Ashcroft: government 'blinded itself to enemies'

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In a strong defense of the Bush administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday the nation was stunned by the Sept. 11 attacks because "for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to our enemies."\nAppearing before a commission looking into the worst terror strike in the nation's history, Ashcroft also said he moved quickly once in office to overturn a "failed policy" allowing American agents to capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden but not assassinate him.\nIn a nationally televised testimony, Ashcroft said a legal wall had been put in place to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents. "Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camps, they would have needed a battery of lawyers" to take action, he said dismissively.\nAshcroft slid into the witness chair on a day in which the panel issued reports indicating a more nimble FBI and CIA working together might have uncovered the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist plot and laying out an agonizing series of missed opportunities, half measures and bureaucratic inertia.\nIn a written report, the panel also quoted former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard as saying Ashcroft told him in the summer of 2001 "he did not want to hear" additional information about possible attacks.\nAshcroft denies making the statement, the commission said.\nThe attorney general followed to the witness table a series of former top-ranking officials, pressed by members of the panel to explain why neither the CIA nor the FBI was successful in uncovering the plot in which four jetliners were hijacked. Nearly 3,000 people perished that day,\n"We did not have great sources in al Qaeda," conceded Pickard, who was acting FBI director briefly at a critical period in the summer of 2001.\n"We didn't have enough people to do the job, and we didn't have enough money by magnitudes," added Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism activities. "When you run out (of money), people die. When people die, you get more money," he said bitingly.\nIn one prominent case, the commission said officials did not immediately recognize the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was taken into custody the month before the attacks on immigration charges while attending flight school in Minnesota. A dispute between FBI agents in the field and supervisors meant no search warrant was immediately obtained to search his computer, the commission said.\nNor was Pickard told after Moussaoui's arrest Aug. 16, 2001 -- less than a month before the attacks that resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.\nAnd it wasn't until after the attack that the FBI learned an imprisoned terrorist told agents he could have recognized Moussaoui from Afghan training camps run by al Qaeda.\nAdditionally, the commission said the FBI asked the British for help in identifying Moussaoui. "The case, though handled expeditiously at the American end, was not handled by the British as a priority amid a large number of other terrorist-related inquiries," it said.\nThe commission said "a maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections" to the plotters.\nThe hearing unfolded in the same Senate hearing room where national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testified last week and former counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke a few weeks before that. But there were empty seats this time, and the event lacked the electricity of those appearances, both of which were devoted largely to the question of what President Bush had been told about the terrorist threat and what he did about it.\nOne relative of a Sept. 11 victim, Nancy Aronson of Bethesda, Md., blinked back tears when commissioner Fred Fielding noted to Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI, that all counterterrorism systems had failed, allowing the hijacking plot to succeed. "I really was shocked that there wasn't more awareness of the threat," she said afterward.\nIn one report that adopted a sports metaphor to describe the nation's counterterrorism effort, the commission said the CIA preferred a zone defense, concentrating on "where" an attack might occur, not "who" would carry it out. By contrast, it said, the FBI focused more on individuals.