Congressional Panel on Terrorist Attacks Overwhelmed by Information

AP ^ | 6/5/02 | Ken Guggenheim

[anniegetyourgun]

WASHINGTON (AP) - Faced with tens of thousands of documents and more coming in every day, leaders of a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks say they are dealing with much more information than they anticipated.

But they said they didn't want that to delay their inquiry.

"We're going to get to the bottom of what happened on Sept. 11, but what we're dealing with right now is still the threat of future terrorist acts," Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday on NBC's "Today."

Graham proposed on "The Early Show" on CBS that "we should consider a new system in which we would have one group of people who would be analyzing the information from all the possible sources."

"We can do this (inquiry) while the war on terrorism is going on because if we don't, we think the mistakes of the past will be revisited," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a strong CIA critic and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Shelby spoke Tuesday after the House and Senate intelligence committees began an extraordinary joint inquiry into the intelligence lapses that preceded Sept. 11 and how future terrorist attacks can be prevented.

"I think we're going to find that a lot of things were not done right by the CIA, the FBI, INS" and perhaps other agencies, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said. "Some of this is pretty serious" and "it will suggest ways we need to change."

Kyl said the joint committee already has interviewed Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who says FBI headquarters ignored her office's pleas in the weeks before Sept. 11 to aggressively investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged as an accomplice in the suicide hijackings that killed more than 3,000 people.

Rowley is to testify publicly on Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

No witnesses appeared at Tuesday's closed-door hearing in a tightly guarded room of the Capitol, where lawmakers agreed on a series of goals and how they would conduct the investigation.

At a news conference afterward, leaders of the intelligence panels stressed bipartisan cooperation and promised to look for facts, not scapegoats.

Graham said there were three basic goals: "One, to lay out for the American people what happened prior to and on Sept. 11. Two, what does it mean? And three, then advocate to the American people and our colleagues the necessary reforms."

The House intelligence chairman, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., said the joint committee's staff was sifting through millions of words from documents and had interviewed about 200 witnesses.

The good news, Goss said, "is we're getting great cooperation, great access. The bad news is there's lots more information to deal with than we thought when we started. But we'll get through that."

Further complicating the inquiry is that staff director Eleanor Hill began work only on Monday. Her predecessor, L. Britt Snider, was forced to resign in April.

Loch K. Johnson, assistant to Sen. Frank Church's 1975 investigation of the CIA, said Goss and Graham appear to be rushing the investigation.

"It takes a good month to a month and a half to get staff, a month and a half to get questions and a list of the people you want to interview, then trying to make sense so you can craft some recommendations," said Johnson, author of "Bombs, Bugs, Drugs and Thugs," a book about intelligence agencies.

The hearings follow recent news reports that the FBI and CIA failed to respond adequately to warning signs of possible terrorist activity before Sept. 11, including the Moussaoui arrest and information developed by the CIA in early 2000 about two of the hijackers.

Hours before the joint committee met, President Bush, in his most explicit criticism yet of FBI and CIA actions before the attacks, said, "I think it's clear that they weren't" communicating properly." But he also said there was no evidence that the attacks could have been averted if agencies had worked together better.

Goss said cooperation between the agencies has improved, but problems remain.

"I would love to be able to say that we're going to have a squabble-free solution to this. That's a dream, of course it is," said Goss, a former CIA agent.

Goss and Graham are alternating as chairmen of the joint committee. The panel plans to have staff briefings on specific issues starting Wednesday, then call witnesses in closed hearings. Open hearings are scheduled to begin June 25.

While lawmakers examine what led up to Sept. 11, government investigators continue to piece together information to learn how Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida followers planned the attacks.

Investigators believe they have identified a Kuwaiti lieutenant of bin Laden as the likely mastermind, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said Tuesday. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of helping plan the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, is at large in Afghanistan or nearby, the official told The Associated Press.

[Semper Paratus]

I'll wait for witness who claims that Sudan wanted to give up Osama to US was turned down by Clinton.
Hear him on Imus and sounded very credible, but the Clinton hit team has him in their sights.

[MaeWest]

That would be Mansoor Ijaz.

[Free the USA]

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