FBI must explain 70 probes before 9/11-panelists

The FBI this week will be pressed to explain why 70 separate investigations did not uncover the September 11 hijacked airliner plot, members of the commission investigating the attacks said yesterday.

Former US Senator Slade Gorton, seizing on the revelation that so many probes were under way weeks before the deadly attacks, also said former President Bill Clinton told the panel he was frustrated by his inability to give the FBI direct orders.

"The greatest surprise to me was that President Clinton said how limited the White House is in dealing with the FBI," Senator Gorton, a Republican member of the bipartisan commission, told "Fox News Sunday."

"You know, after all of the scandals of J. Edgar Hoover and some in the Nixon years, the White House has felt that it couldn't give direct directions to the FBI and I think that was a great inhibiting factor."

The secretive and autocratic Hoover ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, during which time agents routinely spied on political protesters and others. Nixon resigned from the US presidency in 1974 after the Watergate break-in.

Mr Clinton testified behind closed doors to the national commission on Thursday, following public testimony from Condoleezza Rice, US President George W. Bush's national security adviser.

After Ms Rice's testimony, the White House released a secret briefing for Bush that showed he was told a month before September 11, 2001, that al Qaeda members were in the United States and the FBI had detected suspicious activity "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." The briefing was given Bush on August 6, 2001, at his central Texas ranch.

The bureau has been criticised for failing to heed terrorism warnings from agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis in the weeks before the attacks on New York and suburban Washington.

Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste said the information, including reports of Arab men training at US flight schools, "might have led to unravelling the plot."

"Perhaps, perhaps if it had been utilised effectively," the former Watergate prosecutor told Fox.

Gorton added: "It's the reason I am so interested in these so-called 70 field investigations. I don't know what they were. I don't know what they did. I don't think they got to a point where anyone could take action on them.

"It seems to me the FBI has more questions to answer than Condoleezza Rice or... anyone who has testified before us so far."

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who left the bureau a few months before the attacks, comes before the commission tomorrow. Although appointed by Clinton in 1993, the two maintained an uneasy relationship.

Attorney General John Ashcroft will also testify that day as will his Democratic predecessor, Janet Reno. On Wednesday the panel will hear from CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Ben-Veniste said the performance of Ashcroft, who has been criticised by the acting FBI director at the time, Thomas Pickard, would also come under scrutiny.

"We are going to look at how the Justice Department prioritised counterterrorism and its various activities," he said.

Information in the page-and-a-half President's Daily Brief, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US," was as recent as May 2001, despite White House assertions it was "historical" in nature, Ben-Veniste added.

"That, perhaps, should have alerted individuals to try to get this information up. And so we ask, what did the FBI do in this interim?"