WASHINGTON: The long-awaited report that the joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence released on Thursday represents the fullest examination so far of the US response to the threat posed by Al Qaeda — more than 800 pages detailing failures to gather, analyze and coordinate intelligence that might have allowed US agents to foil the plot that climaxed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But already, a revised and expanded sequel is in the works.

The bipartisan commission appointed by Congress and President Bush is conducting what participants believe is the most ambitious government investigation in history, looking not only into intelligence failures, as the congressional committee did, but much more broadly at how the US government responded to the terrorist threat.

“There is new information that has come to us, both classified and unclassified, since Congress finished its work,” said commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey. The new information, he said, may provide new facts and lead to some recommendations that are different from those of the joint committee, but he declined to reveal specifics.

The congressional committee’s 808-page report, the result of a seven-month investigation, showed how little the CIA knew about Al Qaeda’s intentions despite the group’s declaration of war on the United States, portrayed the FBI as too rigid and unimaginative to follow clues that could have uncovered the plot, and depicted the military as reluctant to take a role in fighting terror before Sept. 11, 2001.

But that investigation was concluded in December. The panel spent seven months negotiating with intelligence agencies about which material could be made public. Since then, the FBI, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies have developed much more information about Al Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities.

The commission has already gained access to sensitive new material, including top-secret reports from the interrogation of captive Al Qaeda members. Commission leaders say that they are satisfied with the cooperation they are getting from the White House, and that the Defence and Justice departments, after an initial reluctance, are now responding to document requests.

“We think we are going to have access to National Security Council and White House stuff that nobody has ever had,” Kean said in an interview on Friday.

The congressional inquiry was denied access to some presidential briefing material on the grounds of executive privilege, which allows the president to keep communications with advisers private so they can give their counsel freely. Kean, however, said that he does not expect the White House to cite that privilege with the commission because there are no separation-of-power issues. “I don’t think they have the same kind of issue with us,” he said.

The commission intends to examine, to a much greater extent than Congress did, how the Bush and Clinton administrations responded to the growing Al Qaeda threat.

“The big difference is, the joint inquiry was limited to and focused on intelligence,” said commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana. “Our mandate is much broader. ... Our task is to examine how our government dealt with the phenomenon of terrorism.”

Kean said the intelligence agencies make up only “one-seventh or one-eighth” of the scope of the commission’s work.

By its statutory deadline of next May, the commission plans to produce “a coherent, comprehensive, broad account of what happened,” said Hamilton said. “In creating the narrative, we will certainly make judgments about White House decisions in both the Clinton and Bush administrations.”

The commission is also called upon to look at how well Congress anticipated the terrorist threat, including how it treated funding requests from various agencies and how well it fulfilled its oversight responsibilities.

In addition to looking at the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the commission is examining anti-terrorism policies across the board, including in immigration, border control and aviation. It is evaluating how a broad range of government agencies responded to the attacks, from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to the Pentagon’s North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), which scrambled fighter jets to shoot down the hijacked airliners.

Kean and Hamilton said they hope their report will be made fully public, not subject to the heavy redactions the CIA and the FBI imposed on the congressional report. Much of the redacted material in that report concerned members of the Saudi government or royal family.

The congressional panel found that several hijackers had extensive contacts with Saudi men who were in this country receiving Saudi funds and who the FBI believes have connections to Al Qaeda.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post