different directions. We handled the murder, they handled terrorism investigation.

Almost two years later there was an explosion at the World Trade Center. I was summoned back to listen to tapes, review documents and the like, only to find out that those documents that we turned over were not translated until midway through the bombing trial of the first Trade Center attack. The people that I released from my office, one of them actually drove the van into the world Trade Center in '93. This has bothered me for a long time, but is now subject to the book so we can talk about this publicly.

I bring this up because on September 10 of this year in our city, in Baltimore, my detectives were out on a routine arson warrant. They find the subject who they are going to arrest for an arson and harassment, and in the apartment they encounter eight men from various countries, from Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan. The apartment is very sparsely furnished. There are computers and documents, passports and the like that do not belong to them of people of different names and photographs. There are also photographs of some landmarks like Union Station in Washington, D.C., Times Square, New York.

There are also computers that we seized and cell phones. We got a search warrant for these. They were downloaded by our police department. And in there we find that in the week preceding September 10, which we have to keep in mind is the day we are told we are at very high state of alert, we find they were on the Internet for hours at a time in the middle of the night checking out web sites such as Learntofly.com, Beapilot.com, all local airports and the like. Further analysis of their hard drive that was erased shows photographs of jetliners and many other things.

The reason we bring this up now is I don't know what these men have or have not done, other than what I have told you. The investigation continues. But several were released by the Federal Government that day. And until-and not only that, worse than that, we were told that there is nothing more than expired visa violations on these folks and there is nothing to indicate the existence of a terrorist cell.

Well, that may be true on its face. I mean, if we are waiting for a notarized plan with a list of terrorists, it is going to be a long wait. This is chillingly, eerily similar to what we encountered years ago and encounter here and there through our daily work as police officers in this country, and to be told this by our Federal partners is very disturbing to us.

And that is where we stand right now. That investigation continues. There are a couple of more anecdotal ones I would like to share with you just as part of what has happened in the year since September 11 to date.

We had two men on September 11 of 2001, the day this country was attacked, who were seen celebrating the World Trade Center attacks by a delivery man who was smart enough to call the police. We went in, talked to them, brought them in for questioning. They were subsequently released, I believe by the FBI; there was no evidence to hold them at the time, which may have been the case.

In June of this year, we were notified and asked for our help very quickly to please apprehend someone. We ran through our in

telligence division database and, of course, it was on the people from that night. The point of that little story is the fact we had no idea there was a pending investigation on these folks who live in my city.

We also had, as you probably know by now, June 24, Ramzi elShanouk was arrested on Lehigh Street in Baltimore. He was a previous roommate with Hani Hanjour, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the September 11 hijackers. We were notified of this investigation three days before it was taken down. This is the one that I really would like to bring to everyone's attention.

We have a very competent intelligence division in our department, as most major city police departments do. We run our own investigations and we run them pretty well. But we also check with our Federal counterparts to make sure we are not wasting resources and disrupting anybody else's work.

We have someone now we are investigating, he is rather radical in our city. We asked our counterparts, do you have anything going on this? And, of course, we were told absolutely not. We continued with the investigation, and there is a blind hit in one database that alerted them to the fact we are still investigating this subject, at which time we were notified and said can we come talk to you about the person? They said we are not investigating, well, actually we are investigating, and we need to come talk to you about it, but we couldn't really tell you at the time.

There are others. That is enough for now.

The statement I would like to make, the fact is I am representing myself. I don't represent the major city chiefs of the IACP. But there are several local chiefs in this country who feel the same way. Unfortunately, most of them complain privately. When they are public, they don't want to say anything, for what reason is only known to them.

But if we are talking about this as a local response and there is a need to know, who do we think needs to know more than the chiefs, who protect the cities' citizens? We need to know more than anybody in this country what is going on in our cities, yet we don't. I defy anybody, you can call anybody today from any major American city to ask them what is going on in their cities regarding terrorism investigations today. I think you would be surprised at the response.

