WASHINGTON — All of the Sept. 11 hijackers broke U.S. immigration laws and some of those violations could have led to their detection and arrest, according to a new staff report from the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks.
The detectable violations included fraudulent passports presented by as many as seven of the 19 hijackers, the report said. Also, U.S. intelligence had linked at least three of the hijackers to terrorist groups, but officials never placed their names on the watch lists used by border inspectors.
Moreover, the report said, ringleader Mohamed Atta was allowed back into the United States in January 2001, even though he had previously overstayed a tourist visa and was not eligible for admission.
The report, released late Saturday as the commission formally closed its offices after a 20-month investigation, provides details to bolster a key commission recommendation that intelligence agencies identify and track the travel patterns of suspected terrorists -- a strategy the panel said was still not being fully applied.
By sharing information on suspected terrorists' travel with U.S. consular and border officers, it might be possible to disrupt plots while the would-be attackers try to slip into position.
"Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money," the commission concluded. "The United States should combine terrorist travel intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist mobility."
The CIA was taking some steps in that direction in the 1980s, but it abandoned the efforts in the early 1990s. That was just at the time when the threat of attacks on U.S. territory was mounting, the commission staff found.
The agency had produced an unclassified manual and a training video for border inspectors, highlighting common features of forged passports and visa stamps.
"If we all screen travelers and check their passports ... terrorists will lose their ability to travel undetected, and international terrorism will come one step closer to being stopped!" exhorted the CIA manual, known as the Redbook.
The staff report of the Sept. 11 commission did not explain why the program was dropped, but it noted: "No government agency systematically would analyze terrorists' travel patterns until after 9/11, thus missing critical opportunities to disrupt their plans."
