WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney denied Wednesday that a flurry of public terror warnings was prompted by criticism over how the Bush administration handled pre-Sept. 11 warnings of an attack.
In an interview taped for airing Wednesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live," Cheney said "irresponsible" comments by Democrats did not influence the administration's warnings to the public this week.
"The fact is there is reason to believe that the threat level has increased somewhat," Cheney said. "We see more noise in the system, more reporting that leads us to be cautious here. We haven't changed our practices at all in terms of when we decide to go public and caution people."
Authorities continued to tighten security Wednesday around New York City landmarks after the FBI disclosed uncorroborated information from detainees that sites such as the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge might be attacked.
Cheney said the White House was not raising the nationwide terrorism alert status -- currently at yellow -- because intelligence on possible attacks was too vague.
Cheney also said a special, independent commission into how the government dealt with terror warnings before Sept. 11 would result in intelligence leaks. Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., have proposed that a special commission investigate the matter and have suggested that more should have been done with the advance intelligence.
Congress is already conducting an investigation.
"Our concern is that if we lay another investigation on top of that we'll just multiply potential sources of leaks and disclosures of information we can't disclose," Cheney said. "The key to our ability to defend ourselves and to take out the terrorists lies in intelligence."
The political battle over what information the government had before Sept. 11 about possible terror attacks intensified Wednesday.
For the second day, FBI Director Robert Mueller and agent Kenneth Williams testified behind closed doors to lawmakers investigating what the government knew.
Williams wrote a pre-Sept. 11 warning about Arab students at an Arizona flight school that he hoped would lead to screenings of Middle Easterners who came to study U.S. airport operations, according to government officials familiar with his account.
Tuesday, both Mueller and Williams gave testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. They appeared before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Wednesday.
Also on Capitol Hill, Republicans began to fight against Democratic calls for a special commission.
John Scofield, a GOP spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, sent an e-mail to members noting that the $29 billion anti-terrorism bill includes $1.6 million to support the Congressional investigation into how pre-Sept. 11 warnings were handled.
"In other words there is no need for a commission," Scofield wrote. "Congress has the resources to do a thorough investigation.
As the debate over the commission continued, the Bush administration sought to qualify the threats that the United States faces from terrorists after a week of warnings from President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Rumsfeld said his comment Tuesday that terrorists would inevitably gain weapons of mass destruction was not based on new information.
"The words were the same, the language was the same, the import was the same as I have been saying for months," Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
Rumsfeld also said every bit of intelligence received cannot be treated as a legitimate threat. He said members of the al-Qaida network have provided false information about terrorist threats in order to see how U.S. authorities will react, thereby gaining knowledge of use to the terrorists.
"There's no question but that it happens," he said. "I mean, these people are well trained. They know precisely what they're doing, and they're taught all kinds of techniques in a whole host of different areas."
