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British report: Properly-funded MI6 could have predicted 9-11

Special to World Tribune.com
MIDDLE EAST NEWSLINE
Friday, June 14, 2002

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.

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