Congressional panel on terrorist attacks overwhelmed by information

WASHINGTON -- Faced with tens of thousands of documents and more coming in every day, plus interviews with a key FBI whistleblower and other officials, leaders of a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks say they are dealing with much more information than they anticipated.\nThey don't want that to delay their inquiry, they said.\n"We're going to get to the bottom of what happened on Sept. 11, but what we're dealing with right now is still the threat of future terrorist acts," Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said Wednesday on NBC's "Today."\nThe joint committee's staff was to interview Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley on Wednesday for a second time. Rowley says FBI headquarters ignored her office's pleas in the weeks before Sept. 11 to aggressively investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged as an accomplice in the suicide hijackings that killed more than 3,000 people.\nRowley will be asked "why she felt that the field office was blown off in the way it was, with what now we know to be very important potential information that would have avoided Sept. 11 from occurring," Graham said on CNN.\nRowley also is to testify publicly on Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.\nGraham proposed on CBS' "The Early Show" that the United Stats should consider a new intelligence system "in which we would have one group of people who would be analyzing the information from all the possible sources."\nSen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a strong CIA critic and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it's important to conduct the inquiry "while the war on terrorism is going on because if we don't, we think the mistakes of the past will be revisited."\nNo witnesses appeared at Tuesday's closed-door hearing in a tightly guarded room of the Capitol, where lawmakers agreed on a series of goals and how they would conduct the investigation.