd be dealing with hijackers who did not want to use the plane for an economic or political purpose but rather were prepared to commit suicide by using the plane as a weapon of mass destruction. I think had there been adequate information to the commercial airliners as to new use-- and we had five pages of examples of information about using airliners as weapons of mass destruction-- they might have changed their crew directions as to how to respond in the event of a hijacker and that might have resulted in a different outcome on September 11. If you recall that the first three planes did, in fact, follow the traditional order of being passive and acquiescing, and they were all used as a weapon of mass instruction. It was not until the fourth airplane, where they had heard what happened to the first three, realized what was going on, they started to resist. And while unfortunately, sadly, tragically, they lost their lives, at least they saved potentially hundreds or thousands of lives by not allowing that fourth airplane to also become a weapon. GWEN IFILL: Senator Shelby, we just heard the staff director outline in her report all the U.S. targets, which were part of this chatter -the Statue of Liberty -- even the World Trade Center and other important United States American landmarks, but yet apparently all of the focus or much of the focus was overseas. SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: I believe that was what we were hearing at the time, that there was a lot of chatter that was being picked up, and a lot of it, so the intelligence Committee thought, would be pointing to the direction of the terrorist attacks in some of our targets overseas. But I believe in the final analysis that was all a ploy. That was a trick because they always planned to hit us but we didn't know it because we didn't do our homework. I believe it was a lost opportunity in our intelligence committee and especially today when you'll recall from the day I asked Eleanor Hill, our staff director, who was giving the report, did the FBI ever in their intelligence analytical component, ever analyze the possibility of weapons; she says absolutely no, and she said it didn't happen in the entire intelligence community. That crystallized a lot of my concerns. GWEN IFILL: Senator Graham, Eleanor Hill also talked details today - what she said was her difficulty in trying to get a lot of classified information declassified in order to make it public today. And there were two key issues, which she was unable to resolve: One is the White House's desire to keep anything told to the President classified, even if it had been reported elsewhere in the document. And the second, the activities of a key al-Qaida figure who the White House would not allow the committee to identify. Are you satisfied that you are getting enough cooperation from the administration in this investigation? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: I know I'm not. It took the better part of 60 days to get the material that was the subject of the public hearing today declassified. We had a number of issues in that 60-day process. Finally, these two issues were not resolvable. One of them essentially says that even if the information is declassified, the very fact that an intelligence report has gone to the President, that act of transfer is itself a classified event, which means that the public will never know what the President in fact knew, and therefore, be able to hold him accountable for the actions that he took. GWEN IFILL: And not only this President but previous Presidents as well. SEN. BOB GRAHAM: Yes. And most of the actions were not President Bush but of his predecessor. And then the other issue, a very well-known figure in the September 11 events, who all of the information about what he had done was declassified, but his name alone was continued to be classified. We could not get a reasonable explanation of why that represented a threat to America's national security, which is the fundamental basis upon which a document is classified. GWEN IFILL: Senator Shelby, should the White House and the executive branch be doing more to cooperate with this inquiry? SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Absolutely. I thought they would - back in May and June Senator Graham and I were assured by the Vice President and other people in the administration that we were going to get cooperation in our investigation. We have had it in areas, but oftentimes it's like extracting teeth-- it's hard to get. We have a very able staff director in Eleanor Hill. We have some great people working on the investigative committee. But to say we have had good cooperation, that's foolish; we haven't had it. SEN. BOB GRAHAM: Yeah. We're having an issue right now about whether we can get operational agents from the intelligence community. We had a hearing last week, a closed hearing with operational agents who have been involved in a variety of specific activities against terrorism. And it was an excellent hearing because they were able to give you real field-based knowledge and insight and recommended reform. But we're having a very difficult time getting those kinds of agents, particularly to appear in a public hearing even if all the information that they are going to be speaking has been declassified. GWEN IFILL: Let's talk about the possibility of reform. Senator Shelby you said today during the hearings, "we don't know what we don't know." SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: That's right. GWEN IFILL: How do you fix that? SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Well, I think that this joint committee that we're going to do our work this fall. We have made progress. We have unearthed a lot of very important things, and I think there will be more. But we're working against the calendar in a sense, and we're not getting the best cooperation either. I believe that we will do our job and it will be a very credible job, and that there will have to be down the road a commission or other investigative bodies to build on what we're doing to get to the bottom of everything we need to know about the intelligence community. GWEN IFILL: Do you support the McCain/Lieberman bill that would create such a blue ribbon commission? SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: I plan to. If you had asked me this three months ago, I would have said no, but I have talked to Senator Lieberman and Senator McCain, and when that's offered on the floor, I'm going to support it. GWEN IFILL: And Senator Graham, you? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: Yes. I think we're going to need several commissions of whatever nature and origin to follow on what we're doing, because there's so much information about September 11, which is still to be available, much of it from those detainees in Guantanamo and Afghanistan that are being interrogated. And our charter, our jurisdiction is the intelligence community and their big blocks of information for instance, involving the immigration service and the federal aviation agencies which need to be closely reviewed. GWEN IFILL: Senator Graham, how do you get past the notion that hindsight seems to be 20/20, that looking back on this, of course, it all seems like it's something we should have been able to know and fix? SEN. BOB GRAHAM: Hindsight certainly is better than trying to figure out what is in front of the windshield. What we're trying to do is to use the understanding of what happened and why it happened on September 11 to then answer the ultimate question what to do about it. We believe that we are gaining an insight as to the fundamental systemic problems of our intelligence community, which will be invaluable not only in making the proper prescriptions for reform, but getting the public support and the congressional support and the administration support to make them reality. GWEN IFILL: Senators Graham and Shelby, we'll be following along with you. Thank you very much. SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Thank you. SEN. BOB GRAHAM: Thank you. |
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