That was Senator Richard Shelby’s judgment after a hearing on the U.S. intelligence community’s performance prior to September 11, 2001. Recently, the American public got its first peek at what congressional investigators have learned about failures by the CIA and the FBI to detect and prevent 9/11. For months, both agencies have been furiously leaking information in an effort to diminish the public impact of the investigators’ report.

But it is now evident that U.S. intelligence agencies simply failed to comprehend the emerging terrorist threat to the U.S. in the mid-1990s. Not surprisingly, investigators unearthed no single piece of information that could have alerted the government to the impending 9/11 attacks. But the congressional report provides staggering details on what was known and, more disturbing, how little was done with the available intelligence. CIA Director George J. Tenet declared war on Usama bin Laden in December 1998, but few beyond his immediate circle at CIA seemed aware of it.

For example, last May Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Advisor, claimed that no one could have predicted that terrorists would hijack an airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. But investigators turned up twelve different examples of intelligence reporting that terrorists were plotting to use jet liners as weapons of mass destruction. Potential targets included Ataturk’s tomb in Turkey, downtown Tel Aviv, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A number of reports cited targets in the United States, specifically CIA Headquarters, the White House, a U.S. airport, and the World Trade Center.

Investigators said that there was no evidence that the CIA had ever assembled all these reports in one place or did any sort of strategic assessment judging the feasibility of such an attack. One 1998 report about an attack on the World Trade Center was passed to the FBI and the Federal Aviation Authority, but was dismissed as "highly unlikely." Now the FBI and the FAA are busy pointing fingers at each other over just which agency is at fault.

In fact, follow up media articles featured CIA and FBI’s retaliatory strikes against the congressional report. The FBI, speaking anonymously of course, complained to the Washington Post that it was being scapegoated and held to unfair standards. An FBI official said that its mission before 9/11 was to "investigate" crimes not to prevent them.

As for CIA, despite Tenet’s declaration of war, investigators found that there had been no "massive shift" of resources to the bin Laden terrorist threat. Tenet had the CIA issue a press release debunking that claim, but the numbers cited in the press release are hardly indicative of a massive shift in anything. The CIA’s press release represented little more than a shell game played by bureaucrats. As for the FBI, it was revealed that exactly one analyst was devoted to strategic assessments on Usama bin Laden. Late in the hearing, a congressman noted that counter-terrorism budgets had been quadrupled in recent years. Congressmen were left wondering where the money went.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org