Sept. 11 Suspects Believed Still Here

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said Sunday that authorities believe about 200 suspects in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are still in the United States and that they are thought to be planning additional attacks.

“It’s very unlikely that all of those individuals that were associated with or involved with the terrorism events of September the 11th and other terrorism events that may have been prepositioned and preplanned have been apprehended,” Ashcroft said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

With more than 700 suspects already being detained, he added: “We are doing everything possible to disrupt, to interrupt, to prevent, to destabilize any additional activity, and we are on alert and we will continue to act aggressively in every respect to prevent additional activity.”

The attorney general declined to comment on a report in Time magazine’s latest edition, due out today, that 25 to 35 Arab men in Denver took truck driving lessons over the last two years and received licenses to drive hazardous-material trucks even though they did not speak English--one of the license requirements.

“I’m not able to comment on that specific case,” Ashcroft said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I can tell you that across the country we have been sensitive to individuals’ receiving [hazardous-material] licenses, if they, for any number of reasons, were suspicious individuals.”

Noting that a truck was used in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Ashcroft added, “We are sensitive to those issues. . . . And, obviously, we would take action, appropriately, when we have the right evidence to both contain and curtail the activity of individuals whose licensing is inappropriate, and to prosecute those who provide licenses inappropriately.”

In other news:

* The FBI is looking at four phone calls placed from Afghanistan to the United States in the weeks since Sept. 11, according to law enforcement officials. Newsweek reports that the FBI is working on the “prevailing theory” that the calls came from the Al Qaeda terrorist organization and were an attempt to activate more terror cells in the United States. The FBI had no comment.

* The New Yorker magazine reported that on the first night of bombing raids in Afghanistan, a CIA plane had the leader of the Taliban in its sights but was refused permission to fire. The magazine, in its Oct. 22 edition, said an unstaffed Predator reconnaissance aircraft controlled by the CIA and equipped with two antitank missiles identified a convoy of cars and trucks leaving Kabul as carrying Mullah Mohammed Omar. It said the CIA did not have the authority to fire the missiles, and that the commander of U.S. Central Command in Florida did not authorize firing the missiles because of concerns expressed by military lawyers.