ABC and CBS recently caught up with what we and others have been reporting about the failure of the U.S. government to correctly analyze and utilize information that might have prevented the nine/eleven terrorist attacks last year. During the week of February 20, Nightline, Sixty Minutes Two and a three part series on the ABC Evening News caught up with some important stories.

The ABC reports detailed some of the missed signals and direct warnings that should have been heeded by the government. The World Trade Center bombing of 1993 resulted in a trial in which court documents revealed some of bin Laden’s plans. One was called Project Bojinka, a plan to bomb commercial airliners and hijack others and crash them into buildings, such as the CIA. The latter part of this plan was ignored by the CIA, the FBI and the news media.

ABC referred to several opportunities the Clinton administration missed. It interviewed Clinton’s former ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, who told of Washington’s refusal to deal with Sudan, which was offering information on Al Qaeda. Carney has also said that Sudan offered to extradite bin Laden in 1996, but the offer was rejected. ABC did not report that even though the London Times recently reported that Clinton called this "the biggest mistake of my presidency." Instead, they reported that Clinton’s adviser on Africa told them that they had tried to engage Sudan, but that Sudan had nothing to offer.

Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American, who had contributed to Clinton’s presidential campaign, served as a go-between with countries in the area. He told ABC that he delivered a message from Sudan, offering information on Al Qaeda. But again, ABC ignored a very important story — his efforts to negotiate the hand-over of bin Laden for his role in the 1998 African embassy bombings. He has described how a deal with the United Arab Emirates to deliver bin Laden was blown by the actions of one of Clinton’s top advisers.

Sixty Minutes Two reported on an Al Qaeda manual, called "Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants." The manual was found at the site of one of the embassy bombings. It covered torturing and resisting torture, and the use of sleepers planted long in advance of their terrorist missions. Like the embassy bombings in Africa, the nine/eleven attacks were carefully planned. Together with Project Bojinka, they were a warning and a blueprint of what was to come.

Our intelligence agencies failed to see this, leading to a huge intelligence failure. Their biggest error was not detecting any of the twenty hijackers, especially Zacarias Moussaoui, who aroused the suspicions of officials at a flight school in Minnesota. They suspected that he may have been planning to hi-jack an airliner. The local FBI office was alerted, and Moussaoui was arrested on an immigration charge. FBI lawyers refused to seek permission to search his computer and phone records. He has now been charged with conspiracy to hi-jack an airliner, the one that had only four hijackers. If the FBI had recalled Project Bojinka, they might have prevented the nine/eleven tragedy.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org