- WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The
head of the CIA never informed a vacationing President Bush in August 2001
that a suspected Islamic extremist had been detected taking flight lessons,
the panel investigating the Sept. 11 jetliner attacks on New York and Washington
heard on Wednesday.
-
- As several commission members criticized what they called
a complete intelligence failure ahead of the attacks, in which nearly 3,000
people were killed, CIA Director George Tenet also said it would take another
five years to bring U.S. spying capabilities to the level the country needs.
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- Commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman,
asked Tenet if he had ever mentioned to Bush the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui
in mid-August 2001 after he had been detected behaving suspiciously in
a Minnesota flight school.
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- Tenet said he had not spoken to the president that month,
when Bush was staying at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, nor did he bring
it to the attention of other senior officials, saying simply it did not
fit the agenda.
-
- "He's in Texas and I'm either here or on leave for
some of that time," he said. "In this time period, I'm not talking
to him, no."
-
- But a CIA spokesman later said that Tenet had flown to
Texas to brief Bush on Aug. 17 and resumed regular briefings on Aug. 31
after the president returned to the White House. Tenet said he was briefed
about Moussaoui on Aug. 23 or 24.
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- The briefing to Tenet and other top CIA officials was
titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly," a commission report
said.
-
- A CIA briefer was with the president during his time
in Texas and gave him the now-famous Aug. 6 report, "Bin Laden Determined
to Strike in US."
-
- The CIA director did not bring up the Moussaoui case
at a meeting of top administration officials to discuss Osama bin Laden's
al Qaeda organization on Sept. 4, a week before the attacks.
-
- Tenet said they were discussing the Predator unmanned
aircraft. "All I can tell you is just it wasn't the appropriate place.
I just can't take you any farther than that."
-
- A commission report on Tuesday said Tenet had told the
panel no connection between Moussaoui and al Qaeda was apparent before
the Sept. 11 attacks.
-
- Moussaoui, originally detained for immigration violations,
was later charged with conspiracy in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks,
and faces a possible death penalty if convicted.
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- He is often cited as a key missed clue for unraveling
the plot because he was in custody before the attack.
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- 'PROBLEM OF WARNING'
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- A commission staff report issued at the start of the
day's hearings said the United States had developed defenses against surprise
military strikes after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but never applied
them to potential terrorist threats.
-
- "With the important exception of attacks with chemical,
biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, the methods developed for
decades to warn of surprise attacks were not applied to the problem of
warning against terrorist attacks," the report said.
-
- Republican commissioner John Lehman called the staff
report a "damning evaluation of a system that is broken." Other
commission members called for an intelligence "revolution."
-
- But Tenet said the report was wrong to state he had no
strategic plan to manage the war on terrorism or to integrate and share
data across the intelligence community.
-
- However, he did acknowledge that his and other agencies
failed to devise an effective defense against bin Laden's al Qaeda operatives
in 2001.
-
- "We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike
the homeland. We never translated this knowledge into an effective defense
of the country," Tenet said. "No matter how hard we worked, or
how desperately we tried, it was not enough. The victims and the families
of 9/11 deserved better."
-
- The bipartisan commission, which is due to report to
the nation in July at the height of the presidential campaign, has issued
a series of highly critical reports on what it sees as a succession of
failures leading up to the attack.
-
- A second staff statement issued on Wednesday said that
despite efforts to overhaul the system since Sept. 11, "it is clear
that gaps in intelligence sharing still exist ... We found there is no
national strategy for sharing information to counter terrorism."
-
- U.S. officials insist there was no single piece of information
that would have revealed the plot in time to stop it. But the commission
staff report said the CIA failed to foresee or analyze how a hijacked aircraft
or other explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon.
-
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