I think I am going to stop there and answer any questions you may have for me, Senator.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you very much, Mr. Commissioner, for a very illuminating set of comments.

We have followed a pattern with these hearings of designating four of our members to be the lead questioners, two from the House, two from the Senate. Each of the questioners will have 20 minutes. The designated lead questioners for today are Senator Wyden, Representative Hoekstra, Senator Shelby, and Representative Bishop.

Representative Bishop has indicated to me that he is about to manage a bill on the House floor, and with the consent of Senator Wyden, he will be called upon first so that he can complete his

Senator FEINSTEIN. Mr. Chairman, if I may, after the four lead questioners, would it be your intention to recess for lunch?

Chairman GRAHAM. If the four lead questioners all take their full time, that would put us at approximately 1:00 or close thereto, so, yes, it would be my expectation that we do the lead questioners, break for lunch, reconvene at 2:30.

Senator MIKULSKI. Mr. Chairman, there is a vote at 12:15.

Chairman GRAHAM. The Senators will have to leave to accommodate that.

Congressman Bishop.

Mr. BISHOP. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me thank all of our panelists for bringing very, very illuminating testimony to us this morning. Let me begin by saying the joint inquiry has established a number of things, including that the CIA and NSA possessed critically important information on two of the hijackers, Mihdhar and Hazmi, that was buried within the CIA's raw operations cables and the NSA's raw intercepts. Almost no one outside of these agencies was allowed to access these databases of raw HUMINT signals intelligence. CIA and NSA, the analysts, either did not see this information or concluded that it did not reach internal thresholds for reporting or did not appreciate the needs of other agencies for that information. Thus, critical information lay dormant for, in the most basic intelligence databases, over a period approaching two years.

I mentioned a moment ago that counterterrorism analysts outside CIA and NSA cannot access the databases. That is still true today. DOD, FBI, FAA, INS, State Department, none of the analysts at these agencies get to examine the information in these databases.

I am sure it will come as a shock to the public and even members of this joint inquiry that even the proposed Department of Homeland Security under the House version of the bill at least would not be guaranteed access to these databases.

Post-September 11 reviews have revealed over 1,000 CIA reports or cables that contained the names of hundreds of suspected terrorists that were not turned over to watch list agencies. Mihdhar and Hazmi were in all sorts of public and State and Federal databases prior to September 11 through which they could have been found had anyone thought to look.

The Department of Transportation never saw the Phoenix memo, and in hindsight asserts that the memo would have triggered action in DOT had it been passed to them. FBI agents handling the Moussaoui case and the Phoenix memo apparently knew nothing of the history of the Bojinko plot or the attempt by Algerian terrorists to slam a hijacked airliner into the Eiffel Tower in France.

I could go on and on in this vein, but there is a point that is clear. As Ms. Hill testified recently, first, while we cannot conclude that the plot could have been detected if more information had been shared, it is at least a possibility. Second, we obviously could have done much better at information-sharing and must do better in the future if we hope to succeed in foiling future attacks.

Our current mechanisms for information-sharing are human liaison and the exchange of written reports that reflect a filtering of

and the application of judgment to raw intelligence. September 11 proves that these mechanisms alone are inadequate.

As the prepared statements of several of our witnesses today make compellingly clear, broader access to raw intelligence is mandatory, and we must at the same time apply proven computer technology to sift through this massive and detailed data to find correlations, linkages and patterns that small numbers of humans cannot possibly discern. Computers also provide indelible institutional memory in contrast to human analysts who rotate from job to job.

Ambassador Taylor has told the staff that the main problem is not to gather more information, but rather to use the information and technology to mine what we already acquire. Governor Gilmore has advised us that we must link all the databases together. Admiral Wilson, the just-retired Director of DIA, insists that all-source analysts have to see all the data we collect, not just what the agency that collected it decides is important or relevant enough to disseminate. His assertion that the HUMINT and SIGINT databases contain a wealth of useful information that never gets examined is proven by the Mihdhar and Hazmi cases. The joint inquiry has spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to understand why the intelligence on Hazmi and Mihdhar was not given to analysts and consumers.

