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FBI, Justice Dept. to Face 9/11
Panel
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| By CURT ANDERSON,
Associated Press Writer |
April 13,
2004 |
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| FBI, Justice Department to defend
counterterror efforts before Sept. 11 commission
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WASHINGTON - The independent commission investigating the
Sept. 11 attacks is turning its spotlight on the FBI and Justice
Department, with commission members seeking to determine what law
enforcement officials did when confronted with the rising threat of
an al-Qaida attack.
If the FBI had
information about an al-Qaida presence in the United States and had
70 ongoing investigations, commission members want to know what
actions were taken and how broadly that information was disseminated
throughout the government.
"The FBI is going to have to
answer the question: 'Why didn't they deliver the information up?
Did they get clear instructions from the top that it should be
delivered up?'" said former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of
the Sept. 11 commission.
The panel was beginning a new
two-day round of hearings Tuesday with testimony from former FBI
Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General John Ashcroft and former
Attorney General Janet Reno. Thomas Pickard, who served as acting
FBI director in the months just before the attacks, and former CIA
counterterrorism center director Cofer Black also were scheduled to
testify.
Aides to Ashcroft said he wanted to rebut criticism
that he was more focused on issues such as illegal drugs and gun
crimes than terrorism before the attacks. They pointed to a May 9,
2001, Senate hearing in which Ashcroft testified his agency had "no
higher priority" than protecting against terrorist
attacks.
Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic member of the
commission and deputy attorney general in the Clinton
administration, said Tuesday that Ashcroft was sure to come under
heavy criticism.
"I think there are some real criticisms of
the Department of Justice during that time period," she said on
ABC's "Good Morning America."
Former Sen. Slade Gorton, a
Republican commission member, said he was dubious of an assertion in
a declassified Aug. 6, 2001 presidential daily brief which said the
FBI had some 70 terrorism-related investigations of terrorism under
way at the time.
"I'll tell you, I don't know what those 70
full field investigations were. That's a comforting statement to
make in such a briefing," Gorton told ABC. "And I think it is a
very, very significant exaggeration and I certainly want to follow
up on it."
In an article in Monday's Wall Street Journal,
Freeh said the FBI "relentlessly did its job pursuing terrorists"
before the attacks but was hampered by lack of resources and
political will.
The hearing follows the weekend release of
the August 2001, intelligence memo which also warned that al-Qaida
was operating in the United States and might be looking to hijack
airplanes. The memo did not provide specific times or places for
potential attacks.
President Bush, speaking Monday with
reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, repeated his view that
the memo was "kind of a history" of Osama bin Laden's intentions but
contained no warning that "something is about to happen in
America."
"There was nothing in there that said, you know,
'There is an imminent attack,'" Bush said.
The president had
said earlier he assumed the FBI was on top of the
situation.
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the commission's
Democratic vice chairman, said Tuesday, "I think the president had a
lot of confidence in the people he appointed."
"But in any
event, what is very clear is that with all of these investigations
going forward by the FBI, the pertinent information did not rise to
the top so the top policy-makers could take action," he told CBS's
"The Early Show."
Law enforcement officials say the FBI was
doing all it could to identify and disrupt terrorists. For example,
the FBI in 1999 made counterterrorism a separate division and
created a unit to focus on bin Laden.
Freeh said it took the
Sept. 11 attacks to make others see the danger posed by
al-Qaida.
"The al-Qaida threat was the same on Sept. 10 and
Sept. 12," he wrote. "Nothing focuses a government quicker than a
war."
Freeh pointed out that the FBI expanded its overseas
legal attache offices from 19 to 44 during his tenure, which ended
three months before the attacks, and increased the prominence of
joint terrorism task forces that include personnel from other
agencies.
Freeh also said that at his first meeting with Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney, four days after the new
administration took office, they discussed terrorism, al-Qaida and
several recent overseas attacks targeting American
interests.
But Freeh and Pickard, the interim FBI director in
summer 2001, say there were budgetary constraints. For example,
Freeh said, the FBI asked for 1,895 special agents, linguists and
analysts for counterterrorism in fiscal 2000, 2001 and 2002 - and
wound up with just 76.
Still, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa,
said in a letter Monday to current FBI Director Robert Mueller that
total FBI spending rose some 132 percent from 1993 to 2003, with
counterterrorism requests nearly always met or
exceeded.
"Congress consistently granted the FBI huge amounts
of money for its counterterrorism mission, often at levels more than
the administration was requesting," said Grassley, a senior
Judiciary Committee member and frequent FBI critic.
Questions
also surround what FBI investigators were doing during the summer of
2001, when intelligence reports indicated that bin Laden's
organization was plotting a major attack. Those reports culminated
in the Aug. 6 memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in
U.S."
At the time, according to a congressional investigation
into Sept. 11, the FBI's field offices had not made terrorism a top
priority and there was only a single strategic analyst focused
full-time on al-Qaida at FBI headquarters. Much of the FBI's
attention was focused on investigating overseas attacks, such as the
October 2000 strike on the USS Cole destroyer at port in
Yemen.
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| ©Indiana
Printing & Publishing Co. 2004
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