'I don?t want to hear this'
Former acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard, who headed the bureau just before the attacks, told the panel Ashcroft did not seem to consider terrorism a priority. He said that after he began briefing Ashcroft twice a week on the threats, Ashcroft told Pickard "he did not want to hear this information any more".
Ashcroft denied saying that and added that he had "interrogated" Pickard in their meetings about any possible terror threats facing the United States.
"I did never say to him that I did not want to hear about terrorism," Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft also told the panel that on May 7, 2001, he advised national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the US administration should abandon its previous policy of trying to capture Osama bin Laden. "We should find and kill bin Laden," Ashcroft said he told her.
The hearing was in the same Senate hearing room where Rice testified last week and former counter-terrorism aide Richard Clarke a few weeks before that. This time there were empty seats and not nearly as much electricity as those appearances.
The commission reports issued at the start of the two-day hearing noted some FBI successes in cracking earlier terrorist cases. But the FBI was unable to stop the 19 hijackers from using commercial airliners as weapons, killing some 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
"All our systems failed," said commission member Fred Fielding. "We were totally beaten on September 11."
The inability of the FBI to link Moussaoui to al-Qaeda was a prime example, the commission concluded in revealing previously unreported details about the investigation of the terrorism suspect.
Moussaoui was taken into custody on August 16, 2001, on immigration charges while trying to learn to fly a Boeing 747 at a flight school in Minnesota. A dispute between FBI agents in the field and supervisors meant no warrant was quickly obtained to search his computer, the commission said.
It wasn't until after the attacks that the FBI learned that an imprisoned terrorist - convicted Los Angeles airport bomb plotter Ahmed Ressam - had told agents he recognised Moussaoui from Afghan training camps run by al-Qaeda.
Also, the commission said the FBI asked the British for help in identifying Moussaoui in late August, but the British did not handle the request as a priority. It wasn't until September 13 that London provided intelligence about Moussaoui's attendance at the Afghan camps.
"A maximum US effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections" to the hijackers and their financiers through an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, the commission statement said.
Race against time
"The publicity about the threat also might have disrupted the plot," it concluded. "But this would have been a race against time."
Moussaoui is awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy related to the September 11 plot. A federal appeals court is mulling whether Moussaoui should have access to terrorist confederates in U.S. custody that he says can vouch for his innocence.
Another missed opportunity occurred because of a dispute over sharing of intelligence information with FBI criminal investigators regarding Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the 19 hijackers, the commission said. The search finally was assigned in August to an FBI agent working his first counter-terrorism lead, who on September 11 sent a memo to the FBI office in Los Angeles about Mihdar.
The missed chances came at the end of a summer of heightened intelligence reports about bin Laden's determination to strike the United States. These intelligence reports carried such headlines as: "Bin Laden planning multiple operations" and: "Bin Laden threats are real."
System was blinking red
CIA Director George Tenet, who is to testify before the commission on Wednesday, told the panel in private that in July 2001 "the system was blinking red" and that "it could not get any worse," according to the commission statement.
"None of this, unfortunately, specified method, time or place," J Cofer Black, former director of the CIA counterterrorism center, testified on Tuesday. "Where we had clues, it looked like planning was under way for an attack in the Middle East or Europe."
Still, FBI offices on April 13, 2001, were sent an alert from headquarters urging stepped-up surveillance and use of informants to uncover "current operational activities related to Sunni (Islamic) extremism".
There were similar alerts to the FBI's 56 field offices in June and July, and Pickard told the commission he conducted conference calls with top officials in the field offices about the heightened threats on July 19.
Despite that, the commission found many FBI agents in field offices could not recall any such increased threat and some, including the Washington office, took no special steps or actions in response.
They didn?t hear it
"I don't understand why they didn't hear it," Pickard testified.
A recently declassified August 6, 2001, intelligence memo given to President Bush summarised the al-Qaeda threat and cited 70 FBI field investigations under way. Pickard testified that the number was "somewhat inaccurate" - he said the actual number was classified - and that the cases involved individuals linked to al-Qaeda around the country. It turned out none was involved in the September 11 plot.
A transcript of the hearing, including the two statements issued by the commission and witness testimonies, are available online at http://wid.ap.org/transcripts/statement.html .
- AP
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