WASHINGTON, June 3 (UPI) -- An extraordinary record of intelligence foul-ups has unfolded, leaving the Bush administration acknowledging the Sept. 11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 Americans might have been prevented, even before congressional hearings on the attacks open Tuesday.
In the past several weeks, it has been disclosed in news reports and acknowledged by officials that both the FBI and the CIA ignored or mishandled leads that could have led investigators to the plot to hijack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
President George W. Bush, speaking to an audience in Little Rock, Ark., Monday said, "We can do a better job of defending the American people, which we are going to do. When you read about the FBI, I want you to know that the FBI is changing its culture," Bush said. "The FBI is changing, and they're doing a better job of communicating with the CIA."
Late last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted, "I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers."
But the FBI is not alone in difficulties about how it handled intelligence information before Sept. 11. On Sunday, Newsweek magazine reported that as early as January 2000 the CIA had identified two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, as terrorists in a meeting in Malaysia, but failed to alert the Immigration and Naturalization Service so they could be barred from the United States or the FBI, which could have tracked them once they entered the country.
"Instead," the magazine reported, "during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar, lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools -- until the morning of Sept. 11, when they walked aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed into the Pentagon."
Initially, the Bush administration resisted congressional inquiries, claiming that it might impede the search for the terrorists. At the same time, Attorney General John Ashcroft got tough new laws for wiretapping and surveillance and reversed 25-year-old regulations that restrained investigation agencies.
But the drumbeat of unfavorable details about the actions before Sept. 11 has turned the Bush administration to supporting congressional hearings to avoid the appointment of a special commission.
It faces major inquiries on almost every aspect of pre-Sept. 11 security preparedness.
On Tuesday, joint House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on "9-11," as it is popularly known, are set to begin for the first of three weeks of closed-door hearings on intelligence breakdowns prior to the attacks, including the July 2001 "Phoenix memorandum" from an FBI field office urging headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern students with possible links to Osama bin Laden at U.S. flight schools.
After the closed-door meetings, the committees plan to hold open hearings on June 25 at which Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet are to testify. The committees have compiled 30,000 pages of U.S. intelligence documents since the investigation began in February and interviewed 175 witnesses, according to committee staff.
The Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday is set to hear from Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent who wrote Mueller complaining that FBI officials in Washington had rebuffed agents in Minneapolis who sought greater authority to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th Hijacker," before Sept. 11. Mueller is also set to testify.
Mueller has made conflicting statements, he has called mistakes, about what the government knew prior to Sept. 11. Some senators have stopped short of calling for Mueller's resignation, saying he needs more time to clean up what some lawmakers said is a stumbling FBI headquarters.
"I hope he can do it," Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. "But we'll have to see."
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., has eyed the FBI's reaction to the debacles warily. Sensenbrenner said last week he would ask Mueller to testify before his committee over new rules announced last week that roll back restrictions on the FBI's authority to track potential terrorists by monitoring the Internet, political groups, libraries and religious organizations, including places of worship like mosques.
"In the past, I supported (the restrictions) as an important limitation on FBI investigative practices to prevent the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s," Sensenbrenner said last week.
The intelligence committee has also been quietly delving into how the Bush White House reacted to the vast flow of terrorist warnings that were streaming in by the summer of 2001. National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters last month that they were so numerous in July that White House terrorist working groups were meeting every day. On Aug. 6, Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch, received a briefing on Osama bin Laden that included a discussion of aircraft hijacking and attacks on federal buildings in New York. But Rice has said that nothing in the memorandum was specific enough to be "actionable." The committee has the briefing memorandum, but the White House has opposed making it public.
(Mark Benjamin is UPI's Congressional Bureau Chief and Nicholas M. Horrock is UPI's Chief White House Correspondent.)
