Lawmakers examine why hijackers weren't stopped after 2000 meeting in Malaysia

Friday, September 20th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The United States missed many opportunities to pursue two of the Sept. 11 hijackers after they had been spotted at an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia 18 months before the attacks, a congressional investigator told lawmakers Friday.

In one example, a March 2000 cable from an overseas CIA station noted that one of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown into Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000. The cable was marked ``Action required: None, FYI.''

The information was included in a report prepared by Eleanor Hill, staff director for the House and Senate intelligence committees' inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hill said the missed opportunities to stop al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were the result of institutional problems at intelligence agencies, such as the failure of the FBI and CIA to communicate with each other.

Intelligence agencies ``had, but missed, opportunities both to deny them entry into the United States and subsequently to generate investigative and surveillance action regarding their activities within the United States,'' Hill said.

Also, the FBI's ability to pursue the hijackers in the United States was limited by government policies restricting the use of intelligence information for criminal investigations.

She said her investigation has found nothing to indicate that U.S. authorities had information about 16 of the 19 hijackers. It had limited information about al-Hazmi's brother, Salim-al-Hazmi, who like the other two men was aboard American Airlines Fight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

The CIA maintained interest in al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi since they were seen at the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia. But they continued to live openly in the United States. While residing in San Diego in 2000, they used their true names on an apartment lease and al-Mihdhar obtained a driver's license. They also took flight lessons in San Diego in May 2000.

The two men were not put on the State Department's watch list for denying visas until Aug. 23, 2001. Hill said CIA officials told her there were no procedures at the CIA Counterterrorism Center for putting suspects on watch lists and they had received no training on watch lists.

In written testimony at Thursday's hearings, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said that if intelligence agencies had notified the State Department sooner about the two men, ``it is reasonable to believe these two criminals would never have entered the country in the first place.''

``If we had had these two pieces to the jigsaw puzzle in advance, could we have seen the whole picture and prevented the attacks? Perhaps. But I don't believe that is a question we will be able to answer with any certainty,'' Armitage said.

On Thursday, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., told reporters Thursday that he was reserving judgment until receiving the report about whether the failure to stop al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi was a clear-cut intelligence blunder.

``From what I have seen so far, there are questions that need to be asked to determine if there were mistakes,'' said Goss, a former CIA officer.

After meeting behind closed doors since June, the committees are holding their third consecutive day of open hearings. On Wednesday, Hill outlined numerous warnings of terrorist attacks received by intelligence agencies before Sept. 11. At least 12 warnings, dating back to the mid-1990s, involved the use of airplane as weapons.

At Thursday's hearing, the committees examined how top government officials from past and present administrations have used intelligence and to what extent they were aware of the threat Osama bin Laden posed.