[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 112 (Friday, July 25, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H7774-H7775]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1900
TIME FOR AN END TO THE ADMINISTRATION'S SECRECY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simpson). Under a previous order of the
House, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5
minutes.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the special congressional panel
looking into the September 11 attacks issued its report. It said the
intelligence community could have done a much better job in protecting
the American people. That truly is an understatement.
But what stands out is the fact that the Bush administration has
taken secrecy to a new unacceptable level. The administration insists
on keeping secret 28 pages of that report. It is widely believed that
these 28 pages deal with the possible involvement of foreign
governments in the 9/11 tragedy and specifically Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Speaker, the Bush administration clearly exaggerated the
immediate threat to the United States posed by the regime of Saddam
Hussein in order to justify the war in Iraq, and, indeed, I have
supported the calls for an independent commission to get to the bottom
of that deception.
The administration's credibility has been greatly damaged by the
revelations about the manipulated statements in the President's State
of the Union address. Now we have 28 pages of a report of a vitally
important study that are being kept away from the American people.
Do the American people not deserve to know the truth, whole truth,
the whole story about 9/11? Do the families of 9/11 not deserve to
know? What is the Bush administration now hiding about Saudi Arabia's
possible involvement? How can the Bush administration justify keeping
this secret from the American people?
In an editorial entitled ``Deception and Denial,'' the London-based
Financial Times this morning says the following about the Bush
administration:
``The scale of the Bush administration's official obstruction is
clear.'' And the article goes on to say `` `The Bush administration has
done everything they can do to make sure that's not the focus,' said
William Wechsler, a former White House official who coauthored a recent
report critical of the Saudi failure to cut off financing for terrorist
troops.'' The Bush administration wants `` `to talk about tactical
breakdown, but they do not want to talk about the elephant in the
room,' '' i.e., specifically Saudi Arabia. According to the Financial
Times, ``the tantalizing glimpses of the Saudi role that survived the
censor's pencil are by far the report's most potentially explosive
aspects.''
We know there were meetings between some of the hijackers and Omar
al-Bayoumi, a Saudi citizen. What does that mean in the context of 9/
11? There are reports that al-Bayoumi supplied at least some of the
hijackers with cash. Is that true? Unless the Bush administration drops
its insistence on secrecy, the American people and families of the
victims of 9/11 might never know the truth.
The Bush administration says it cannot tell the American people the
whole truth because of national security concerns. One should ask, is
it national security that the Bush administration cares about or is it
political security? Or could it be access to Saudi oil? As the
Financial Times said this morning, ``It is hard to avoid suspicion that
some of the coyness may have political origins.'' The decision to keep
this information secret adds ``a new layer of haze over its
credibility,'' says the Financial Times.
It is time for the Bush administration to tell the families and to
tell the American people what it knows about the possible involvement
of foreign governments or foreign nationals in the events of September
11, and no one should be exempt from that scrutiny. No country, no
person. It is time for an end to the Bush administration's secrecy.
[From the Financial Times, July 25, 2003]
Report Raises New Questions on Saudi Role in 9/11 Attacks
(By Marianne Brun-Rovet and Edward Alden)
Washington.--The September 11 hijackers received foreign-
government support while they were in the US plotting the
attacks on New York and Washington, the leader of a
congressional inquiry charged.
The conclusion, which is strongly hinted at in the
declassified parts of the inquiry's 900-page report released
yesterday, will raise new questions about the role of Saudi
Arabia in particular. The Bush administration insisted on
deleting a 28-page section of the report that focused on the
link to foreign governments.
Senator Bob Graham, the former Democratic intelligence
committee chairman who led the investigation, said the
hijackers ``received, during most of this time [in the US],
significant assistance from a foreign government which
further facilitated their ability to be so lethal''. He would
not identify the government.
But he charged the Bush administration with refusing to
release the information ``to protect the country or countries
. . . that were providing direct assistance to some of the
hijackers''.
The report also contains new evidence that US intelligence
agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew far
more about some of the hijackers activities than has been
revealed.
While the administration has insisted that the plot could
not have been unraveled from the information available, a
congressional official said: ``There was no smoking gun in
the sense of all the details and the specifics in one piece
of intelligence . . . But that is not the same as saying that
this attack could not have been prevented.''