What we all have to understand is that still today, very, very few counterintelligence analysts can get access to the databases that held the information on Hazmi and Mihdhar.

Admiral Jacoby, until recently the senior intelligence officer for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, insists that analysts, not collectors, must be the proprietors of raw intelligence data, including especially CIA's operations cables, NSA's SIGINT intercepts, and the FBI's terrorist investigatory information. Admiral Jacoby quotes the DCI himself on the need for a fundamental shift in culture and in practice.

On the other side of this position are the arguments that the imperative to protect sources and methods precludes wider access to raw data. NSA also insists that only people formally inside the SIGINT system can see raw signals intelligence due to the need to protect the privacy of U.S. persons. In the case of the FBI, there is the added concern about compromising legal proceedings and ongoing investigations.

I do not see why people outside the CIA should not be allowed to see sensitive HUMINT material provided that these people are subject to the same security standards as CIA employees are. The same is true for NSA. As for the concerns about protecting the privacy, U.S. persons, people outside of NSA can be trained and certified in NSA's so-called minimization procedures. With respect to the FBI, we hope that the PATRIOT Act has already provided the legal foundation to break down the inappropriate barriers to information sharing.

I hope that one of the strong recommendations of this joint inquiry is that all-source counterterrorism analysts must have direct access to intelligence databases and the ability to exploit those

I would like to ask Mr. Andre and Ambassador Taylor, in that order, to comment on what I have said, particularly with respect to protecting sources and methods, privacy and law enforcement sensitive information. I would also like to ask Mr. Andre this question: Has anything fundamentally changed since 9/11 in terms of who has access to the databases that contained information on Hazmi and Mihdhar?

Mr. ANDRE. Yes, sir, thank you. Thank you for the way you framed the issue. I couldn't have done it better myself. I am very passionate about the role of all-source analysts in this process and believe they have been undervalued and underemployed in this regard and to be properly employed they have to have access to more information.

Let me be clear on a couple of points that maybe are not as clear in our statements as they should have been-that is, Admiral Jacoby's as well as mine-and that is there is not now nor has there been a problem with the sharing of what is deemed to be threat information. Any information collector-I know of no instance where an information collector was anything less than very responsive and very responsible and disseminated that information widely with a sense of urgency.

So the sharing of information from our perspective falls more into the category of the Mihdhar-Hazmi information, which is sort of seemingly benign activities, deliberations, acquisitions, travel by people that wish us harm. It is that information that we wish to harvest.

We don't believe, as all-source analysts, that we have to get access to the source data. We understand completely the need to protect sourcing. We respect that. There are cases where we certainly would want the freedom to go back to the collector and get some evaluation of a source to help our analysts when they are evaluating that particular piece of evidence or those assumptions.

So it is the substantive data, not the circumstances of its collection that is important to us.

Much has fundamentally changed since 9/11. We have a different level of access to data from all of the organizations that you mentioned, CIA, FBI and NSA. Some of the inhibitions on us getting information reside with us. We have taken a lot of measures to change the way we do business so that the information provider can have a greater degree of confidence that we can be trusted with their data, and of course our job is to show them not only can we be trusted but we can add value to that information.

We have taken a real hard look at some of the documents that are used to tell us why we can't have certain information. For example, in the signals intelligence area, Executive Order 12333, I am not a lawyer, but I have had a team of lawyers look at it. That document is a very powerful document that compels sharing of information, not withholding information. We are very optimistic that things are in train to dramatically increase the level and type of information that is shared.

Ambassador TAYLOR. I think when I spoke to the staff on this matter I was reflecting on the time I spent on active duty with the United States Air Force as the head of its investigative organization, OSI, and in that position it became clear to me that our inves