WASHINGTON?President Bush said Tuesday the CIA and FBI failed to communicate adequately before Sept. 11. Congress began extraordinary closed-door hearings into intelligence lapses with bipartisan promises the inquiry will search for facts, not scapegoats.
“We’re up and running with momentum,” said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who will run the first week of the joint Senate-House intelligence committee hearings.
“We will be a fact-driven inquiry,” Goss said as he stood next to Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who will run the hearing on alternate weeks, under the rules the joint committee adopted during its first meeting Tuesday.
Hours before the committee met for the first time behind closed doors, Bush, in his most explicit criticism yet of FBI and CIA actions before the attacks, said: “I think it’s clear that they weren’t” communicating properly.
But, speaking at the National Security Agency, Bush also said there is no evidence that U.S. officials could have averted the attacks, even if agencies had worked together better.
The House-Senate intelligence committee will examine just that point, and others, as it seeks to uncover what clues might have pointed to the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and how to prevent lapses in the future.
“We need to be aggressive and rigorous in this inquiry, asking the right questions like who knew what? And if they didn’t know it, why? And what did they do with the information they had?” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.
Investigators owe it to the victims and their families to be “serious, thorough and credible,” Mikulski said. Open hearings will begin June 25.
Criticizing the finger-pointing some CIA and FBI officials have engaged in recently, Rep. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said on CNN: “This blame game does nobody any good. We’re not head hunters over here on the Hill.”
The president made his comments when asked about an assertion by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that U.S. officials were warned about a week before Sept. 11 that al Qaeda operatives were in the advanced stages leading toward an attack on an unspecified American target.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, “This was credible but not specific information that pointed to al Qaeda threats against U.S. interests, Egyptian interests and others as well.”
Bush also said any additional inquiries into Sept. 11?by other congressional panels or by an independent commission that some in Congress favor?could hinder efforts to prevent future terrorist strikes.
“What I am concerned about is tying up valuable assets and time and possibly jeopardizing sources of intelligence,” the president said.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hear Thursday from Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who says FBI headquarters ignored her office’s pleas in the weeks before Sept. 11 to aggressively investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, after his arrest last August.
Moussaoui, now charged as an accomplice in the hijacking plot, had come under suspicion by the FBI and was arrested on an immigration charge.
At the intelligence committees, lawmakers spent Tuesday discussing procedural matters like the scope of the inquiry, said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who emerged from the hearing while it was still under way.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said one purpose of the hearings is to ensure federal law enforcement agencies don’t react the wrong way to current criticism and spy more on Americans.