[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 67 (Wednesday, May 22, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H2926-H2929]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            INDEPENDENT COMMISSION NEEDED TO DETERMINE FACTS

  (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and 
include extraneous material.)
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, evidence continues to 
mount that we suffered a major, major failure of intelligence prior to 
September 11.
  Our colleague, Senator John McCain, writes in this morning's 
Washington Post that asking and urging and demanding answers by various 
agencies, the Federal Government failing to understand the enormity of 
the danger facing the United States is an obligation shared by all 
elected officials.
  We were told in Newsweek earlier this week that even after the 
President asked, What is going on here, his intelligence advisors were 
unable to tease out the facts or decipher the information.
  Mr. Speaker, that is why we need an independent commission. We need 
an independent commission to determine the facts.

[[Page H2927]]

  Senator McCain goes on to say, ``It is hardly a surprise that in a 
lively democracy, the partisan and institutional loyalties will 
influence both sides of an honest debate challenging and confronting 
Federal Government.'' That is all the more reason to consider 
impounding an independent commission of trustworthy and experienced 
statesmen who are not entirely devoid of partisan loyalties.
  George Will, the columnist, then goes on to suggest such Americans as 
George Schultz, Sam Nunn, Bob Graham, Dick Lugar, Senator Danforth and 
others who can make up that commission. We owe it to this Nation. We 
owe it to the families of the victims of September 11.

                       [From the Washington Post]

                              The Way out

                          (By George F. Will)

       ``The best way out is always through.''--Robert Frost.
       The Bush administration is in a quandary which is, as 
     Washington quandaries so often are, partly self-inflicted. 
     There is only one way out of the growing--tardily growing; by 
     no means grown too large--controversy about investigating 
     intelligence inadequacies prior to Sept. 11. The way out for 
     the administration is to go through an investigation, and not 
     one conducted by itself.
       Eleven days. That is how long it took President Roosevelt 
     after Pearl Harbor to appoint a blue-ribbon commission, 
     headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, to examine what 
     was known, and what should have been, prior to Dec. 7, 1941.
       More than 250 days have passed since Sept. 11. Last week, 
     one of the most dispirting in recent Washington history, the 
     administration seemed surly and defensive regarding the 
     inevitably rising tide of questions about governmental 
     intelligence operations before the terrorist attacks.
       Understandably, the administration was provoked by some 
     Democrats' crassness in casting their questions in Watergate-
     era cadences--what did the president know and when did he 
     know it? Actually, a blue-ribbon commission, concerning 
     itself with all three branches of government, almost 
     certainly would vindicate President Bush, who, after all, 
     initiated the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing on the threat of al 
     Qaeda operations in the United States.
       The commission also would find that Congress has already 
     begun correcting some problems--for example, belatedly 
     funding modernization of FBI computers, more than 13,000 of 
     which were too old to be compatible with crucial software 
     last year. Given the rapid multiplication of new means of 
     communication, from cell phones to the Internet, the 
     commission should recommend revisions of the Foreign 
     Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in 1978. The commission 
     should evaluate judicial standards of probable cause when law 
     enforcement agencies seek wiretaps, access to computer hard 
     drives and bank records, and other forms of surveillance 
     covered by Fourth Amendment privacy protections.
       The commission should be balanced between Republicans and 
     Democrats but should have an even number of members to 
     underscore the assumption that its proceedings are not 
     expected to be internally adversarial, producing party-line 
     votes and requiring a tie-breaker. A commission of sufficient 
     prestige can perhaps impart to its recommendations momentum 
     that will overwhelm the institutional rivalries that can make 
     national security a hostage to jurisdictional jealousies. So 
     the co-chairman of the commission should be former secretary 
     of state George Shultz and former senator Sam Nunn, the 
     Georgia Democrat.
       Shultz, who also was secretary of labor and of Treasury and 
     was the first head of the Office of Management and Budget, 
     has had more highlevel government experience than perhaps any 
     American in history. And his memoir of his 6\1/2\ years 
     running President Reagan's State Department, ``Turmoil and 
     Triumph,'' contains this laconic sentence: ``Our knowledge of 
     the Kremlin was thin, and the CIA, I found, was usually wrong 
     about it.'' Nunn has a long-standing interest in a matter of 
     increasing urgency: Russia's surplus nuclear weapons.
       Sens. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat, and Richard Lugar, 
     the Indiana Republican, with considerable experience on the 
     Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees respectively, 
     can represent the legislative branch. Former senator Jack 
     Danforth, the Missouri Republican, having conducted the 
     investigation of the 1993 Waco disaster, understands 
     investigating government misadventures. Former representative 
     Lee Hamilton, the Indiana Democrat, served on the 
     International Relations Committee for 34 years. Prof. Donald 
     Kagan of Yale, author of ``On the Origins of War,'' would 
     bring a historian's understanding to the challenge of making 
     retrospective judgments about events viewed through the lens 
     of present knowledge. The eight and final member of the 
     commission could be former senator Pat Moynihan. He was vice 
     chairman of the Intelligence Committee--and in 1984 he 
     resigned from it until CIA Director William Casey apologized 
     for not informing the committee of CIA involvement in mining 
     Nicaraguan harbors.
       In his book ``Secrecy: The American Experience,'' Moynihan 
     says it is an iron law of institutions that the ration of 
     unnecessary to necessary secrecy increases--including secrecy 
     maintained by one part of the government against other parts. 
     President Truman could have used the proof contained in 
     intercepted messages between the Soviet Union and its agents 
     in America, of espionage by Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs--
     but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept it from 
     him.
       Secrecy renders societies susceptible to epidemics of 
     suspicion. A blue-ribbon commission would be immunization 
     against such an epidemic and preventive medicine against 
     future failures. The administration and the nation need to go 
     through it.
                                  ____


