Posted on 09/14/2002 10:59:56 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
The Bush administration is balking at a request from Congress that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld testify in public before the Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, government officials said today.
The administration's resistance has frustrated lawmakers by making it difficult for the joint Senate and House committee to schedule public hearings, even as it races against a deadline to complete its work by the end of the current session of Congress.
The dispute apparently centers on the administration's reluctance to have the two secretaries answer questions about whether they have been satisfied with the quality of the intelligence they have received about terrorism since they took office, government officials said. Their views could help the committee gauge whether American intelligence agencies are meeting the needs of policy makers.
American intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been heavily criticized for failing to predict or prevent the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In particular, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency have each been stung by public disclosures of potential missed signals to the plot.
In an interview with The New York Times this week, Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama and a member on the joint committee investigating the attacks, said that the "failures in the intelligence are so widespread, so deep, that we owe the American people a searching job."
But Senator Shelby also warned that the committee was running out of time to finish its job, and indicated that he believes Bush administration officials have delayed cooperating fully, knowing it has a deadline to meet.
"We were told that there would be cooperation in this investigation, and I question that," he said. He added that he believes that the joint panel may run out of time, and that an independent commission to investigate the terrorist attacks may be needed to fill in the gaps.
The joint committee has been plagued by a series of miscues and delays since its inception. Its first staff director was forced to resign before the committee even began work, and the committee leadership later called for the F.B.I. to investigate a leak of classified information to the news media. That has led to a dispute over whether committee members should be forced to submit to polygraph examinations.
The committee has been inundated with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies, making it difficult for the staff to sort through the material as it seeks to document how the government dealt with the clues about Al Qaeda's intentions prior to Sept. 11.
So far, the committee has still not held any public hearings, although it held its 10th closed-door hearing today, and heard from officials from the C.I.A.
But if Secretary Powell and Secretary Rumsfeld did testify about their views on terrorism-related intelligence, it is unlikely that they would heap scorn on the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in public.
Before accepting President Bush's offer to become defense secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld considered taking the helm at the C.I.A. Since returning to the Pentagon after a 25-year absence, he has displayed an unusually strong interest in intelligence, and has been seeking to enhance his office's authority over the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies that are part of the military.
Secretary Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has extensive experience in dealing with intelligence, particularly in the Persian Gulf war. In public, Mr. Powell has actually defended the intelligence agencies against the criticism it has received since Sept. 11.
In an interview with NBC News broadcast Wednesday, for example, Mr. Powell said that it is unfair to pillory American intellience for failing to place spies inside Al Qaeda.
"To say we failed because we weren't able to get inside of this terrorist organization, I think, is not the right characterization," Mr. Powell said. "Our intelligence people did a heck of a job last year. We knew something was going on. We had warnings in the course of the summer. We tried to chase those warnings, and we tried to track them down. We weren't successful, but I wouldn't say that it was because our intelligence system failed. There are people out there who were determined to make sure we didn't know what was going on. They hid it very well."
Congress or any part of it racing? Yeah. Right.
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