Seven in Ten Confident U.S. Can Thwart Attacks
Sat May 25, 2:34 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than seven out of ten Americans have at least some confidence the FBI (news - web sites) and CIA (news - web sites) can prevent attacks on the United States, according to a poll released on Saturday by Time magazine.
The Time/CNN poll, which will appear in Time's May 27 issue, found a majority -- 55 percent -- of the 1007 adults polled May 22-23 have "just some" confidence in the ability of each agency to prevent terror strikes on U.S. soil.
About one in six had a great deal of confidence in the agencies' ability to ward off attacks -- 17 percent expressed that level of confidence in the FBI and 16 percent in the CIA.
The poll was conducted following a series of government warnings over possible fresh strikes and after some lawmakers questioned if the government had missed clues that could have unraveled the Sept. 11 plot.
Twenty-seven percent said they had little or no confidence in the ability of either the FBI or CIA to prevent attacks like those which killed about 3,000 people, mostly at the World Trade Center and Pentagon (news - web sites).
As to who bore responsibility for any lack of government action to prevent the attacks, 59 percent said the CIA was either "very" or "somewhat" responsible. Fifty-eight percent assigned that high level of responsibility to the FBI and some 54 percent assigned that level of responsibility to President Bush (news - web sites)'s top advisers.
Bush, who blames the attack on the al Qaeda guerrilla network, was deemed either very or somewhat responsible by 46 percent of those responding to the poll.
This month, some lawmakers have questioned if the government could have helped prevent the hijacked plane attacks by piecing together clues, including an FBI agent's suspicion extremists were training at U.S. flight schools. Criticism from within the FBI has also emerged over the possible mishandling of a captured suspect in the Sept. 11 plot.
Seventy-three percent of those polled said they had paid at least some attention to a flurry of warnings from Bush administration officials that additional attacks could occur at any time, with 36 percent saying they had paid a great deal of attention to those warnings.
Time assigned a 3.1 percent margin or error to the poll.
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