                       [From the Washington Post]

                            (By John McCain)

                         Probe Deep, and Fairly

       President Bush is a patriot. He responded forcefully to the 
     terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. And had he known that enemies 
     of the United States were planning to seize four passenger 
     aircraft and crash them into American buildings, I'm sure he 
     would have done everything in his power to stop them. We can 
     also safely assume that Vice President Cheney is a patriot, 
     and a watchful guardian of our national security. That said, 
     the government of the United States, which they now have the 
     privilege of leading, failed the American people in the 
     weeks, months and years leading up to Sept. 11.
       The Sept. 11 attacks were incredibly depraved but not, as 
     it turns out, unimaginable. As early as 1995, an accomplice 
     of Ramiz Yousef revealed that the mastermind behind the 1993 
     World Trade Center attack intended to plant bombs on 12 U.S.-
     bound airliners and crash a light plane packed with 
     explosives into CIA headquarters. The accomplice had trained 
     as a pilot at three separate U.S. flight schools. In 1999 the 
     Library of Congress prepared a report for the National 
     Intelligence Council warning that al Qaeda suicide bombers 
     ``could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives'' 
     into the Pentagon, CIA or the White House.
       Last July Kenneth Williams, an FBI field agent in Phoenix, 
     suspected that terrorists had enrolled in an Arizona pilot 
     training school. He urged the bureau to begin investigating 
     whether other U.S. flight schools might be training 
     terrorists to fly. A month later, FBI agents in Minnesota 
     arrested flight school student Zacarias Moussaoui, whose lack 
     of interest in learning how to land an aircraft had aroused 
     the suspicions of his instructors, who dutifully alerted the 
     FBI. It is uncertain how far up the chain of command 
     suspicious about Moussaoui's intentions traveled. A week 
     before Sept. 11, the FBI did notify the FAA of Moussaoui's 
     arrest, his terrorist connections, and his interest in flying 
     large commercial aircraft. The FAA chose not to share this 
     rather pertinent information with the airlines.
       Throughout last summer, CIA analysts were increasingly 
     anxious that Osama bin Laden's operatives were planning 
     imminent terrorist attacks against the United States and 
     possibly planning to hijack planes in this country. The 
     agency shared its concern with the president in August. 
     Apparently no one from either the CIA or the FBI shared with 
     the president information that terrorists might intend to use 
     hijacked planes to destroy civilian and government targets.
       Nor did the FBI and CIA make much of a habit of sharing 
     information with each other. Had they done so, one presumes 
     the President's Daily Briefing on Aug. 6 would have included 
     a suspicion that the hijackers might have something much more 
     atrocious than ransom demands on their agenda.
       As administration officials have observed, the president is 
     not expected to work as an intelligence case officer. It is 
     not his job to drag from different agencies various bits of 
     information, murky clues and suspicions that, considered 
     together, begin to reveal the dimensions of a clear and 
     present danger. But it is the responsibility of officials who 
     serve at his pleasure.
       Asking for, urging and demanding answers for why various 
     agencies of the federal government failed to understand the 
     enormity of the danger facing the United States is an 
     obligation shared by all elected federal officials. As is the 
     responsibility for understanding why and how the previous 
     administration failed to combat the growing menace of 
     international terrorism more effectively. As is 
     responsibility for questioning Congress's inability or 
     unwillingness to exercise more diligently its oversight 
     responsibilities for these agencies. As is the expectation 
     that officials who did not competently discharge their 
     responsibilities be held accountable.
       It's hardly a surprise in a lively democracy that partisan 
     and institutional loyalties will influence both sides of an 
     honest debate on the most critical challenge confronting the 
     federal government. The administration's critics and its 
     defenders suspect each other of motives less civic-minded 
     than an honest search for answers, impairing our own and the 
     public's ability to arrive at fair conclusions about what 
     went wrong and how to repair it.
       This is all the more reason to consider empaneling an 
     independent commission of trust-worthy, experienced statesmen 
     who, if not entirely devoid of partisan loyalties, are 
     sufficiently removed by time and wisdom from the appeal of 
     such loyalties to know when they conflict with the national 
     interest.

