Graham lends credence to Moore,s saudi connectionFollow

WASHINGTON - Mild-mannered Sen. Bob Graham, after dealing firsthand with the investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the buildup to the Iraq war, is leaving office an angry man.

If one theme emerges from his new book, Intelligence Matters, it's that his Senate colleagues, much of the public and, above all, President Bush are not responding to the crisis of poor intelligence in the face of a serious terrorist threat.

''I usually operate within a relatively narrow emotional spectrum,'' the Florida Democrat wrote in the book, which comes out Tuesday. ``But now my advancing age, or my 11 grandchildren, have changed things.

``The more I learned about the threats we're ignoring, the more I saw the Bush administration leading us into a war of choice, the more aware I became that there are hundreds of people living in America who would like nothing more than to kill Americans, the angrier I got.''

White House officials did not respond Sunday to Graham's book. ''We don't do book reviews,'' White House spokesman Trent Duffy said. Much of the book, which The Herald obtained Saturday, catalogs FBI and CIA failures in underestimating terrorist threats and overestimating the threat of Saddam Hussein. It's a broadside and a call to arms, not a memoir.

Graham agreed to only one interview Sunday, on NBC's Meet the Press, as part of an arrangement made by his publisher, Random House.

Graham said on Meet the Press that the Bush administration ``has taken every step to obfuscate, avoid and cover Saudi Arabia's role in Sept. 11.''

Some revelations in the 272-page book:

• Then-CIA Director George Tenet told Graham in October 2002, when the Senate faced a vote on whether to authorize war, that in Iraq ``there were 550 sites where weapons of mass destruction were either produced or stored.''

''It was, in short, a vivid and terrifying case for war. The problem was it did not accurately represent the classified estimate we had received just days earlier,'' Graham wrote, noting that secret estimates, never made public, warned that information was inconclusive.

''It was two different messages, directed at two different audiences,'' Graham recalled. ``I was outraged.''

• An FBI official estimated that there were fewer than 10 al Qaeda operatives in a particular U.S. city because that was the number of open case files he knew about. Another FBI official told the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Graham chaired, that there were only 237 al Qaeda terrorists worldwide known to the FBI, because that's how many had signed a record book that was recovered.

''God damn, the CIA has told us there were between 15,000 and 20,000 al Qaeda recruits who went through the Afghanistan training camps in the 1990s,'' Graham responded.

Perhaps Graham's most explosive charge is that a support network for al Qaeda, backed by Saudi officials and Saudi money, aided some of the Sept. 11 hijackers and ``still exists, largely undamaged, within the United States.''

Saudi officials have denied any connection to al Qaeda operatives in the United States.

Graham said the FBI and the White House frustrated efforts by the Sept. 11 investigation he co-chaired to thoroughly investigate the connection between two of the hijackers and two Saudis in San Diego, who the CIA believes were Saudi spies.


yet another book, from yet another insider, all be it a democrat this time which will make it much easier to dissmiss as partisan politics from the addministraition.