WASHINGTON: The head of an independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks on Thursday said that they could and should have been prevented, and that the officials responsible for the failure should be fired.

His full report is not due to be published before May, but the comments by the commission’s chairman, Thomas Kean, suggest its conclusions are likely to be politically explosive.

“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” Mr Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey appointed by the Bush administration, told CBS television. “As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done ... This was not something that had to happen.”

A less ambitious congressional report into the attacks published a year ago found evidence that leads were overlooked but stopped short of ruling that the hijackings could have been prevented. That report examined pre-9/11 warnings from the intelligence community that Al Qaeda had for years been planning a hijacking attack, that extremists were using flying schools to train, and that two were tracked as they entered the United States — and then lost.

Mr Kean said the officials responsible for the intelligence failure should have been fired. So far, no one in the CIA and FBI found to have shelved repeated warnings that an attack like September 11 was being planned by Al Qaeda, have suffered setbacks in their careers.

“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Mr Kean said.

The White House had no comment on Mr Kean’s remarks on Thursday, and said only: “The president wants to learn everything possible about what happened.”

The 10-member bipartisan commission last month struck a compromise with the White House over access to secret documents, in particular the president’s daily intelligence brief. The tussle focused on a brief given to the president on Aug 6, 2001, in which the CIA warned about the possibility that Al Qaeda could be planning hijackings in the US. After the commission threatened to issue a subpoena, the president’s staff agreed to hand over the documents to a commission sub-committee.

The administration suffered another setback on Dec 18 when a federal appeals court ordered the release of a US terrorist suspect Jose Padilla from military custody within a month. Mr Padilla was arrested in June 2002 on suspicion of plans to build a “dirty” radioactive bomb, although intelligence officials later said there was no evidence he had made any progress.

Since being designated an “enemy combatant” he has been held at a military base without access to lawyers or relatives.

In his interview on Thursday, Mr Kean said that his commission’s public hearings, starting next month, will produce important revelations, as its members question officials from the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Pentagon, and possibly President Bush and former president Bill Clinton.

Against the backdrop of a presidential election campaign, the hearings could damage the president if it emerges that his administration failed to take reasonable steps to defend the country against such a devastating attack. However, the final report in May could also find fault with the preceding Democratic administration.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.