- WASHINGTON, DC --
CIA Director George Tenet warned Thursday that the threat of new Al-Qaida
terror attacks in the United States "is as bad as it was . . . the
summer before September 11th."
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- "They have reconstituted," Tenet said of Osama
bin Laden's followers in testimony before the House and Senate intelligence
committees. "They are coming after us. They want to execute attacks."
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- He delivered his sobering assessment as the joint panel
held its 22nd and final hearing -- its ninth in public -- following a six-month
inquiry into the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect and thwart
the suicide hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001.
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- In his testimony, Tenet also suggested for the first
time publicly that the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who had aroused suspicions
at an Eagan, Minn., flight school in mid-August of 2001, might have accelerated
the attacks. George Tenet Ken Lambert Associated Press
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- Eleven days after Moussaoui was detained, Tenet said,
each of the hijackers "starts buying their [plane] tickets."
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- "Why it happened that they started buying their
tickets so soon after his arrest, I don't fully understand," he said,
"but you have to pay attention to it."
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- The committee released an updated report containing the
most complete chronology to date of the FBI's pre-Sept. 11 investigation
of Moussaoui and of the Minneapolis FBI office's prescient warnings to
Washington.
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- The report noted that a CIA officer who was detailed
to FBI headquarters, alarmed about Moussaoui's flight training and deceptive
behavior, described the Frenchman and the person who drove him from Oklahoma
to Minnesota to agency station chiefs worldwide as "suspect 747 airline
attackers" and "suspect airline suicide hijacker."
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- On Aug. 21, 2001, the Minneapolis FBI office advised
headquarters in Washington in an e-mail that Moussaoui had sought to learn
how to pilot a 747 jumbo jet from London to New York City, the report said.
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- The e-mail called it "imperative" that the
U.S. Secret Service (which guards the president) be apprised of the evidence
regarding Moussaoui because, "if [Moussaoui] seizes an aircraft flying
from Heathrow to NYC, it will have the fuel on board to reach D.C."
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- Profound threat
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- Still, FBI headquarters officials refused until after
the terror attacks to seek a national security warrant authorizing a search
of Moussaoui's belongings -- a search that led to his indictment on charges
that he was part of the Sept. 11 conspiracy.
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- Tenet, flanked at the hearing by FBI Director Robert
Mueller and Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the National Security
Agency, said the continuing terrorist threat is so profound that "the
country's mindset has to be changed fundamentally."
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- While the intelligence agencies have dramatically improved
their operations with new funding, he said, there should be "no more
sighs of relief . . . . We have to get about the business of protecting
the country."
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- The 37-member committee, which plans to issue a final
report on its investigation and recommend changes, has documented multiple
missed clues to the terror plot. Among them were the CIA's failure to adequately
alert other agencies that two Al-Qaida operatives had slipped into the
United States in January 2000, and its failure to react to a Phoenix agent's
memo urging a nationwide canvass to check for Middle Eastern men attending
flight schools.
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- However, the committees have produced no "smoking
gun" showing that intelligence and law enforcement agencies could
have prevented the attacks.
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- Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., expressing a note of futility
over what was known before Sept. 11, asked the three intelligence chiefs
whether Al-Qaida "had people to fill in" if one or more of the
terrorists had been picked up before the attacks.
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- "I think the answer to that has to be yes,"
Mueller replied. "I mean, we all know that in the camps in Afghanistan
approximately 10,000 individuals went through the training and are now
dispersed throughout the world."
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- Tenet, drawn into an extraordinary public assessment
of his agency's supersecret operations, acknowledged that the CIA's pre-Sept.
11 performance "wasn't flawless."
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- But, echoing combative testimony last month from a former
CIA counterterrorism chief, Tenet said the agency was hindered for years
by inadequate resources. Moreover, he said that its employees should be
heralded as "absolute heroes" for working marathon hours and
probably saving thousands of lives.
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- If he could go back in time, Tenet said, he would have
done several things differently:
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- * Government agencies should have paid much more heed
to the threat of domestic attacks after Al-Qaida operative Ahmed Ressam
was arrested in December 1999 while crossing the Canadian border into Washington
state with a car full of explosives. Ressam was later convicted of plotting
to blow up the Los Angeles airport during the millennium celebration.
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- * The United States should have "taken down the
sanctuary" of Al-Qaida in Afghanistan much sooner. "We let them
operate with impunity for a long time without putting the full force and
muscle of the United States against them," Tenet said.
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- * Even though he had tripled the size of the CIA's
counter-terrorism center by 1997, he should have shifted "500 more
people" to back up its "exhausted" analysts.
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- Mueller said he felt the biggest mistake before Sept.
11 was the failure to harden cockpit doors so that terrorists could not
seize the controls of passenger planes.
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- He said the FBI is rapidly beefing up its counter-terrorism
capabilities but acknowledged that, in addition to threats from Al-Qaida,
the FBI is concerned that a war with Iraq could trigger new domestic terrorism
risks.
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- Not on 'watch list'
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- Tenet clashed with the committee's investigative staff
over its findings on the CIA's tracking of eventual hijackers Khalid Almihdhar
and Nawaf Alhazmi. The staff said the agency monitored their presence at
a meeting of Al-Qaida operatives in Malaysia in January 2000 but failed
for 20 months to put them on a "watch list" so they would be
denied admission to the United States.
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- Tenet cited a January 2000 CIA message indicating the
information was indeed passed along.
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- Regardless, the panel's staff director, Eleanor Hill,
said that "the weight of the evidence" suggested otherwise.
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- Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., contending the agency had information
that "could have disrupted, limited or possibly prevented the terrorist
attacks," asked Tenet if he knew which employees failed at three different
stages to read or circulate the critical information.
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- Tenet called "ridiculous" the notion that he
should punish overworked analysts, including one he called "one of
the finest employees we've ever had."
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- The material on Moussaoui was released with the approval
of the judge presiding over his criminal prosecution. It says that before
his arrest on Aug. 16, 2001, FBI agents interviewed his instructor at the
Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, who described him as unlike
any other student he had taught.
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- Moussaoui lacked a pilot's license, paid $8,300 in mostly
cash for his training, had only about 50 hours in a light plane and wanted
to fly a 747.
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- Upon his arrest at an Eagan motel, the report said, Moussaoui
declined to let agents search his belongings. He told them he had traveled
to Morocco, Malaysia and Pakistan for business, "although he could
not provide any details of his employment." Nor, the report said,
could he "convincingly explain the $32,000" he had deposited
in an Oklahoma bank account.
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- The next day, after Moussaoui demanded to see an attorney,
Minneapolis FBI agents sent bureau headquarters a memorandum on their Moussaoui
investigation. They said his "possession of weapons and his preparation
through physical training for violent confrontation" gave reason to
believe that he, his traveling companion Hussein al-Attas "and others
yet unknown" were conspiring to seize control of an airplane.
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- Investigators for the intelligence committees concluded
earlier that the Minneapolis office was denied a national security warrant
because of a misunderstanding at bureau headquarters over the legal requirements
for obtaining one.
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- Mueller, in his testimony, said he visited the Minneapolis
field office while in town two weeks ago for an international police chiefs
conference and praised the agents for doing "a terrific job."
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- © Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
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