US congressional hearings open into September 11

High-stakes congressional hearings began behind closed doors and in a sound-proof room yesterday into the failure of US intelligence to thwart the September 11 attacks, as President George W. Bush warned Congress not to hinder his war on terrorism.

Lawmakers want to determine what went wrong and what must be fixed to get the FBI and CIA to better track terrorists, share information and protect the nation.

"We need to be aggressive and rigorous in these inquiries, 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," Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, said as she headed to the hearings in a secured fourth-floor room at the Capitol.

The FBI and CIA have come under fire after a string of disclosures that they failed to share information that could have warned of the attacks, and the Bush administration has been criticized for not being open enough about what it knew.

The intelligence committees of the Senate and US House of Representatives are holding the joint hearings, expected to stretch late into this year.

The proceedings are expected to open to the public the week of June 24 when FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet are scheduled to appear, Capitol Hill aides said.

Before the hearings got underway, Bush said he was concerned congressional probes might take government experts away from their job of preventing another attack - "tying up valuable assets and time and possibly jeopardizing sources of intelligence."

"I am concerned about distractions from this perspective," Bush said at the National Security Agency headquarters. "I want the Congress to investigate, but I want a committee to investigate, not multiple committees ... because I don't want to tie up our team when we were trying to fight this war on terror."

The White House opposes mostly Democratic calls for an separate investigation by an independent commission, contending such a probe could become political and be less able to handle classified information.

But Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, stuck to his position that an outside panel of experts should take a look.

"What is happening currently with the CIA and the FBI is all the more reason we should get on with the commission," declared Daschle, who has said he may seek a vote on legislation to create a commission within the next few weeks.

Bush said it was clear the FBI and the CIA were not communicating properly before September 11, but that they were now in closer contact. He said he saw no evidence suggesting the United States had information that would have allowed it to prevent the four hijack attacks, which killed about 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania.

The congressional hearings want to answer key questions: What did the FBI, CIA and other administration agencies know and when did they know it, what did they do about it and what can be done to improve intelligence gathering and prevent another attack?

"Information will come out, some public, showing that there were massive intelligence failures," Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the Senate Intelligence Committee's top Republican, said just hours before the hearings began.

"What do we learn from it, what do we do about it, how can we get our agencies working together for the security of this nation?" Shelby said on CNN.

The hearings opened as the FBI and CIA dispute who knew what and when about Khalid Almihdhar, one of the suspected hijackers.

The FBI says it was not warned about Almihdhar until just weeks before the attacks, but on Monday CIA officials said they notified the FBI in January 2000 that he attended a meeting of suspected terrorists in Malaysia.

An FBI spokesman declined comment about the new report. "As per the director's instructions, we are not going to get involved in a finger-pointing contest."

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican, said of the FBI-CIA spat, "it's not very professional and that bothers me." But he dismissed as "wacky" calls for an independent commission to investigate events leading up to the September 11 attacks.

Intelligence committee staffers intended to spend yesterday, today and possibly tomorrow - when a first witness may be called - telling lawmakers what they have unearthed since beginning their probe in February, congressional aides said.

Staffers have interviewed members of the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies and reviewed thousands of pages of documents, aides said.

The House and Senate intelligence committees, with a budget of nearly $3 million to conduct its probe, are to issue their findings and recommendations in February 2003.