Tenet: Vacationing Bush Not Told of 9/11 'Clue'

The intelligence community needs to be reformed.

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Wed Apr 14, 2004 02:33 PM ET

By Tabassum Zakaria

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 of restructuring to bring U.S. intelligence to the level the country needs.

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.

Tenet said he had not spoken to the president at all 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 it was "not appropriate."

"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."

After Moussaoui's arrest, Tenet and other top CIA officials received a briefing headed, "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

But the CIA director did not bring it up at a meeting of top administration officials to discuss Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization on Sept. 4, a week before the attacks.

"It wasn't discussed at the principals' meeting since we were having a separate agenda," Tenet said. "All I can tell you is just it wasn't the appropriate place. I just can't take you any farther than that."

Moussaoui, who was 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.

A commission staff report issued at the start of the day's hearings on the attacks 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.

TOUGH QUESTIONS

Tenet came under tough questioning, with Republican commissioner John Lehman calling the staff report a "damning evaluation of a system that is broken." Other commission members spoke of the need 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.

"It will take us another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs."

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."

Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey said he had heard a long string of excuses from current and former senior policymakers, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

He disclosed that the CIA knew by 1996 that bin Laden operatives had shot down a Black Hawk helicopter over Mogadishu in 1993 in a battle in which 18 U.S. troops were killed.

The earlier staff report said there were many reports on bin Laden and his growing al Qaeda network during the 1990s, but no comprehensive estimate of the organization was ever compiled by the intelligence agencies,

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.