WASHINGTON, July 21 (AFP) - A report to be issued Thursday on the September 11 attacks lists 10 missed opportunities during the administrations of President George W. Bush and his predecessor Bill Clinton to detect or derail the attacks, The Washington Post said Wednesday.
However, the 600-page report by the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States stops short of saying the attacks should have been prevented, government officials who reviewed the document told the daily.
The report lists six "operational opportunities" to potentially unravel the attacks on New York and Washington that killed 3,000 people missed by the Bush administration and four by the Clinton administration.
They include the Central Intelligence Agency's failure to add two of the 19 hijackers who flew the four suicide planes in 2001 to a terrorism watch list, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's handling of the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of conspiring in the attacks.
They also include several attempts to kill or capture al-Qaeda terrorist network leader Osama bin Laden.
The report acknowledges that many of the opportunities were long shots and that others would have required a lucky sequence of events to alter the outcome, the officials who read the report told The Washington Post.
The report also recommends wide-ranging reforms in US intelligence agencies and the creation of a cabinet-level position to oversee all US intelligence operations.
It also concludes that al-Qaeda maintained a deeper relationship with Iran and its client Hezbollah militant group than with the overthrown regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.