22 July 2004	Thursday	04 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425

WASHINGTON, July 21: The final report of the commission investigating the Sept 11, 2001, attacks will not conclude definitively that the terrorist strike could have been prevented , but it is clear that US officials missed a series of opportunities to stop some of the hijackers, disrupt the plot and perhaps save lives.

NBC News says the report, which is to be released on Thursday, is not expected to add any startling revelations about the Al Qaeda operation that killed almost 3,000 people, brought down the World Trade Center in New York and seriously damaged the Pentagon.

But after three years and two investigations, a pattern of crossed signals, miscommunication and ill-considered decisions emerges. The most significant signal appears to have come in April 2000, when Niaz Khan, a Briton of Pakistani extraction, walked into the FBI's office in Newark, New Jersey.

Khan told agents that he had been trained by Al Qaeda and that there would be a hijacking in the United States or on a US airline. He said he had been sent to the United States to join Al Qaeda operatives here. Even though he passed two polygraph tests, FBI headquarters did not believe him and let him go.

"I told them before the 9/11 _ more than a year" ahead of time, Khan told NBC News. It was just one of many chances US intelligence and law enforcement agencies had to get inside Al Qaeda in the years before the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. All were fumbled.

As early as 1996, when Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader, declared war on the United States, the CIA was trying to penetrate his inner circle. It failed. By Jan 2000, US intelligence had picked up the trail of two of the 19 men who would eventually hijack the four jetliners in Sept 2001.

They were among top Al Qaeda operatives who gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a planning meeting. But the CIA lost track of the hijackers when they left, and the agency failed to warn the FBI that one of them had a valid visa to enter the United States.

The hijackers began flowing into the United States, as many as 11 of them, with doctored passports or by lying on their visa applications. US authorities again missed what in hindsight appear to have been golden opportunities to intervene in the terrorists' planning.

In San Diego, one of the hijackers got as many as a dozen telephone calls from a known Al Qaeda switchboard in Yemen. Although the National Security Agency intercepted the calls, it did not determine that the calls were to someone already in the country because it had not deployed the right equipment.

TRAINING SITES FOUND, BUT NO ACTION: By autumn 2000, US intelligence had located some of Osama bin Laden's training sites. A Predator drone spy plane brought back pictures of Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, as well as of a tall man in flowing white robes, who is now believed to have been Osama bin Laden himself.

But no military assets were on standby to take a shot at him. By summer 2001, the warning signs were many. An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo warning that Osama could be training pilots at US flight schools, for example, but it got lost at FBI headquarters.

Then there was the case of Zacharias Moussaoui, who was arrested while training at a Minnesota flight school. FBI agents were not allowed to search his computer until less than three weeks before Sept 11, however.

"The Moussaoui episode is one of the top three examples of where we might have been able to stop 9/11," said Roger Cressey, a terrorism analyst for NBC News who was the US official in charge of co-ordinating US counter-terrorism policy in 2000 and 2001.

About the same time, CIA agents told the FBI that two hijackers might be in the country. The FBI could not find them, even though they were listed in telephone directories.

When two of the hijackers were put on the State Department's "watch list" of suspected terrorists, they were not put on the no-fly list maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration, because they had not previously shown an interest in hijacking aeroplanes.

The hijackers were, therefore, able to make their flights on Sept 11 with little difficulty. Even after the hijackings were in progress, authorities delayed taking action after hints of the unfolding situation became clear.

At 8:24am, one of the hijackers, believed to be Mohammed Atta, was overheard by air traffic controllers as he talked to passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 11. "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK," he said. "We are returning to the airport."

But the FAA repeatedly failed to alert the military's air defence system until it was too late, if at all. When F-16 fighter jets did finally scramble in response, some went in the wrong direction, and their pilots were never told that they were looking for hijacked planes.

'THEY DEFEATED US': "If you look at the details of what these 19 men did on the 11th of September, they defeated every defence that we had in place, every single one of them," former Sen.

Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., a member of the Sept 11 commission, said at a hearing this year. "And there is no other word that you can put on it other than that they defeated us." House Republican leaders were briefed on Tuesday by members of the commission in a closed-door session.