Kean: Sept. 11 'could have been prevented'

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- The chairman of the commission set up to probe the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings said that the attacks "probably could have been" prevented," but despite a series of huge reforms and the expenditure of billions of dollars on homeland security, the United States was still not safe.

Thomas Kean, the chairman of the ten-person panel, asked whether Sept. 11 could have been prevented, said, "I think it probably could have been, in any number of ways."

Speaking Thursday on ABC's "Nightline," Kean detailed failings by consular officials, airport security personnel and intelligence agencies, concluding, "there were a number of steps along the way that if they'd occurred differently, this event might not have occurred."

The statement by Kean, the former GOP governor of New Jersey, is the strongest yet by any official charged with investigating the attacks.

Earlier this year, an extensive inquiry by committees of both houses of Congress detailed the multitude of failures by U.S. intelligence agencies to "join the dots" that preceded the attacks.

But they did not conclude that the attackers could have been stopped.

"No one will ever know," their report concluded, "what might have happened had more connections been drawn between these disparate pieces of information."

Kean's statement comes despite the White House's rejection of a similar claims he made Wednesday night in brief portions of an interview broadcast by CBS News.

"There is nothing that we have seen," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Thursday, "that leads us to believe that Sept. 11 could have been prevented."

"I don't like to argue with the White House," Kean responded, "But I think ... if some of those hijackers had been kept off some of those planes, then they wouldn't have been able to do what they did. If some of those people had been kept out of the country, they wouldn't have been able to do what they did."

"The evidence I'm talking about is the evidence we've all had for a long time," he said.

Kean also indicated that, despite the biggest reorganization of the federal government for 50 years and the expenditure of $19 billion on homeland security, he did not believe the country was safe from a repetition of the attacks that killed 3,000 people.

"No, in fact, unfortunately, most of the people who have testified before us say in all likelihood something will occur again. ... Our problem is to do our best as we can as a country ... to prevent it."

But, he added, "We're not quite there yet."

Kean's comments were echoed by Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, emphasizing the degree to which the burning questions at the heart of the commission's inquiry have become politicized in the run up to next year's presidential primaries.

"We are no safer today than the day those planes struck the world trade center," Dean said Thursday.

Rep. Ed Markey, D.-Mass., a senior member of the Homeland Security Committee said that Kean "has delivered the most disturbing news yet for the United States. The worst attack ever on American soil could have been prevented.

"Despite these revelations," he concluded, "the White House still appears to be in deep denial."

Some Democratic members of the bipartisan commission went even further.

"We've got to fill the holes that those snakes crawled in through on Sept. 11," former Rep Tim Roemer, D-Ind., told United Press International, "But I think we are moving in the wrong direction."

"We've got this huge new department (of homeland security) that is dysfunctional and probably won't be working properly for years.

"We've got an 18-year-old college kid able to smuggle weapons onto planes," Roemer said, referring to the case of Nathaniel Heatwole, who this year took box cutters and imitation explosives onto several airliners where they remained undetected, even after he had tipped off Homeland Security officials.

Kean's statements were hailed by relatives of the Sept. 11 victims who have long argued that the attacks could have been prevented.

"What this means to me is that my husband could have been with me and the rest of his family this Christmas," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ron, was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center.

"This is the first time that someone in this position has said that this could have stopped and that the people who failed to stop it should have been held accountable," she added.

"The only way we can make the country safe is by finding those who failed and making them accountable."

Kean told Nightline that the mistakes he was talking about were made by mid-level officials, by "people ... in the line."

He appeared to retreat slightly from comments he made Wednesday ,which seemed to imply that some senior officials should have been fired for their failures that day.

"We have no evidence that anybody ... high in the Clinton administration or high in the Bush administration did anything wrong," he said Thursday, adding that the inquiry still had a way to go.

Kean said that the commission had not yet discussed whether presidents Bush and Clinton should be called to testify, let alone whether that testimony should be public.

But Roemer said that he and other members had "argued strongly that there were four directly elected officials (presidents Bush and Clinton and vice presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney) who should absolutely be called to answer questions in public."

"It would leave a huge gaping hole in our record as investigators if we didn't do that," he said.