LONDON Ñ A House of Commons report asserts that British intelligence
agencies predicted an Al Qaida attack prior to Sept. 11.
But the House Intelligence and Security Committee annual report said
MI6, starved for funds, did not forsee that Al Qaida would attack targets in
the United States or result in massive casualties. More than 3,000 people
were killed in the Islamic suicide attacks on New York and Washington.
Britain's MI5 and MI6 had obtained intelligence and warned the
government on July 16 that Al Qaida was in the "final stages of preparation"
for an attack, the report said. The two agencies warned London of a pressing
need to gather additional intelligence on Al Qaida.
"The shortage of specific intelligence and Osama Bin Laden's record
could have warned all concerned that more urgent action was needed to
counter this threat," the report, which underwent censorship, said. "With
hindsight, the scale of the threat and the vulnerability of Western states
to terrorists with this degree of sophistication and a total disregard for
their own lives was not understood."
MI5 is responsible for domestic security. MI6 is responsible for
Britain's intelligence missions abroad and closely cooperates with the CIA.
The parliamentary committee is also responsible for the British military
General Command Headquarters.
"This lack of intelligence access to a notably hard target meant that
the UK [United Kingdom] and the U.S. did not know who was going to carry out
the attacks, how the attacks were going to be mounted or where the attacks
were going to take place," the report said. "Up to a point, the West had not
foreseen suicide attacks taking place on the USA mainland and certainly not
the attacks would resolute in some 3,000 deaths."
[On Friday, eight people were killed and dozens others were injured when
a car filled with explosives slammed into the U.S. Consulate in Karachi,
Pakistan. The bomb was said to have destroyed a guard post outside the
consulate but did not kill consulate staffers.]
Parliamentary leaders and officials acknowledged that British
intelligence agencies did not have sufficient funding to close the
intelligence gap in obtaining sufficient information on Al Qaida. They said
the government must change its priorities to ensure that Britain has the
intelligence to learn of terrorist plots and ways to foil them.
"The nature of asymmetric threat is that you cannot predict precisely
what is going to happen and therefore you can only imagine and best define
those scenarios and put in place those mechanisms ready for that," Armed
Forces Minister Adam Ingram said before the report was released. The
threshold of the level of attack has now been lifted post-11 September and
it is because of that that we look at other elements of our preparedness."
In Washington, U.S. officials said the Bush administration is bracing
for an imminent attack by Al Qaida or its allies on the American capital.
"There is a 100 percent, absolute certainty that some fundamentalist
group -- or groups -- will attack this city sometime this year," Rep. Randy
Cunningham, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said.