Congress to Probe Lapses on Terrorism

The first full-scale congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, due to start behind closed doors Tuesday, will seek to determine what U.S. authorities knew about Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and, perhaps more important, why they didn’t know and do more.

Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees said Sunday that the long-delayed joint probe would examine communication lapses involving the CIA and the FBI, as well as immigration, aviation and other government agencies, that allowed possible clues of the impending attacks to go unnoticed.

One such lapse is why the CIA failed to alert the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to watch for Khalid Almihdhar after he was secretly photographed at a meeting with a suspected Al Qaeda operative in January 2000 in Malaysia.

The CIA waited until Aug. 23, 2001, to ask the INS to add Almihdhar’s name to a “watch list” used to bar suspected terrorists and others from entering the U.S.

By then, Almihdhar and another suspect, Nawaf Alhazmi, had been living openly for several months in the U.S. and had enrolled in flight schools. The CIA then told the FBI, but the bureau was unable to find the men before they helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77 and crash it into the Pentagon.

“There was information that could have allowed us to put [Almihdhar] on the watch list earlier,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said Sunday. “It didn’t get done.”

The official said the issue “undoubtedly will come up” in the congressional hearings. “Some of the documents and information on this are among the 350,000 pages we’ve made available” to congressional investigators. “I’m sure they’ll want to ask and talk about it.”

Although the communication breakdown was reported by The Times and other publications in the fall, a Newsweek report this week adds several new details.

The lapse is the latest to roil the national security community and adds fresh pressure to calls for stronger congressional scrutiny of the often-bitter rivalry between the U.S.’ chief spy service and its top law enforcement agency.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said Sunday that the CIA and the FBI are “working in a significantly better way” than before. “Reports that used to be generated, that were almost competitive between the one agency and the other, are now jointly generated,” Ashcroft said on CNN’s “Late Edition,” one of three network talk shows on which he appeared Sunday.

The FBI has taken the heaviest fire in recent weeks. Top officials ignored warnings in July from a Phoenix field agent about Middle Eastern men training at American flight schools. The bureau also denied requests from the Minneapolis field office in August for help in investigating Zacarias Moussaoui, who was later charged with conspiracy for his alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Ashcroft said, however, that the slew of missed clues probably were not enough to have averted the attacks. “My view is that the information we now have does not indicate that there was a substantial likelihood of detecting this,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced new surveillance guidelines last week that will sharply increase the FBI’s ability to monitor libraries, mosques, political rallies, Internet sites and other public places to search for intelligence about possible terrorist acts.

Ashcroft said the new rules would allow the FBI to “listen to what’s happening in public places in our community,” including “bomb-making sites” on the Internet. “Any 12-year-old child can do it,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “The FBI ought to be able to do it.”

But Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, questioned whether the FBI needed new powers to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens, given its failure to correctly analyze the information it had received before Sept. 11.

“People talk a great deal about connecting the dots,” she said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “Well, they didn’t even see the dots. They don’t understand the salience of the dots. The dots were there. It wasn’t a question of needing more collection on American citizens.”

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on the same program that the nation needs “a thorough, credible investigation of all our intelligence agencies: what they knew, what they didn’t know, what do they need?”

Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA employee, complained recent news reports have hampered the inquiry.

“The problem we’re having now is that we’re looking and focusing on one little corner ... of the tapestry at a time as things leak out,” Goss said on “Meet the Press.”

The panel will hold its first closed hearing Tuesday in a special Senate chamber that has soundproofed doors and walls. The first public hearings are tentatively planned for mid-June.