InFact - The 9/11 Commission Report - Page 277.

                   "THE SYSTEM WAS BLINKING RED"                              277.

When no information was forthcoming, the Bin Ladin unit
dropped the matter. When additional pieces of the puzzle arrived in the
spring and summer of 2001, they were not put together.
    The first piece of the puzzle concerned some intriguing information asso-
ciated with a person known as "Mukhtar" that the CIA had begun analyzing
in April 2001. 
The CIA did not know who Mukhtar was at the time--only
that he associated with al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah and that, based on
the nature of the information, he was evidently involved in planning possible
terrorist activities.
    The second piece of the puzzle was some alarming information regarding
KSM. On June 12, 2001, a CIA report said that "Khaled" was actively recruiting
people to travel outside Afghanistan, including to the United States where col-
leagues were reportedly already in the country to meet them, to carry out
terrorist-related activities for Bin Ladin. CIA headquarters presumed from the
details of the reporting that this person was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In July,
the same source was shown a series of photographs and identified a photograph
of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the Khaled he had previously discussed.
    The final piece of the puzzle arrived at the CIA's Bin Ladin unit on August
28 in a cable reporting that KSM's nickname was Mukhtar. No one made the
connection to the reports about Mukhtar that had been circulated in the
spring. This connection might also have underscored concern about the June
reporting that KSM was recruiting terrorists to travel, including to the United
States. Only after 9/11 would it be discovered that Muhktar/KSM had com-
municated with a phone that was used by Binalshibh, and that Binalshibh had
used the same phone to communicate with Moussaoui, as discussed in chap-
ter 7.As in the Moussaoui situation already described, the links to Binalshibh
might not have been an easy trail to find and would have required substantial
cooperation from the German government. But time was short, and running
o u t . 112

Time Runs Out
As Tenet told us, "the system was blinking red" during the summer of 2001.
Officials were alerted across the world. Many were doing everything they pos-
sibly could to respond to the threats.
    Yet no one working on these late leads in the summer of 2001 connected
the case in his or her in-box to the threat reports agitating senior officials and
being briefed to the President. Thus, these individual cases did not become
national priorities.As the CIA supervisor "John" told us, no one looked at the
bigger picture; no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the
thundercloud to the ground.
    We see little evidence that the progress of the plot was disturbed by any gov-
er nment action. The U.S. government was unable to capitalize on mistakes
made by al Qaeda.Time ran out.