FBI and 9/11: The picture fills in

Seldom, if ever, has so much detail about sensitive national security decisionmaking been made public so soon after the events took place. The persistence of the Sept. 11 commission has already begun to produce an extraordinary national narrative of the months prior to the worst terror attacks in US history.

Its details may well result in government changes soon - the FBI and CIA face further reforms, for instance.

But a search for root causes in a politically charged atmosphere might slide too easily into a search for scapegoats, say some analysts. Already the panel's hearings have produced a round of Washington finger-pointing in which everyone from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on down has said they believed that other parts of the national security bureaucracy had counterterrorism matters in hand.

"By focusing on individual agencies we're losing the big picture," says Juliette Kayyem, homeland security and law enforcement specialist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

This doesn't mean that the parts of the government charged with protecting the US did not make crucial mistakes. Commission staff reports released Tuesday contained a number of examples of pre-9/11 hints that something large was afoot - bits of intelligence that are almost heartbreaking to read today.

In the spring of 2001, "the level of reporting on terrorist threats and planned attacks began to increase dramatically," notes a commission report. Top officials received intelligence reports with such headlines as "Bin Laden's network's plans advancing."

By late May, there were reports of hostage plots against Americans to try to force the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was serving a life sentence for his role in plots to blow up New York City sites in 1993.

"The reporting noted that the operatives may opt to hijack an aircraft or storm a US embassy," says the report.

At the end of May, 2001, the CIA's counterterror chief, Cofer Black, told Ms. Rice that on a scale of one to 10, the threat level was seven - but was going to get worse. Yet at the time, the FBI may still have been hobbled in its ability to fight terrorist within US borders.

"The FBI attempted several reform efforts aimed at strengthening its ability to prevent such attacks, but these reform efforts failed to effect change organization-wide," concludes a commission study.

President Bush has said that prior to Sept. 11 he was "comforted" by the knowledge that the FBI was running down leads about terrorism. But revelations since then have led him to say it may be time to make changes in how the FBI, the CIA, and other US intelligence agencies work.

Speaking to reporters at his Texas ranch on Monday, Mr. Bush did not lay out any specific reform plans. He said he was looking forward to receiving any proposals about the matter from 9/11 panel commissioners.

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