Despite the deletions demanded by the administration, which
held up the report's release for nearly seven months, it
contains new evidence that indicates the Saudis may
[[Page H7775]]
have had ties to supporters of the September 11 hijackers.
It focuses on the activities of Omar al-Bayoumi, who some
in the FBI believed to be a Saudi intelligence agent, though
the Saudi government has denied the allegation.
Mr. Bayoumi played a vital role in establishing Nawaf al-
Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two of the hijackers, when they
arrived in the U.S. before the attacks. U.S. intelligence
agencies knew as early as 1999 that the two were linked with
al-Qaeda and that they had attended a CIA-monitored high-
level meeting of the terror network's operatives in Malaysia
in January 2000.
Mr. Bayoumi met the pair in Los Angeles shortly after he
was observed entering and leaving a meeting at the Saudi
consulate.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.,
said yesterday that the country was facing ``false
accusations . . . made by some for political purposes''
despite its widespread co-operation with the U.S. in the war
on terrorism. ``It is disappointing that despite everything
we are doing, outrageous charges continue.''
The report also revealed another serious U.S. intelligence
failure before the attacks, which represented ``perhaps the
intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September
11 plot''. The FBI had recruited an informant in San Diego
who met repeatedly with Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar. However,
the FBI did not act on his information because the CIA had
not told the FBI of the pair's suspected links to al-Qaeda.
The FBI agent handling the informant said ``we would have
done everything'' had the CIA revealed what it knew.
[From the Financial Times, July 25, 2003]
Deception and Denial (Part Two)--The White House's Intelligence
Problems Get Bigger
It is often the case with lengthy inquiries into government
failures that what gets left out of the final report is more
interesting than what goes in it. Politicians are not unduly
burdened by a capacity for self-criticism and if they can
hide behind spurious claims of national security to avoid
providing potentially damning evidence to hungry
investigators, you can generally guarantee that they will.
The publication yesterday of the results of the
congressional investigation into the performance of the US
intelligence services in the run-up to the September 11 2001
terrorist attacks is a case in point.
We knew already that the White House had been most
unhelpful in its dealings with the congressional
investigators, failing to make available critical material
such as presidential briefings on the scale of the al-Qaeda
threat. Now, in the form of dozens of blank pages in the 900-
page volume, the scale of official obstruction becomes clear.
Though the report still reaches some valid conclusions
about the failures of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the Central Intelligence Agency in acting on what they knew
about the hijackers, the overall effect of the
administration's behaviour is to produce more questions. Most
disturbing is the White House's unwillingness to disclose
important new information on Saudi Arabia's role in the
terrorist plot.
The long list of errors by the FBI and the CIA remains the
central finding. The fact that officials had opportunities to
track the movements of at least two of the hijackers in the
months before the attacks represents the largest single
failing and highlights flaws in intelligence co-ordination
that still need to be put right. In addition the lack of
reliable intelligence overseas prevented either the Clinton
or the Bush administration from taking preemptive action
against al-Qaeda that might have scuppered the plot.
But the tantalising glimpses of the Saudi role that
survived the censor's pencil are by far the report's most
potentially explosive aspects. Meetings between some of the
hijackers and Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi citizen, are well
documented, as are indications that he supplied them with
cash. But instead of detailed investigation of Mr. al-Bayoumi
and his alleged links to the Saudi government, there are only
blank spaces. The administration says it could not agree to
publication of this and other material for national security
reasons. That may be true. But it is hard to avoid suspicion
that some of the coyness may have political origins. The Bush
administration is already under fire for its dubious
disclosures about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Now the
White House has added a new layer of haze over its
credibility.
In the end the congressional report is not so much an
indictment of the intelligence agencies, though it clearly
highlights their faults. It is an indictment of the needless
obfuscation surrounding too much of this administration's
national security policy.
[From the Financial Times, July 25, 2002]
September 11 Investigation Undermines Bush's Claims
(By Edward Alden and Marianne Brun-Rovet)
For the past 18 months the administration of President
George W. Bush has clung firmly to the argument that, while
there were certainly intelligence failings, the September 11,
2001 attacks could not have been prevented.