[[Page H2928]]

       Give them complete access to all intelligence reports and 
     internal documents with arguable relevance to their inquiry, 
     and charge them with rendering a judgment about who failed 
     and why in this administration and its predecessors, as well 
     as in Congress, and with recommending appropriate remedies to 
     guard against a recurrence.
       An independent inquiry will not impose a serious burden on 
     the administration as it prosecutes our just war against 
     terrorism, any more than a similar inquiry after Pearl Harbor 
     impeded Franklin D. Roosevelt's prosecution of World War II. 
     Nor should it prevent members of Congress, the press or any 
     American citizen from questioning or criticizing the 
     government's apparent failures before and after President 
     Bush's inauguration. All wars and national security failures 
     have occasioned contemporaneous criticism, and the Republic 
     has managed to thrive.
       It is irresponsible in a time of war, or any time for that 
     matter, to attack or defend unthinkingly or because partisan 
     identification is one's supreme interest. But it is not 
     responsible or right to shrink from offering thoughtful 
     criticism when and to whom it is due, and when the 
     consequences of incompletely understanding failures of 
     governance are potentially catastrophic. On the contrary, 
     such timidity is indefensibly irresponsible especially in 
     times of war, so irresponsible that it verges on the 
     unpatriotic.

                     [From Newsweek, May 27, 2002]

                            What Went Wrong

                 (By Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff)

