US: With each public hearing, the independent commission examining events leading to 9/11 raises fresh questions about the adequacy of the response of President George Bush and senior officials in the weeks immediately prior to the attacks as warnings were pouring in to the intelligence agencies. Conor O'Clery, in New York
Yesterday, CIA director, George Tenet, acknowledged that throughout the month of August 2001 Mr Bush, who was on holiday in Texas, did not once seek to speak to him about the threats. This week the heat has been turned up on the US intelligence agencies for their pre-9/11 failures.
The FBI has come under withering fire for missing vital clues to the al-Qaeda plot in what the commission described as a "stuttering quarrelsome feud" with the CIA.
In a day of angry finger-pointing on Tuesday, US Attorney General John Ashcroft blamed Democratic commission member Jamie Gorelick for the "single greatest structural cause" of the 9/11 failures. As deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Ms Gorelick issued a 1995 memo erecting a legal wall which hampered terrorism investigations by banning the sharing of information between the FBI and CIA.
However, Republican commisson member Slade Gorton produced an August 2001 memo from Mr Ashcroft's deputy reaffirming the legal wall. Mr Thomas Pickard, acting FBI director during the summer of 2001, alleged that Mr Ashcroft had little interest in terrorism before 9/11 and rejected an appeal for more anti-terrorism funds just before 9/11 happened.
House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jim Sensenbrenner, yesterday called on Jamie Gorelick to resign from the commission because of "an inherent conflict of interest" as the original author of the legal wall.
In recent days it was disclosed that President Bush's PDB (President's Daily Brief) of August 6th 2001 was headlined "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" and that Mr Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and top national security officials had seen a stream of alarming reports that month on al-Qaeda's intentions.
In April and May 2001 the intelligence community headlined a number of reports as follows: "Bin Laden planning multiple operations", "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real".
The government took a number of steps but did not submit a strategy to the president.
In his testimony to the 10-member bipartisan panel yesterday, Mr Tenet admitted to CIA mistakes and acknowledged that "we never penetrated the 9/11 plot overseas".
He told the commission: "We all understood Bin Laden's intent to strike the homeland, but we were unable to translate this knowledge into an effective defence of the country."
Mr Tenet startled members of the commission when he said that it would take "another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs" to combat terrorist threats.
In private testimony Mr Tenet had said that the system was "blinking red" in the summer of 2001.
Mr Bush "had occasionally asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States", the commission report said. The question was on the lines of "This guy going to strike here?", a senior official told the Washington Post.
The August 6th 2001 PDB began: "Clandestine, foreign government and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US."