Lack of Pre-9/11 Sources to Be Cited as Intelligence Failure

American intelligence agencies failed to obtain reliable human sources inside the Afghanistan training camps run by Al Qaeda before the September 2001 attacks, according to government officials who have read an unreleased Congressional report on intelligence lapses in the months before the hijackings. The absence of such sources left counterterrorism officials largely blind to Osama bin Laden’s specific intentions before the attacks and contributed to what the joint intelligence committees concluded in their report was a lack of knowledge about Al Qaeda even as the agencies for years collected information that showed the terror network hoped to strike inside United States. The failure of human intelligence is a new finding from a report that, according to some people who have read it, will provide many important new insights into the activities of American intelligence agencies before the attacks. Other officials, including some from intelligence agencies criticized in the report, said it would shed little new light on the events leading up to the attacks. Full Story