       Forget James Bond. Intelligence gathering is more like 
     taking a metal detector to the city dump. So much comes in, 
     rumor, hearsay, disinformation, so little of it more than 
     trash: once in a blue moon an agent-prospector may get lucky. 
     But even then an agent's warning is likely to be dismissed as 
     what Condoleezza Rice last week called ``chatter.'' ``There's 
     always TMI--too much information,'' says former CIA agent 
     Milt Bearden. Often agents poke fun at the sometimes 
     obsessive quirks of their colleagues. ``If a confidential 
     memorandum comes from a guy out in, say, Phoenix, the first 
     thing that goes up the line is, `That's Harry again. He's 
     like a broken clock twice a day','' one ex-agent says. Even 
     today, long after 9-11, streams of new threats pass unnoticed 
     through Washington. In recent weeks, for instance, the FBI 
     has gotten specific threats about a car- or truck-bomb attack 
     on an ``all-glass'' building near the U.S. Capitol, and 
     another threat against a Celebrity cruise ship off Florida. 
     Neither was corroborated, or publicized.
       Yet every now and then, amid the piles of dross, a nugget 
     of pure gold turns up in intel files. The key for American 
     national security--now and into the future--is to know it 
     when we see it. Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team 
     hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven 
     supervisor in the FBI's Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing 
     an investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July 
     when a member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old 
     counterterrorism agent named Kenneth Williams, noticed 
     something odd: a large number of suspects were signing up to 
     take courses in how to fly airplanes. The agent's suspicions 
     were further fueled when he heard that some of the men at the 
     local Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University were asking a lot 
     of questions about airport security.
       Kurtz, who had previously worked on the Osama bin Laden 
     unit of the FBI's international terrorism section, was 
     convinced he and his colleagues might have stumbled on to 
     something bigger. Kurtz's team fired off a lengthy memo 
     raising the possibility that bin Laden might be using U.S. 
     flight schools to infiltrate the country's civil-aviation 
     system. ``He thinks of everything in terms of bin Laden,'' 
     one colleague recalled. The memo outlined a proposal for the 
     FBI to monitor ``civil aviation colleges/universities around 
     the country.''
       Williams, the agent who sniffed out the link, was described 
     by one former colleague as a ``superstar,'' a former SWAT 
     sniper and family man who coaches Little League and, in 1995, 
     helped track down Michael Fortier, Timothy McVeigh's former 
     Army buddy. ``Anything he says you can take to the bank,'' 
     says former agent Ron Myers.
       But little of that seemed to make a difference back in 
     Washington, where the Kurtz team suffered a fate even worse 
     than Cassandra's: not only were they not believed, they were 
     ignored altogether. The FBI was concerned about racial 
     profiling. Moreover, it wasn't used to gather intelligence, 
     especially domestically, given American sensitivities about 
     intrusive government and civil liberties. Its intelligence-
     assessment system was almost laughably antiquated. And under 
     Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being 
     prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent 
     crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become 
     a priority of the Clintonites (not that they did a better job 
     of nailing bin Laden), seemed to be getting less attention. 
     When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more 
     counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as 
     Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet 
     for his own security reasons.
       The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-
     emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at 
     the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected 
     not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin 
     Laden, among other actions. In self-absorbed Washington, the 
     Phoenix memo, which never resulted in arrests, landed in two 
     units at FBI headquarters but didn't make it to senior 
     levels. Nor did the memo get transmitted to the CIA, which 
     has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI--and 
     whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton 
     holdovers, was issuing so many warnings that bin Laden was 
     ``the most immediate'' threat to Americans he was hardly 
     heeded any longer.
       Last week the tale of the missed signal from Phoenix 
     became, for thousands of families of 9-11 victims, yet 
     another tendril of pain stemming from that day. Indeed, it 
     was part of a whole summer of missed clues that, taken 
     together, seemed to presage the terrible September of 2001. 
     The same week in early July that Kurtz and his team were 
     dispatching their memo, the White House acknowledge for the 
     first time, Bush was privately beginning to worry about the 
     stream of terror warnings he was hearing that summer, most of 
     them aimed at U.S. targets abroad. On July 5, five days 
     before the Phoenix memo, Bush directed Rice to figure out 
     what was going on domestically. A month later, America 
     learned for the first time last week--nine months after the 
     attacks--Bush received a ``presidential daily brief'' in 
     Crawford, Texas, that mentioned the possibility of an airline 
     hijacking as a domestic threat. The Aug. 6 briefing was only 
     ``an analytic report that talked about [bin Laden's] methods 
     of operation, talked about what he had done historically,'' 
     rice said in a hastily called conference to contain the 
     damage from the news.
       Because Bush has long insisted he had no inkling of the 
     attacks, the disclosures touched off a media stampede in a 
     capital long deprived of scandal. The fact that the nation's 
     popular war president might have been warned a little over a 
     month before September 11--and that the supposedly straight-
     talking Bushies hadn't told anyone about it--opened up a 
     serious credibility gap for the first time in the war on 
     terror.
       There were, in fact, failures at every level that summer: 
     from the shortcomings in the law-enforcement trenches--the 
     FBI's poor record at domestic surveillance, the CIA's poor 
     record at infiltrating Islamic groups and the lack of 
     cooperation between the two agencies--to the fixed strategic 
     mind-set of the Bush administration. Between the claims by 
     the FBI and CIA that they did't get enough information and 
     the White House's insistence that it didn't receive any 
     reports--``He doesn't recall seeing anything,'' Rice said 
     when asked if Bush had read the Phoenix memo--the buck seems 
     to be stopping nowhere. ``If I were an average citizen, I'd 
     be pissed at the whole American government,'' says a senior 
     official who has worked on counterterrorism.
       The question is not so much what the president knew and 
     when he knew it. The question is whether the administration 
     was really paying much attention. Terrorism is by nature 
     stealthy and hard to crack, even in the face of the most 
     zealous efforts to thwart it. What Americans should be asking 
     is why the Bush administration in its first eight months, 
     like the Clinton admiration for much of its eight years, did 
     not demand the intelligence cooperation that was needed. At 
     issue is not whom to blame for the past, but how to learn 
     from it to safeguard our future.
       The fact is, in a nation that prices itself on its mastery 
     of the Information Age, almost no one in the U.S. government 
     seemed to know what anyone else was doing. Even as what Rice 
     called ``major threat spikes'' began to appear on 
     Washington's . . .
       In any case, few Americans seem to be in the mood any 
     longer for more-of-the-same from Washington. September 11 has 
     often been compared to Pearl Harbor as a fault line between a 
     complacent and war-ready America. And, like Pearl Harbor, 
     questions about whether it could have been prevented will 
     forever haunt us. To give the Bush administration some 
     credit, no government in modern history has every predicted a 
     major surprise attack. Britain and France missed the 
     Blitzkrieg in 1940. The Germans missed D-Day in June 1944. 
     And everyone missed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
       Even so, it's too simple to say that post-mortems now are 
     somehow unfair or unpatriotic in ``wartime America.'' The 
     latest revelations could open up a Pandora's box of questions 
     about the administration's pre-9-11 performance on terror--
     questions with complicated and interesting roots.
       By the end of the Clinton administration, the then 
     national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become ``totally 
     preoccupied'' with fears of a domestic terror attack, a 
     colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act 
     decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain 
     of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave 
     Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat 
     in detail, and, sources say, warned her: ``You will be 
     spending more time on this issue then on any other.'' Rice 
     was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategy 
     review. But the effort was marginalized and scarcely 
     mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed 
     itself to other priorities, like national missile defense 
     (NMD) and Iraq.
       John Ashcroft seemed particularly eager to set a new 
     agenda. In the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an 
     extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis 
     Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents in charge in 
     Quantico, Va. The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft 
     laid out his priorities for Freeh, another Clinton holdover 
     (though no friend of the ex-president's),

