WASHINGTON, May 17: Democrats in the US Congress are demanding an investigation into whether intelligence warnings prior to September’s suicide attacks were properly handled as Republicans accused them of playing politics.
“We need an inquiry, we need to know what information was given to the White House and what they did with it,” House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt said.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle urged President George W. Bush to turn over by Friday all intelligence information to a congressional investigation that might have warned of the September 11 attacks that killed around 3,000.
“A pattern was developing” of documents warning of terrorist actions filed by various branches of the US intelligence community, some of which are only recently coming to light, Senator Richard Durbin said.
Durbin cited a July 10 Federal Bureau of Investigation memo on terrorists linked with Osama bin Laden training as pilots on US soil as one of three issues that concerned him.
The other two were a July 26 report that the US attorney general had been warned by the FBI not to use commercial flights, and the arrest in mid-August of terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui after flight school staff alerted authorities he wanted to learn to steer a plane but not to take off or land.
“All three point to concerns of domestic commercial aviation,” Durbin told the Joint Bipartisan Intelligence Committee.
Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham said if that information had been connected to other intelligence warnings on terrorist hijackings, someone might have “seen a pattern that would have led a person to call the (Federal Aviation Administration) and say we’re getting significant credible information of a possible hijacking.”
“Then the FAA would have alerted airlines who would have then ratcheted up security,” he said. “We have a lot of information coming, but it’s not going to the same source for analysis.”
As the White House sought to calm the gathering storm, Republican leaders accused Democrats of playing politics.
“There is nothing more despicable — and despicable is a tame word — in American politics than for anyone to insinuate that the president of the United States knew that an attack on our country was imminent and did nothing to stop it,” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott said.
“It’s sad that crass political cynicism is fuelling today’s cruel and divisive attacks intended to undermine America’s resolve to stamp out the evil of terrorism.”
A Senate Republican aide said on condition of anonymity that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s leaders, Republican Richard Shelby and Democrat Graham, actually had received intelligence information, without specifying what.
“No one outside of the White House has seen the early August document that allegedly describes hijacking and other threats,” Graham said.
However, he cautioned against assigning blame to those who were not trained to discern levels of threat.
“No one should expect the president or members of Congress to go put on their James Bond uniforms and become (intelligence) case officers,” he said.
An intelligence report August 6 stating that al Qaeda might use hijackings was considered to mean hijacking “in the traditional sense,” national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said.
“There was nothing that said this is going to happen or this might happen. It said this is a method that these people might be considering,” she said.
Officials declined to pass the information on to the general public because it was so general, she said.
And they assumed the reference was to “traditional” hijacking techniques in which terrorists take over a plane, threaten passengers and demand the release of their operatives.
“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an aeroplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon,” she said.
“Hijacking before 9-11 and after 9-11 do mean two very very different things.”
Durbin called for the administration to release a memorandum sent by the FBI’s Phoenix, Arizona, office asking for an investigation into the unusually high number of Middle Eastern men enrolled in pilot training courses.
“Unless and until they do so, the American people won’t see firsthand what the FBI should have seen,” he said.
Senator Robert Torricelli also dismissed the White House’s defence.
“I don’t doubt the information was not specific. It is the confluence of information that is now raising questions,” he said. “We would hope somebody was putting it all together.”
IRRESPONSIBLE: Vice President Dick Cheney said Democratic criticism was irresponsible at a time when a more devastating act of terror could be in the works.
The White House said intelligence given President George W. Bush in August about a possible hijack plot was too general to act upon. “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an aeroplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon,” Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said.
Bush told Republicans in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill that “there is a sniff of politics in the air” in the fact Democrats were attacking him on the issue, sources familiar with his remarks said.—AFP/Reuters