In shift, FBI now says it might have been able to detect Sept. 11 plot

By Ted Bridis

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – FBI Director Robert Mueller, acknowledging serious lapses in how the FBI mishandled some information prior to Sept. 11, suggested for the first time that investigators might have detected the terrorist plot if they had pursued leads more diligently.

Mueller’s acknowledgment came amid fresh disclosures of what could be missed hints about threats from suicide hijackings, including efforts by an unidentified Middle Eastern country to buy a commercial flight simulator.

“The jury is still out on all of it,” Mueller said Wednesday at FBI headquarters. “Looking at it right now, I can’t say for sure it would not have, that there wasn’t a possibility that we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.”

On Thursday, Mueller told ABC’s “Good Morning America”:

“I do not believe, based on what I know now, that we could have prevented the attack. I’m not ruling out the possibility at all. We could have gotten lucky. Absolutely. But from what I’ve seen now, I do not believe we could have prevented the attack.”

Mueller’s remarks came after his announcement of a broad reorganization of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, partly in response to criticism of the FBI after Sept. 11. The FBI’s new marching orders will focus on terrorists, spies and hackers, in that order.

“The president is pleased to see that change is under way at the FBI,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Thursday. “He thinks they’re important changes to help protect the American people and to reorient the mission of the FBI to prevent terrorism in this country.”

The Justice Department also is making changes to support the FBI. Attorney General John Ashcroft was to announce new guidelines Thursday lifting restrictions on the FBI’s use of the Internet and public libraries to give agents more freedom to investigate terrorism even when they are not pursuing a particular case.

Under existing rules, FBI agents are not allowed to do general research on the Internet or at public libraries unless the information sought directly relates to a current investigation or to leads being checked out.

Those limits “extended even to publicly available information that everyone else is free to access, and even to information that could plainly be valuable in generally facilitating investigative activities and preventing terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo.

The new rules allow agents to conduct “general topical research” and “pure surfing” designed to find Web sites, chat rooms or Internet bulletin boards with information about terror, bomb-making instructions, child pornography or stolen credit cards.

The new rules also will make it easier for FBI agents to begin and pursue terrorism investigations without approval from FBI headquarters; give local FBI officials more authority to approve undercover operations in emergency situations; and let agents conduct preliminary investigations for up to six months without special approval from headquarters.

“There are additional steps that intelligence and FBI are looking at to help protect the American people,” Fleischer said at the White House. “The president is confident we can protect the American people from terrorist attacks and protect Americans’ individual rights.”

Mueller’s statement represented the first time any senior official in the Bush administration has said counterterrorism investigators might have detected and averted the Sept. 11 hijackings if they had recognized what they were collecting. That question is the focus of a congressional inquiry, and almost certain to come up next week during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the FBI’s reorganization plans.

“Putting all the pieces together, who is to say?” Mueller said, though he also noted that those pieces amounted to “snippets in a veritable river of information.” Mueller took over as FBI director just days before Sept. 11.

“It is critically important that we have that connection of dots that will enable us to prevent the next attack,” Mueller said Wednesday. “Headquarters has to assume a responsibility for assuring that information comes in, that information is analyzed and that information is disseminated.”

President Bush has bristled over suggestions that the government had collected enough clues to avert the attacks. “Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people,” Bush said earlier this month.

The FBI disclosed two other clues Wednesday that it said might be relevant to the investigation into the September hijackings. A Middle Eastern country where U.S. shipments are restricted sought unsuccessfully before Sept. 11 to buy a commercial flight simulator, and an FBI pilot in 1998 expressed concerns to a supervisor in Oklahoma City about a number of Arab men seeking flight training.

The unidentified pilot told his supervisor “that he has observed large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months,” according to a copy of the one-page memo, under the heading “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The FBI memo, dated May 18, 1998, was marked “routine” and never was forwarded to headquarters.

The pilot added that “this is a recent phenomenon and may be related to planned terrorist activity.” He also “speculates that light planes would be an ideal means of spreading chemical or biological agents.”

The FBI would not identify the country that sought to buy the simulator except to say it was not one publicly connected to Sept. 11. It said the information was given to the FBI by another U.S. agency that it would not identify.