Assassinating al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would not have prevented the September 11th terror attacks on the US, the director of the CIA, Mr george Tenet said today.
The Bush and Clinton Administrations tried to disrupt the activities of al Qaeda, but weaknesses in US intelligence agencies allowed the September 11th hijackers to slip through the net, Mr George Tenet a Congressional commission in Washington. Mr Tenet said the US was "not systemically protected" against terror before the suicide attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon.
But when asked if the atrocities could have been prevented by eliminating bin Laden, he said: "I do not believe so. I believe this plot was up and running.
"Decapitating one person, even bin Laden, in this context; I do not believe it would have stopped this plot."
He defended both the Bush and Clinton Administrations, which have drawn fire from the commission for failing to take military action against al Qaida.
He said: "There was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced."
He told the cross-party commission that the CIA, working with other international agencies, had disrupted terror plots in the lead-up to the Millennium.
But he admitted that the US was "not systemically protected" against terrorism before the September 11th attacks.
He said intelligence agencies "raced from threat to threat to threat", without focusing on a broader strategy.
He said the lack of communication - which at the time was the result of laws forbidding criminal and intelligence data being shared - also led to weaknesses.
If intelligence had been shared among the different agencies the US "might have had a chance" to prevent the terror strikes on New York and Washington, he said.
In preliminary findings the commission found that the Clinton Administration had three possible opportunities to launch an attack on bin Laden in the 1990s.
In each case, Mr Tenet opposed the attacks because the intelligence came from a single, uncorroborated source and there was a risk of civilians being killed, the report said.
"George would call and say, 'We just don't have it'," the report quotes Mr Samuel Berger, national security adviser to Mr Clinton, as saying.
Later, the commission would hear from Mr Richard Clarke , a top counter-terrorism adviser to Clinton and Bush.
He provoked a White House backlash at the weekend when he claimed that Mr Bush did "a terrible job on the war against terrorism". He suggested that Mr Bush could have done more to prevent the September 11th attacks.
And he claimed that the Bush White House was obsessed with attacking Iraq, despite the fact that advisers told politicians that Saddam Hussein played no part in the atrocity.
PA