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Years of FBI and CIA rivalry led to a security blackout

US intelligence agencies failed to foil last week's apocalyptic terror attacks despite tips that followers of prime suspect Osama bin Laden were in or heading for the US, a report said yesterday.

The Washington Post said in an investigative report that lack of communication between the CIA and the FBI, lack of language skills, insufficient emphasis on data analysis and outdated equipment all contributed to the spectacular failure.

"In the past two years, the CIA cabled to the FBI names of about 100 suspected associates of Osama bin Laden thought to be bound for or already in the United States," the paper said.

"An August 23 cable bore the names of two, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. The FBI sought the men, but failed to locate them before they boarded the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon."

Hijackers commandeered four passenger jets on Sept. 11 and flew two into the Twin Towers at New York's World Trade Center, causing the buildings to collapse. A third plane slammed into the Pentagon outside of Washington, while a fourth jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

President George W. Bush has pointed to Saudi-born bin Laden as the mastermind behind the strikes and has vowed revenge.

Now, as more than 7,000 investigators detain more than 80 potential suspects and pursue tens of thousands of leads into the case, the shellshocked nation is beginning to ask how its security agencies were not able to prevent the attacks.

The FBI, which has named terrorism as its top target, has tripled its anti-terrorism budget over the past 10 years and multiplied by five its number of intelligence gatherers, the paper said.

But old rivalries between it and the CIA, a lack of translators to interpret data in foreign languages including Arabic, outdated computers were among the factors which left it "ill-equipped and unprepared," the paper said.

"Even when it had information, the report said, the FBI sometimes did not know what to make of it," the paper said.

In related news, three people have been taken into custody in the US state of Texas in the investigation into the terrorist attacks two weeks ago on New York and Washington, US media reported yesterday.

Two men were removed from an airplane Sunday night in the Texas capital, Austin, after their names were found on a list of those wanted for questioning by federal investigators in the September 11 attacks. Some of the names on the list are believed to be accessories in the attacks, which are estimated to have killed 7,000 people.
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