Former Chairman of National Commission on Terrorism Urges Strong Stance Against Terrorist Haven

BOSTON (AP) _ The former chairman of the National Commission on terrorism said Wednesday that the United States must destroy all safe havens for terrorists.

L. Paul Bremer III, who was also a former ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism at the State Department, said the Sept. 11 terror attacks would not have happened if the terrorists had not had a base of operations in Afghanistan.

"We have to deny terrorists territory," Bremer said, speaking to about 100 students and faculty at Simmons College.

Bremer's commission, appointed in 1999, was given the task of reviewing the nation's counterterrorism policies.

The panel presented its findings in June 2000, outlining a series of recommendations, including a loosening of information-gathering restrictions on the CIA and FBI and closer monitoring of foreign students in the United States. The commission's report warned that terrorists would try to stage a disastrous event inside the United States that would kill thousands of people.

None of the group's recommendations were implemented, Bremer said in an interview with The Associated Press Wednesday.

The biggest failure leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks was a lack of intelligence, Bremer said.

"In the fight against terrorism, the most important thing is to have good intelligence ... to prevent them is to know what is going to happen," he said.

Bremer agrees with the Bush administration's strategy since the attacks, including the military campaign to destroy terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. He said the United States must also bring down and then replace Afghanistan's Taliban regime.

The biggest challenge, he said, will be sustaining public support for a protracted war against terrorism in other countries and keeping together the international coalition that has so far supported the United States.

"The problem will be after we have completed the Afghanistan phase," he said.

Between 6,000 and 7,000 people were killed on Sept. 11, when hijackers commandeered four planes and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in rural Pennsylvania. Two of the planes were hijacked from Boston, one from Newark, N.J., and one from Washington.

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