The communication breakdown between the CIA and FBI before the 11 September attacks suggests incompetence or, worse, a sinister conspiracy. Anayat Durrani reports from Washington The United States House and Senate intelligence committees began closed-door hearings on Capitol Hill last week to investigate the pre-11 September intelligence failures that might have prevented the terrorist attacks against America taking place and more than 3,000 people losing their lives. On Tuesday, in their first session, lawmakers observed a minute of silence in remembrance of the victims of the attacks, followed by an "initial scope of inquiry." The House and Senate intelligence committees have focused their investigation on an internal FBI memo and letters that were sent from two field offices and which drew attention to clues that suspicious activities were taking place immediately before 11 September. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller testified for nearly five hours before lawmakers last Thursday in the first public hearing in the investigation into the performance of the FBI before and after 11 September. Mueller again acknowledged that the FBI mishandled information about terrorist activities prior to 11 September but emphasized that the newly reformed FBI will be "more flexible, agile and mobile" and will meet its mission of protecting the country from future attacks. Mueller took over the position of director a week before the 11 September attacks occurred. Following Mueller, Minnesota FBI agent Colleen Rowley testified for more than two hours before a Senate committee on why she believes her efforts to further investigate suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui were not taken seriously. She cited an "ever growing bureaucracy" and a "climate of fear" that discourages field agents from pursuing an investigation or questioning superiors. "We have a culture in the FBI that there's a certain pecking order; it's pretty strong and it's very rare that somebody picks up the phone and calls a rank or two above themselves," she said. The US House and Senate intelligence committees investigation centres on a 21 May memo sent by Rowley to Mueller that said FBI headquarters in Washington threw up "roadblocks" to the Minneapolis office investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, the French- born flight school student and so-called "20th hijacker." FBI headquarters hindered Rowley's request for a warrant to search Moussaoui's laptop computer. A search that later followed the 11 September attacks turned up information on jetliners and crop-dusters that led the government to temporarily ground crop-dusting planes. Moussaoui was arrested on an immigration charge weeks before the 11 September attacks and has since been charged as a conspirator. Rowley also referred to what has now become known as the "Phoenix memo" that was sent on 10 July 2001 by Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams, warning FBI headquarters of the presence of possible Al-Qa'eda agents in Arizona and other US flight schools. The Phoenix memo was sent to two task forces at FBI headquarters: the Radical Fundamentalist Unit as well as another department that focuses exclusively on Osama Bin Laden. It was largely ignored. Rowley also met last Wednesday in closed-door hearings with congressional investigators from a separate joint House-Senate inquiry. As the joint hearings continue, Senator Bob Graham (Democrat-Florida), chairman of the US Senate intelligence committee said more people have been coming forward from inside the government with new information on US intelligence failures that occurred prior to the 11 September attacks on America. "We are already getting significant numbers of people coming to us, either in person or with materials that hadn't previously been known," Graham told the CBS "Face the Nation" programme on Sunday. "I think the testimony of Ms Rowley has given encouragement to folks." The joint hearings are expected to last until the fall and are being held in secure, soundproof rooms under the Capitol dome. The hearings will not be held in open session until late June. The inquiry will focus on the events of 11 September but will also examine US counterterrorism efforts that go back to 1986. The White House has asked that the ongoing investigation of intelligence failures remain within congressional intelligence committees to prevent top-secret intelligence data from leaking out. US President George Bush said he believes there is no evidence that suggests the US government could have prevented the 11 September attacks, despite intelligence failures between the CIA and FBI. "Based on everything I've seen, I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th," Bush said. "Yet we now know thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us. And this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently." The Bush administration had considered adding the FBI to the new Department of Homeland Security but officials decided to leave it under the Justice Department since the FBI is primarily involved in law enforcement, an area not covered by the proposed Department of Homeland Security." The FBI does more than worry about terrorist attacks," Chief of Staff Andrew Card said on ABC's This Week. "And besides, we did not want to create a homeland security department that would look like the old Soviet-era... ministry of the interior. This is a homeland security department that will secure the homeland." Card said that information gathered by the FBI and the CIA would be shared with the department, which would serve as a clearing house to analyse information received by both agencies. Meanwhile, an officer in the US Air Force has learned that insulting the president can cost one his career. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Butler said the president knew about the 11 September attacks on America but failed to warn Americans "because he needed this war on terrorism." In a letter to California's Monterey County Herald dated 26 May, Butler described President Bush as a "joke." Butler wrote, "His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama, his presidency was going nowhere -- this guy is a joke." The letter also said that Bush "wasn't elected by the American people," and that the president used the war on terror to gain high marks among the American people. "He wasn't elected by the American people but placed into the Oval Office by the conservative Supreme Court... the economy was sliding into the usual Republican pits and he needed something to hang his presidency on." After serving 24 years in the Air Force, Butler was suspended under a law that dates back to the American War of Independence and bans "contemptuous words" from being used by military officers against the president or other elected officials. The offence is punishable by court martial. Butler served as vice-chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
