The FBI failed miserably over several years to reorganize and respond to a steadily growing threat of terrorism, and Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected an appeal from the agency for more funding on the day before al-Qaida struck, the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks said yesterday.

　　"On September 11, the FBI was limited in several areas," the commission said in a staff report. It cited "limited intelligence collection and strategic analysis capabilities, a limited capacity to share information both internally and externally, insufficient training, an overly complex legal regime and inadequate resources."

　　The commission released its unflinchingly critical report at the outset of two days of hearings from several current and former officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

　　Former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh was the first to take the witness chair.

　　"We had a very effective program with respect to counterterrorism prior to September 11 given the resources that we had," he said.

　　Former Attorney General Janet Reno said that while the FBI never seemed to have sufficient resources, "Director Freeh seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism from other areas such as violent crime."

　　On September 11, 2001, the commission staff said, "about 1,300 agents, or 6 percent of the FBI's total personnel, worked on counterterrorism."

　　Reno was the day's second witness, following Freeh.

　　The report said the FBI had an information system that was outdated before it was installed, further hampering efforts to battle terrorism.

　　Creation of a new Investigative Services Division in 1999 was a failure, the commission said, adding that 66 percent of the FBI's analysts were "not qualified to perform analytical duties."

　　A new counterterrorism strategy a year later again fell woefully short, and a review in 2001 showed that "almost every FBI field office's counterterrorism program was assessed to be operating at far below maximum capacity."

　　Hearings on events leading to the terror attacks have also shown that President Bush wasn't the only one to get a memo in August 2001 about the threat of Osama bin Laden striking on US soil.

　　Senior government policy-makers got a similar document one day later, but theirs excluded most of the recent threat information the president had received. The August 7, 2001, Senior Executive Intelligence Brief didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al-Qaida activity that the president had been told of a day earlier in a top-secret memo titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US," government officials said.

　　The senior executives' memo also did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of possible attacks with explosives in the United States or that the FBI had concerns about recent activities like the casing of buildings in New York, the officials said.

　　(The Associated Press)