[[Page H2929]]

     ``basically violent crime and drugs,'' recalls one 
     participant. Freeh replied bluntly that those were not his 
     priorities, and began to talk about terror and 
     counterterrorism. ``Ashcroft didn't want to hear about it,'' 
     says a former senior law-enforcement official. (A Justice 
     Department spokeswoman hotly disputed this, saying that in 
     May Ashcroft told a Senate committee terrorism was his 
     ``highest priority.'')
       That was unfortunate, because Freeh, despite his late-
     tenure interest in global terrorism, had left behind an FBI 
     that badly needed fixing, especially its antiquated evidence-
     gathering methods. So fouled up is the FBI's communications 
     system that it is almost impossible for agents to send 
     classified e-mails to another agency like the CIA; the effect 
     is that little is shared.
       It wasn't that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about 
     these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an 
     ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, 
     Secretary Paul O'Neill's team wanted to roll back almost all 
     forms of government intervention, including laws against 
     money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror 
     groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the 
     military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a 
     request to divert $800 million from missile defense into 
     counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested 
     in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the 
     Clinton administration: the CIA's Predator surveillance 
     plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the 
     possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with 
     Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But 
     through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable 
     intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush 
     administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill 
     sources say DOD didn't want the CIA treading on its turf.
       And while most of the current controversy is about what 
     America didn't do defensively, Rumsfeld and Bush didn't take 
     the offensive, either. Upon entering office, both suggested 
     publicly that the Clinton administration left America with a 
     weak image abroad. The day after the Oct. 12, * * *

                          ____________________