The release yesterday of the declassified final report of
the congressional investigation will make that argument much
harder to sustain, and could ignite fresh controversy for an
administration already under scrutiny for manipulating
intelligence information before the war on Iraq.
The report contains few entirely new revelations about the
missed opportunities to unravel the plot of the 19 hijackers.
But the detailed evidence of how much the U.S. knew of their
movements before the attacks belies the assertion made to the
investigators last year by Robert Mueller, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation's director, that ``as far as we know, they
contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the U.S.''.
The report points out that five of the hijackers had met a
total of 14 people who had come to the FBI's attention as
part of counter-terrorism investigations.
Four of those 14 were under active FBI investigation when
the hijackers were in the U.S.
The hijackers who led the attacks were not isolated but
instead were backed by what U.S. intelligence knew to be ``a
radical Islamic network in the U.S. that could support al-
Qaeda and other terrorist operatives.''
As early as June 2001 the CIA had learned that senior al-
Qaeda planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was recruiting people
for operations in the U.S.
The report also revealed that an informant for the FBI had
numerous meetings with two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi
and Khalid al-Mihdhar, when they were living in San Diego.
But the San Diego FBI was unaware that the Central
Intelligence Agency had in 2000 identified the two men as al-
Qaeda operatives, so never acted on the information.
The FBI had also opened in 1998 a counter-terrorism
investigation of Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who co-signed the
lease on an apartment in San Diego rented by the two
hijackers, paid the first month's rent and organised a party
to welcome them into the community.
Mr. Bayoumi became the subject of attention late last year
after it was revealed that the wife of Prince Bandar, the
Saudi ambassador to the U.S., had indirectly deposited tens
of thousands of dollars into an account held by Mr. Bayoumi's
wife. The Saudis have said they had no knowledge that the
money, which was part of a charitable contribution, had ended
up in her accounts.
The report says that although Mr. Bayoumi was a student, he
``had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi
Arabia'', and at one time made a $400,000 donation to a
Kurdish mosque in San Diego. It adds: ``One of the FBI's best
sources in San Diego informed the FBI that he thought that
Mr. Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia
or another foreign power.''
The Saudi government denies the charge, saying he has no
connection to the Saudi government.
The most controversial element of the report will be what
it does not contain. At the insistence of the Bush
administration, 28 pages discussing evidence of foreign
government support for the hijackers was deleted from the
declassified version.
``The Bush administration has done everything they can do
to make sure that's not the focus,'' said William Wechsler, a
former White House official who co-authored a recent report
critical of the Saudi failure to cut off financing for
terrorist groups.
``They want to talk about tactical breakdown but they don't
want to talk about the elephant in the room.''
U.S. officials note that Saudi co-operation in counter-
terrorism investigations has improved markedly, particularly
following al-Qaeda attack's in Riyadh in May that left more
than 30 people dead. The Saudis responded angrily yesterday
that ``we cannot respond to blank pages''.
But the investigation showed that even well after the
September 11 attacks, Saudi Arabia continued to impede U.S.
efforts in areas such as shutting down financing for
terrorism.
While the congressional investigation was a
bipartisan undertaking, its conclusions will fuel a
partisan battle over whether the Bush administration has
responded fully to the lessons of September 11.
Democrats have homed in on intelligence failures, both in
the war on terrorism and before the war on Iraq, as the
vulnerable spot for an administration that has been widely
trusted by Americans on national security since the attacks.
The report challenges whether the administration has yet
made sufficient efforts to improve intelligence gathering and
sharing in response to the serious breakdowns uncovered by
the investigation.
On foreign support for terrorists, the report says ``only
recently'', and in part due to the pressure from the
congressional inquiry, had the agencies tried to determine
the extent of the problem. ``This gap in US intelligence
coverage is unacceptable, given the magnitude and immediacy
of the potential risk to US national security,'' it says.
Democratic hopefuls for the next presidential election,
including Senator Bob Graham, the former intelligence
committee chairman, are already seizing on the problems
identified by the inquiry to criticise the administration's
actions since September 11.
The controversy over what is missing in the report will
only deepen those charges. Senator Joseph Lieberman, another
Democratic candidate, said yesterday that the administration
``has, even today, failed to demand a full accounting of
intelligence failures, in order to ensure that they have been
corrected''.
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