Congress Fattens Its Dossier on Sept. 11 Intelligence Errors

Congressional investigators are fielding a flurry of new tips and documents indicating that the nation’s intelligence community missed other opportunities to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Wednesday.

Investigators are getting “new reports, new documents that are purported to be examples of evidence that was not adequately pursued,” said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), adding that they appear to represent a number of additional “dots” that the CIA, the FBI and other agencies failed to connect.

Graham declined to provide details about the new evidence but said it goes beyond the recent revelations about the FBI’s failure to act on warnings from a Phoenix agent or to aggressively investigate suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota before the attacks.

The flow of information has spiked in recent weeks from various corners of the intelligence community, he said, adding that he is increasingly convinced that U.S. intelligence officials had enough information to stop the attacks.

“Had one human being or a common group of human beings sat down with all that information,” he said, “we could have gotten to the hijackers before they flew those four airplanes either into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or the ground of Pennsylvania.”

Panel Gets Background

Graham’s remarks came as House and Senate intelligence committee members completed their second day of closed hearings on Sept. 11 intelligence failures.

The bulk of Wednesday’s session was devoted to a lengthy presentation by committee staffers on the nation’s counter-terrorism efforts of the last 15 years. The joint committee is expected to resume its examination of that timeline today and begin calling its first witnesses next week.

Graham noted that much of the new information flowing into the joint investigative committee was uncorroborated. He also said that what he has seen has not “reached the level of importance of the Phoenix document or the Moussaoui case.”

But other congressional sources familiar with the new material said otherwise. “It’s substantive stuff,” said one aide close to the investigation. The material “is coming in every day,” he said. “People are calling, people are volunteering information from a variety of places.”

The surge of information signals new momentum for an inquiry that just weeks ago seemed stalled amid internal squabbling that led to the ouster of the investigation’s staff director, as well as accusations that the FBI and the CIA were refusing to cooperate with the probe.

Graham’s remarks could signal fresh trouble for FBI and CIA officials who insisted for months that they had no way to anticipate the attacks, but who now appear to have mishandled multiple opportunities to piece together the Sept. 11 puzzle.

Most recently, the CIA has struggled to explain why it had not adequately notified the FBI and immigration authorities on the travels of two Sept. 11 hijackers whom the agency had been watching since January 2000.

Mueller Set to Testify

The FBI’s failings are expected to be highlighted in hearings on Capitol Hill today, when FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee just hours before the panel is to hear from bureau whistle-blower Coleen Rowley.

Rowley, an attorney in the FBI’s Minnesota field office, accused Mueller in a memo of a “subtle shading/skewing of facts” in his defense of the bureau’s handling of the investigation of Moussaoui, a suspected terrorist arrested last August after enrolling in a Minnesota flight school.

Rowley complained in her memo that the investigation of Moussaoui was undermined by Washington bureaucrats who blocked efforts by the Minnesota field office to obtain permission to place Moussaoui under surveillance and search his computer.

FBI officials have previously said they feared that there was not adequate evidence to support an application for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Aiming to eliminate that excuse in future cases, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday that they plan to introduce legislation that would make it easier to obtain a surveillance warrant under the act. Their bill would eliminate a requirement that authorities show that a suspect has a link to a foreign government. Law enforcement officials say such links are not always clear in terrorist cases.

Intelligence committee members likened Wednesday’s closed-door session to a “Terrorism 101” course covering a 10-year period after the creation of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center in 1986 and the rise of Osama bin Laden as a primary threat to the United States in the 1990s.

Graham said the panel could begin calling witnesses next week. Among the first expected to appear before the joint committee is Cofer Black, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center for three years before accepting another assignment within the agency last month.

Graham also said the committee expects to hold its first public hearings during the week of June 24.

Times staff writer Nick Anderson contributed to this report.