Tenet Could Face 9/11 Reprimand

The former CIA director George Tenet is among more than a dozen current and former officials who could be subject to disciplinary proceedings over the agency's performance before the September 11 attacks.

A classified report by the CIA's independent watchdog, delivered to the US Congress on Tuesday night, sharply criticised more than a dozen senior officials at the CIA, including Mr Tenet, former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and former counterterrorism centre head Cofer Black.

The report, the fruit of a two-year investigation by CIA inspector-general John Helgerson, recommended that the officials be placed before accountability boards - the agency's disciplinary bodies.

The report is understood to mostly cover issues already raised in the 9/11 commission report, but the harsh tone of some of the commentary has provoked intense debates within the US intelligence community about whether it should be published at all.

The CIA has been sharply criticised in the past for its failure to place hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi on a government watchlist in 2000 and to inform the FBI that the other September 11 hijackers had entered the US.

Officials told the New York Times that Mr Tenet was censured in the new report for failing to develop and carry out a strategic plan against al-Qaida before 2001, despite writing in a 1998 memo that "we are at war" with the group.

An earlier draft of the report is understood to have attacked the management of the counterterrorist centre and CIA directorate of operations for focusing on al-Qaida's leaders rather than the organisation's lower-level operatives, preventing the intelligence agencies from recruiting agents on the fringes of the group.

The draft also blamed senior officials for allowing thousands of pages of intercepts in Arabic to go untranslated, a former official told the New York Times.

But Beth Marple, spokeswoman for national intelligence director John Negroponte, told the Associated Press that Mr Negroponte and the current CIA director, Porter Goss, had discussed the report but insisted that senior officials had never considered scrapping it. "As expected, there has been discussion between Director Negroponte and Director Goss about this report. But there were absolutely no efforts to kill it," she said.

The Congress intelligence committee's senior Democrat member, Jane Harman, has demanded that the CIA publish a declassified version of the report, a request echoed by the families of some victims of the attacks.

"The findings in this report must be shared with all members of Congress and with the American public to ensure that the problems identified are addressed and corrected, thus moving to restore faith in this agency," a group called Sept 11 Advocates said in a statement yesterday.

The decision on whether to discipline the officials rests in the hands of Mr Goss, a former CIA officer whose history in the field puts him in a difficult position. Before the September 11 attacks he was responsible for oversight of US intelligence agencies as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and was subsequently leader of the joint congressional inquiry, which requested Helgerson's report in late 2002.

It is by no means certain that he will commission the accountability boards. Some of the less senior officials named are believed to be still engaged in counterterrorism against al-Qaida, and disciplinary proceedings would be feared to be bad for morale and a distraction from the ongoing campaign.

The accountability boards could dismiss officials, clear them of wrongdoing, or, in the case of former employees, issue them with formal reprimands.