Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that he believes terrorists will again strike the United States, bluntly declaring, “It’s not a matter of if, but when.”
American intelligence reports indicate a growing “level of noise” from Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, Cheney said, but the information is too vague to identify targets.
“The prospects of a future attack on the U.S. are almost a certainty,” Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The warning comes as the Bush administration grapples with the political fallout from last week’s revelation that the president had been told a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that terrorists might hijack U.S. planes. The White House dispatched Cheney to two television talk shows Sunday.
He said the government’s intelligence community failed to respond to signs of terrorism but said he doubted that the Sept. 11 attacks could have been thwarted. Cheney said he opposes giving Congress an intelligence report about possible hijackings that President Bush received Aug. 6.
Cheney said he wants to avoid a “circus atmosphere” on Capitol Hill.
“There’s no question that there were failures,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “But I can’t say at this point that even if we had all those pieces together that it would have led to the conclusion that they were going to hit the [World] Trade Center, the Pentagon et cetera.”
The vice president said a memorandum from the FBI’s Phoenix office, which raised concerns about the number of Arab men seeking flight training in U.S. schools, didn’t “trickle up to the presidential level.”
Top intelligence officials also didn’t know about the August arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, Cheney said, who officials believe was supposed to be the 20th hijacker on Sept. 11.
Hijack warning also vague
Cheney said the briefing Bush received on Aug. 6 mentioned a hijacking possibility but was not specific enough to warrant action. Hijacking airplanes has been a threat for 30 years, he said, and the intelligence briefing did not contain fresh information.
“You are going to shut down the nation’s aviation system based on that report?” Cheney asked. “You wouldn’t.”
Faced with its first intense criticism of its handling of the war on terrorism, the White House has been rejecting calls for the creation of a special commission to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Cheney said the administration is cooperating with congressional intelligence committees, but he opposes releasing the Aug. 6 intelligence briefing.
“It comes from the most sensitive sources and methods that we have as a government,” Cheney said, explaining the administration’s resistance.
Cheney said an independent inquiry also could distract intelligence officials from investigating future attacks.
Last week, the White House accused Democrats of trying to make political gains out of the intelligence questions surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Again on Sunday, Cheney warned Democrats and other critics to raise questions in “a responsible fashion.”
“I don’t have any problem with a legitimate debate over the performance of our intelligence agencies,” he said. “I’ve got a real problem with the suggestion that somehow, my president had information and failed to act upon it to prevent the attack of Sept. 11.”
`Outrageous’ allegation
“That strikes me as beyond the pale,” Cheney said. “That is an allegation that is without merit and falls into the category of outrageous.”
The president returned to the White House on Sunday afternoon after a weekend at his retreat at Camp David, Md. He did not take reporters’ questions about whether Americans should be on a higher state of alert.
In the eight months since hijackers commandeered four U.S. jetliners in the nation’s deadliest day of domestic terrorism, the government has issued repeated warnings that the country could be attacked again.
“It could happen tomorrow; it could happen next week; it could happen next year,” Cheney said. “But they will keep trying, and we have to be prepared.”
Other officials worried too
Other Bush advisers sounded warnings similar to Cheney’s, but with less urgency.
“No one can say that there will not be an attack against the United States or U.S. interests,” said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on ABC News’ “This Week” program.
“It also speaks to the importance of continued vigilance on the part of the American public,” Rice said.
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that the latest intelligence reports appear to be similar to what officials have seen in the past year.
“It was non-specific, didn’t lead to you a particular course of action that could you take, other than a general increase in our level of sensitivity to possible terrorist activities,” Graham said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
