WASHINGTON: Congressional investigators are fielding a flurry of new tips and documents indicating that the U.S. intelligence community missed other opportunities to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday.
Investigators are getting “new reports, new documents that are purported to be examples of evidence that was not adequately pursued,” said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., adding that they appear to represent a number of additional “dots” that the CIA, the FBI and other agencies failed to connect.
Graham declined to provide details about the new evidence, but said it goes beyond the recent revelations about the FBI’s failure to act on warnings from a Phoenix agent or to aggressively investigate suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The flow of information has spiked in recent weeks from various corners of the intelligence community, he said, adding that he is increasingly convinced that U.S. intelligence officials had enough information to stop the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Had one human being or a common group of human beings sat down with all that information,” he said, “we could have gotten to the hijackers before they flew those four aeroplanes either into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or the ground of Pennsylvania.”
Graham’s remarks came as House and Senate intelligence committee members completed their second day of closed hearings on Sept. 11 intelligence failures.
The bulk of Wednesday’s session was devoted to a lengthy presentation by committee staffers on the nation’s counter-terrorism efforts of the past 15 years. The joint committee is expected to resume its examination of that timeline Thursday, and begin calling its first witnesses next week.
Graham noted that much of the new information flowing into the joint investigative committee was uncorroborated.
He also said that what he has seen has not “reached the level of importance of the Phoenix document or the Moussaoui case.”
But other congressional sources familiar with the new material said that it does rival those developments in significance. “It’s substantive stuff,” said one aide close to the investigation. The material “is coming in every day,” he said. “People are calling, people are volunteering information from a variety of places.”
The surge of information signals new momentum for an inquiry that just weeks ago seemed stalled amid internal squabbling that led to the ouster of the investigation’s staff director, as well as accusations that the FBI and the CIA were refusing to cooperate with the probe.