Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings

Also, contrary to the previous testimony of Tenet, the CIA did not tell the FBI about this discovery until late August 2001, according to the report.

Almihdhar had left the United States in June 2000 but had plans to return.

"It is possible that if, in January 2001, agencies had resumed their search for him" or had placed him on a terrorist watch list, "they might have found him" before he applied for a new visa in June 2001, the report said. "Or they might have been alerted to him when he returned to the United States the following month. We cannot know."

In mid-May 2001, during the height of threat reporting, a CIA official went back through the Almihdhar files and discovered that he had a U.S. visa and that Alhazmi had come to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000. The official concluded "something bad was definitely up," the staff report said, but he did not alert his FBI counterparts. "He was focused on Malaysia."

But the report said he did ask an FBI analyst detailed to the CIA to review the Kuala Lumpur material again -- "in her free time." She began on July 24, 2001, and learned from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that the two might be in the country. She drafted a cable asking that Almihdhar and Alhazmi be put on a terrorist watch list. The FBI analyst, meanwhile, "took responsibility for the search effort inside the United States."

The analyst thought Almihdhar was in New York and informed the FBI's New York field office. But she labeled her first e-mail to the office "routine," which gave the FBI 30 days to respond.

"No one apparently felt they needed to inform higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case," the commission staff said.

The search was assigned to an FBI agent who had never before handled a counterterrorism lead.

"Many witnesses have suggested that even if [Almihdhar] had been found, there was nothing the agents could have done except follow him onto the planes," the report said. "We believe this is incorrect.

"Both [Alhazmi] and [Almihdhar] could have been held for immigration violations, or as material witnesses in the Cole bombing case," the commission report said. Interrogations "also may have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot. In any case, the opportunity did not arise."