The Hindu : There was rift between FBI, CIA: Bush

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jun 06, 2002

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There was rift between FBI, CIA: Bush

Washington June 5. Secret Congressional hearings opened on Tuesday into intelligence failures before September 11, with the FBI and CIA each determined to shift the blame.

The President, George W Bush, acknowledged for the first time that there had been a breakdown between the two agencies. "In terms of whether or not the FBI and the CIA were communicating properly, I think it is clear that they weren't," he said.

"We have addressed that issue. The CIA and the FBI are now in close communication." He added: "I have seen no evidence to date that said this country could have prevented the attack."

But a consensus has emerged on Capitol Hill that the U.S. intelligence community probably had enough information to be able to prevent the September 11 attacks.

"If they had acted on the information they had and followed through, maybe things would be different," said Senator Richard Shelby, senior Republican on the Senate intelligence committee.

"There were massive intelligence failures. It's a question now of what we do about it."

But an unseemly series of leaks and counter-leaks has suggested that the two main intelligence agencies are more preoccupied with pointing the finger at one another than learning how to prevent another Al-Qaeda attack. More than 350,000 documents have been turned over by the CIA for hearings that began in secure, soundproofed rooms before 37 members of the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees.

The staff members of the Congressional committees, many of whom are former CIA or FBI agents, have already examined 30,000 documents and interviewed 200 people connected to September 11.

Both Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, which operates domestically, and George Tenet, head of the CIA, which operates abroad, are likely to face angry questioning from Senators and Congressmen.

One of the star witnesses will be Coleen Rowley, a Minneapolis FBI agent and legal adviser who has sought protection from a federal whistleblower statute to protect her job. —

Osama's key man named

AP reports:

Investigators believe they have identified a Kuwaiti lieutenant of Osama bin Laden as the likely mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, designated one of the FBI's most-wanted terrorists, is at large in Afghanistan or nearby, the law enforcement official told The Associated Press. U.S. investigators believe Mohammed planned many aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks, turning Osama's calls for dead Americans into reality.

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