WASHINGTON - As Congress began its inquiry yesterday into intelligence failures that might have left the nation vulnerable to terrorists, President Bush said there was no evidence that the available information could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a visit to the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Bush acknowledged that the CIA and FBI failed to adequately share their intelligence findings before Sept. 11. But he said he was not convinced that closer collaboration would have uncovered the plot.
"In terms of whether or not the FBI and the CIA were communicating properly, I think it is clear that they weren't," Bush said. Even so, he added, "I've seen no evidence today that said this country could have prevented the attack.
The president spoke shortly before the House and Senate intelligence committees met privately in a soundproof room in the Capitol to begin planning what is likely to be a months-long investigation. It is an inquiry that some have likened to Congress' 1944 investigation into how the United States failed to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The committee members will review the events that preceded the attacks and will look into what changes can be made to avoid future terrorist acts. Open hearings are to begin June 25.
"We're off and running with momentum," Rep. Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said after what he called a three-hour "business meeting" of the joint panel.
"This is going to be a fact-driven, witness-driven inquiry."
The FBI and the CIA have been pointing fingers at each other, with officials of each agency blaming the other for failing to pass along or properly act on information related to the suspected al-Qaida members who later hijacked the planes used in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Lawmakers of both parties condemned the defensive maneuvering by the agencies as counterproductive and potentially harmful.
"This war of words hasn't enhanced the standing of either agency in the public's mind," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican.
The president, whose visit to the NSA was intended to boost morale at the intelligence agencies at a time of heated criticism, said he wasn't as concerned about the interagency sniping as he was about the prospect of multiple investigations of the intelligence failures.
Bush dismissed the "finger-pointing" as the product of mid-level staffers "trying to protect their hide. That's just typical Washington, D.C."
The president said he was troubled, though, by the possibility that other congressional committees, in addition to the intelligence panels, would hold their own, overlapping inquiries.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow to air charges by Coleen Rowley, a veteran FBI agent and counsel in the Minneapolis office. Rowley wrote a scathing memo that accused senior FBI officials of repeatedly blocking her office's efforts last summer to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, suspected of being the would-be 20th hijacker. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is to testify at the same public session.
Bush reaffirmed his opposition to calls for an independent commission to conduct a broader investigation of U.S. policy decisions that might have contributed to the failure to prevent the attacks.
"I want the Congress to investigate, but I want a committee to investigate, not multiple committees to investigate," he said. "I don't want to tie up our team when we're trying to fight this war on terror. I don't want our people to be distracted."
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, dismissed Bush's concerns as an excuse to resist an aggressive inquiry by an independent commission.
"If the FBI can spend resources investigating whether there's prostitution in New Orleans, they ought to be able to find the resources to investigate what happened in this country prior to 9/11," Daschle said, referring to a controversial investigation of crime usually prosecuted by local authorities.
It wasn't clear, though, whether Daschle had enough support from fellow Democrats to win Senate approval for the creation of an outside panel.
"We just had a lengthy discussion about it," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. "There were many points of view expressed. ... We still don't know exactly where we stand."
In any case, Durbin said, "it's not likely the House is going to go along with it, because the White House clearly is opposed to it. That means whatever we do is likely to be just an effort that may not result in anything."
Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who supports an independent investigation, predicted that pressure for an outside inquiry would grow as more is revealed about intelligence and policy failures that Congress should have detected in its oversight role.
"Sooner or later, there will be a commission," McCain said.
Among the fresh revelations yesterday was a report in The Washington Post suggesting that both the CIA and FBI knew by January 2000 that Khalid al-Midhar, one of the eventual hijackers, attended a meeting of suspected al-Qaida members and carried a suspicious visa.
The report conflicted with previous FBI statements that it knew nothing about al-Midhar until the CIA warned it in August 2001 to try to block him from entering the country. But he had already slipped into the United States.
The incident fit into an emerging pattern of ignored tips and missed clues that pointed to terrorists' plans to mount a major attack in the United States.
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt told The New York Times in remarks published yesterday that Egyptian intelligence agents warned U.S. officials about a week before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida had developed plans for an assault on an unspecified American target.
At their opening session yesterday, the 37 lawmakers on the joint intelligence committees agreed to begin their inquiry by reviewing the initial U.S. response to the threat of international terrorism nearly two decades ago. They also plan to examine the ways in which the intelligence agencies have responded to their lapses and whether the response is adequate to prevent future attacks.
"We need to be aggressive and rigorous in this inquiry, asking the right questions, like who knew what, and if they didn't know it, why?" said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "And what did they do with the information they had, and how we can prevent, detect, derail and disrupt any other future attacks on the United States of America?
"This is going to be a big job, and a hard job," Mikulski added. "But I believe everyone on the committee is enormously conscientious and ready to go forward."