U.S. Intelligence Bobbled 9/11 Clues

American intelligence agencies received far more reports of terrorist plotting to use planes as weapons before Sept. 11 than the U.S. government has previously acknowledged, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

House and Senate intelligence inquiry staff director Eleanor Hill told committee members that intelligence officials picked up overseas warnings prior to the actual attacks.

"The community continued to believe that Sunni extremists associated with al Qaeda [were] most likely to attempt spectacular attacks resulting in numerous casualties," she said.

Hill also told of warnings of explosives-laden planes flying into buildings in this country, reports CBS News Correspondent Howard Arenstein.

Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer reports investigators have not yet found specific information showing that anyone in the government had information that the attack would be on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Investigators said the agencies never looked closely at the potential threat of hijacked airliners flying into buildings.

Hill's statement was presented to committee members Wednesday at the inquiry's first public hearings. Lawmakers have been meeting behind closed doors since June, looking into intelligence failures leading up to the attacks and how they can be corrected.

Kristin Breitweiser, whose husband died in the World Trade Center, seemed bitter.

"Now, a full year later, it is time to look back and investigate our failures as a nation," she testified.

"These public hearings are part of our search for the truth - not to point fingers or pin blame, but with the goal of identifying and correcting whatever systemic problems might have prevented our government from detecting and disrupting al Qaeda's plot," said Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Hill outlined 12 examples of intelligence information on the possible terrorist use of airplanes as weapons, dating back to 1994. The last example occurred a month before the attacks, when intelligence agencies were told of a possible bin Laden plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, or crash a plane into it. But it contained no specifics pointing to the impending Sept. 11 attacks.

Other intelligence suggested that bin Laden supporters might crash a plane into a U.S. airport, or conduct a plot involving aircraft at New York and Washington, the report said.

While generally aware of the possibility of this method of attack, "the Intelligence Community did not produce any specific assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use airplanes as weapons," the report said.

With revelations in the spring that President Bush had learned a month before the attacks that bin Laden wanted to hijack airplanes, the White House defended the lack of disclosure of the information by saying the president's briefing detailed plans for traditional hijackings, not the use of airplanes as weapons.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said at the time that the threat was vague and uncorroborated.

"I don't think anybody could have predicted...that they would try to use an airplane as missile," Rice said. "Had this president known of something more specific or known that a plane was going to be used as a missile, he would have acted on it."

Congressional investigators also said that an intelligence briefing two months before the Sept. 11 attack warned that Osama bin Laden would launch a spectacular terrorist attack against U.S. or Israeli interests.

Between May and July 2001, the National Security Agency reported at least 33 communications indicating a possible, imminent terrorist attack.

The July 2001 briefing for senior government officials said that based on a review of intelligence information over five months "we believe that (bin Laden) will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks."

But Hill said the credibility of the sources was sometimes questionable and no specific details about the attacks were available.