SEPT. 11 PROBE Focus shifts to agencies

The president said officials were not warned about an 'imminent attack.'
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is turning its spotlight on the FBI and Justice Department, with commission members seeking to determine what law enforcement officials did when confronted with the rising threat of an Al-Qaida attack.
If the FBI had information about an Al-Qaida presence in the United States and had 70 ongoing investigations, commission members want to know what actions were taken and how broadly that information was disseminated throughout the government.
"The FBI is going to have to answer the question: 'Why didn't they deliver the information up? Did they get clear instructions from the top that it should be delivered up?'" said former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the Sept. 11 commission.
Scheduled to testify
The panel was beginning a new two-day round of hearings today with testimony from former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Attorney General Janet Reno. Thomas Pickard, who served as acting FBI director in the months just before the attacks, and former CIA counterterrorism center director Cofer Black also were scheduled to testify.
Aides to Ashcroft said he wanted to rebut criticism that he was more focused on issues such as illegal drugs and gun crimes than terrorism before the attacks. They pointed to a May 9, 2001, Senate hearing in which Ashcroft testified his agency had "no higher priority" than protecting against terrorist attacks.
In an article in Monday's Wall Street Journal, Freeh said the FBI "relentlessly did its job pursuing terrorists" before the attacks but was hampered by lack of resources and political will.
Intelligence memo
The hearing follows the weekend release of a declassified Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence memo that warned Al-Qaida was operating in the United States and might be looking to hijack airplanes. The memo did not provide specific times or places for potential attacks.
President Bush, speaking Monday with reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, repeated his view that the memo -- the president's daily brief, or PDB -- was "kind of a history" of Osama bin Laden's intentions but contained no warning that "something is about to happen in America."
"There was nothing in there that said, you know, 'There is an imminent attack,'" Bush said.
Law enforcement officials say the FBI was doing all it could to identify and disrupt terrorists. For example, the FBI in 1999 made counterterrorism a separate division and created a unit to focus on bin Laden.
Freeh said it took the Sept. 11 attacks to make others see the danger posed by Al-Qaida.
"The Al-Qaida threat was the same on Sept. 10 and Sept. 12," he wrote. "Nothing focuses a government quicker than a war."
Freeh pointed out that the FBI expanded its overseas legal attach & eacute; offices from 19 to 44 during his tenure, which ended three months before the attacks, and increased the prominence of joint terrorism task forces that include personnel from other agencies.
Freeh also said that at his first meeting with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, four days after the new administration took office, they discussed terrorism, Al-Qaida and several recent overseas attacks targeting American interests.
Funding
But Freeh and Pickard, the interim FBI director in summer 2001, say there were budgetary constraints. For example, Freeh said, the FBI asked for 1,895 special agents, linguists and analysts for counterterrorism in fiscal 2000, 2001 and 2002 -- and wound up with just 76.
Still, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a letter Monday to current FBI Director Robert Mueller that total FBI spending rose some 132 percent from 1993 to 2003, with counterterrorism requests nearly always met or exceeded.
"Congress consistently granted the FBI huge amounts of money for its counterterrorism mission, often at levels more than the administration was requesting," said Grassley, a senior Judiciary Committee member and frequent FBI critic.
Questions also surround what FBI investigators were doing during the summer of 2001, when intelligence reports indicated that bin Laden's organization was plotting a major attack. Those reports culminated in the Aug. 6 memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
At the time, according to a congressional investigation into Sept. 11, the FBI's field offices had not made terrorism a top priority and there was only a single strategic analyst focused full time on Al-Qaida at FBI headquarters. Much of the FBI's attention was focused on investigating overseas attacks, such as the October 2000 strike on the USS Cole destroyer at port in Yemen.