Tomorrow’s Congressional report on the 9/11 investigation isn’t going to focus solely on the FBI’s failures. The NSA is expecting some heat for its failures, too.

THE US government had intercepted conversations by early 1999 indicating that two September 11 hijackers-to-be were connected to a suspected al-Qaeda facility in the Middle East.

But the National Security Agency did not pass on the information to other agencies, a congressional report on intelligence failures said.

The NSA interception was the first evidence in American possession that eventual hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were connected to each other and to al-Qaeda, but some of that information was not brought to the attention of other agencies until early 2002 after Congress began investigating pre-September 11 failures, according to excerpts of the report to be released tomorrow.

Analysts at NSA are given leeway to determine whether the threat level associated with SIGINT is sufficient to warrant reporting. In this situation, NSA claims, the intelligence did not warrant warrant inclusion in the agency’s reports because the identity of the individuals involved in the monitored were still unknown.

Oddly enough, NSA is denying that this lapse – which is clearly tied into the agency’s standards for reporting – is related to NSA culture. As further defense of its failure to tip off other agencies about the conversations monitored in 1998, the NSA notes that two years later other US intelligence offices figured out the identity of the individuals based on conversations they, too, had monitored.