|
Attacks fooled US 'absolutely'
05/04/2004 08:19 - (SA)
Washington - Members of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks, speaking four days before national security advisor Condoleezza Rice's highly-anticipated public testimony, on Sunday criticized the US government's handling of terrorism threats.
Former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey, a commission member, said the men suspected of carrying out the September 11 attacks fooled every major US government agency.
"Nineteen men with $350 000 defeated every single defensive mechanism we had up on the 11th of September 2001, and they defeated it utterly," Kerrey said on CBS television.
"Our department of defence, our FBI, our CIA, our FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), the INS (Immigration and Naturalisation Service), I mean, every three-letter acronym in Washington, DC, where there's billions of dollars being spent, was defeated on 11 September, and defeated absolutely utterly," Kerrey said. "It wasn't even a close call."
Responsibility
The commission's vice chairman, Democrat Lee Hamilton, told NBC television: "The more I look at it, the more I see kind of systemwide problems, rather than individual responsibility."
Republican commission member John Lehman, a former navy secretary, told CBS that the FBI was unable to penetrate terrorist cells in the United States and it failed to share intelligence, while "we had a CIA with a total aversion to covert activities, that had no capacity to penetrate al-Qaeda, that was not set up really for transnational enemies".
The commissioners were looking forwards to Rice's public testimony on Thursday.
The White House, citing separation-of-power concerns, had resisted until recently political pressure to allow Rice to speak under oath publicly before the panel, whose official name is the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
"We expect it to be very exciting, because we want to know so much," Republican commission chairman Thomas Kean told NBC News.
"She was right at the nexus 24 hours a day," Lehman said.
Hair on fire
"She was the conduit to the president and the coordinator of national security policy," he added. "And she is the one that had to deal with all of the people that had their hair on fire ... So she really has the view we need to establish the facts."
The goal of the panel is to ensure the United States learns from its mistakes and stops future terrorist attacks, he added.
"So that's really what the purpose of this commission is, not to point fingers at people, but to lay out the facts, draw the lessons and come up with some very real, far-reaching changes to see that this doesn't happen again," Lehman said.
|
News
