(AP/FoxNews) -- Heads of the FBI and CIA warned congressmen Thursday that al Qaeda could strike soon and that there’s little they can do about it.
“I have a hard time telling the country that you should be comfortable, that we’ve covered all the bases, in the wake of what we saw they were able to accomplish on Sept. 11,” FBI Director Robert Mueller told the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
CIA Director George Tenet said the current situation is similar to just before Sept. 11, 2001. “You must make the analytical judgment that the possibility exists that people are planning to attack you inside the United States -- multiple simultaneous attacks,” Tenet said. “We are the enemy.”
“You must make the assumption that Al Qaeda is in an execution phase and intends to strike us both here and overseas,” Tenet said, noting recent attacks in Kuwait and Indonesia and off the Yemeni coast. “That’s unambiguous as far as I’m concerned.”
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., noted intelligence warnings that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could order terrorist attacks against Americans if the United States invaded his country.
Mueller said the FBI was focusing on the threat of terrorists who would use military action against Iraq as a pretext to strike. But he said an attack as meticulously planned and executed as the Sept. 11 hijackings would be hard to stop.
Tenet also offered his most detailed public accounting to date of what the CIA did to stop bin Laden’s terrorist network before Sept. 11. He said his agency has saved thousands of lives by successfully stopping terrorist attacks, but admitted mistakes were made. Mistakes included failure to put two future Sept. 11 hijackers on watch lists and lost information and lack of communication with the FBI in regards to movement of suspected terrorists.