US intelligence agencies missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11th plot in the months before the hijacked plane attacks, a US congressional report has said.
If various pieces of information picked up by the FBI and CIA had been connected, it could have "greatly enhanced" the chances of uncovering and preventing Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11th, 2001, the report, released last night, claimed.
Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat running for president who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee during last year's inquiry, said the attacks "could have been prevented if the right combination of skill, co-operation, creativity and some good luck had been brought to the task".
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mr Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, said there was a lot of information still unknown about the plot in which four planes were hijacked and hit the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing about 3,000 people.
"This is an excellent snapshot, it's not a full anatomy," he said of the 900-page report from the joint inquiry of the House of Representatives and Senate intelligence committees conducted last year.
The report details the contacts of an FBI informant with two of the September 11th hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, while they were living in San Diego, and more limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour.
But the FBI agent who handled the informant said he had not been alerted to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi's significance. The report blamed the CIA for failing to put them on a watchlist despite having information that they were linked to al-Qaeda and had visas to travel to the United States.
The FBI informant's contacts with the hijackers had been possibly the "best chance to unravel the September 11th plot," the report said.
At least five of the hijackers had contact with at least 14 people who had come to the attention of the FBI, including four who were the focus of active FBI investigations, it said.
An intelligence report in early summer 2001 said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now believed to have been the mastermind of the attacks, was recruiting people to travel to the United States to plan "terrorist-related activity," the congressional report said.
Other intelligence reports from December 1998 until the attacks said followers of bin Laden were planning to strike US targets, hijack US planes, and that two individuals had successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a New York airport, the report said.
One report said it was clear bin Laden was "building up a worldwide infrastructure which will allow him to launch multiple and simultaneous attacks with little or no warning".