Report Details FBI's 9/11 Missteps

Justice Dept. Details 5 Missed Chances To Uncover Vital Information

(CBS/AP) 
The information was written up that day by one of the FBI agents assigned to the CIA's bin Laden unit. The FBI agent sought, but was never able to get, the required go-ahead from the CIA's deputy chief of the unit to send the draft to the FBI. Ten days later, Mihdhar and Hazmi were in Los Angeles.

All of the CIA and FBI personnel who were involved in the matter now say they remember nothing about the document that wasn't sent. The document is called a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR.

"When we interviewed all of the individuals involved with the CIR, they asserted that they recalled nothing about it," the report stated.

Mihdhar came under CIA scrutiny because the National Security Agency had picked up communications that al Qaeda operatives were planning travel to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Mihdhar showed up at the meetings.

Once in the United States, Mihdhar and Hazmi lived openly in San Diego and "should have drawn some scrutiny from the FBI," the report said.

The head of the San Diego FBI office responded that the report greatly exaggerates the possibility that local agents could have prevented the attacks.

The two Saudis rented a room in the home of a longtime FBI terrorism informant, and also befriended a fellow Saudi who had drawn FBI scrutiny in the past.

The informant identified the two men to his FBI handler only by their first names, and the report criticizes the FBI handler as "not particularly thorough or aggressive" in following up.

The two men also befriended Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who had established himself in the area. The FBI briefly investigated him in 1998 when the manager of his apartment complex reported that al-Bayoumi had received a suspicious package, had strange wires in his bathroom and hosted frequent weekend gatherings of Middle Eastern men.