WASHINGTON -- President Bush briefed congressional leaders Tuesday on U.S. plans for a long, open-ended hunt for terrorists while the FBI said it was seeking nearly 400 people for questioning in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush met with Republican and Democratic leaders over breakfast at the White House. "I think the war aims are clear," said House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Montana) "In a way, it's meeting guerrilla warfare with guerrilla warfare, but it's also meeting it with financial efforts, and political efforts, and diplomatic efforts. There's no one place that you can get this done."
There was progress on the diplomatic front. Saudi Arabia cut all ties with Afghanistan's Taliban government, saying the Central Asian country was defaming Islam by harboring and supporting terrorists.
The move leaves Pakistan as the only nation in the world to maintain ties with the Taliban. And it leaves Afghanistan's hard-line Islamic regime ever more isolated in its showdown with the United States over Osama bin Laden, the No. 1 suspect in the attacks on the United States.
At the White House, Gephardt said Bush was taking the right approach in targeting terrorist cells rather than civilians. He said that removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan is not necessarily a goal.
"I don't think it's anybody's goal to topple governments in this," Gephardt said. However, he added, the fact that the Taliban is supportive of bin Laden "gives us real pause, and obviously we'd like to change that position on their part."
Also in the meeting were House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Mississippi).
The leaders discussed airport security measures, including Gephardt's idea of putting military police or reservists on planes "so that every passenger has a feeling of confidence to go back on the airplanes."
Gephardt said Reagan National Airport outside Washington, the only airport still closed due to the Sept. 11 attacks, could reopen once planes using the airport are equipped with better cockpit doors.
Bush indicated he was more than willing to consider Democratic proposals to extend unemployment and health insurance benefits to airline workers, Gephardt said. "There are some people who don't qualify for unemployment because of their status," he said.
Bush was meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi as his country's role in the looming conflict becomes more clear.
Japan will send warships to the Indian Ocean as early as this week to carry out intelligence and surveillance missions, two Japanese newspapers reported. The squadron may accompany the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier that left its base near Tokyo on Friday, the reports said.
Bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, meanwhile, issued a new statement early Tuesday warning Washington against attacks against him or Afghanistan.
"Wherever there are Americans and Jews, they will be targeted," said a statement faxed to news organizations in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, in the name of al-Qaida's chief military commander, Naseer Ahmed Mujahed.
Bush, in a letter to Congress, broadly outlined how forces already have been deployed in the Middle East and Asian and Pacific regions.
"It is not now possible to predict the scope and duration of these deployments, and the actions necessary to counter the terrorist threat to the United States," Bush wrote in the letter Monday.
In other developments Monday:
Bin Laden, tried to rally Pakistani Muslims to combat any attack on Afghanistan, where he is believed to be hiding.
A CBS-New York Times poll found that Bush's handling of the terrorist crisis was supported by 90 percent of those surveyed, and 92 percent expressed backing for U.S. military action in response. At the same time, 78 percent said they believed another terrorist attack was likely in the United States. The survey questioned 1,216 individuals between Sept. 20-23 and had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a two-day ban on flights by crop-dusters, which authorities feared might be used in a chemical or biological attack. A Florida bank president said he had been told that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, tried to get a loan from the U.S. Agriculture Department to buy a crop-duster. USDA is a tenant of the bank, which checked its files about Atta at the request of the FBI.
At home there were signs Americans were beginning to return to normalcy after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which terrorists hijacked and crashed four airliners, resulting in the apparent deaths of nearly 7,000 people.
After a grim week on Wall Street, stocks roared back Monday as bargain hunters were lured back to the market by some of the cheapest prices in years. The Dow's advance was its fifth-biggest daily point gain in history. Even airline stocks were up, responding to a financial support package passed by Congress over the weekend.
The Dow gained 368 points, 4.5 percent, recovering more than a quarter of the 1,369 lost last week in its biggest-ever weekly point decline.
The investigation of the hijackings that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center and heavy damage to the Pentagon inched forward.
Federal authorities charged the first person with aiding the hijackers, according to court documents released Monday. The number of people arrested or detained in the wide-ranging investigation grew to 352.
Herbert Villalobos was charged in federal court in northern Virginia with aiding one of the suspected hijackers to fraudulently obtain a Virginia identification card a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.
A second man who aided with the IDs was cooperating and was not charged, prosecutors said. The court records disclosed as many as five of the hijackers got Virginia cards in the month before the attacks.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Justice Department was seeking 392 people for questioning about the attacks.
"We think they have information that could be helpful to the investigation," the attorney general told lawmakers.
In New York, rescuers and grieving families were beginning to say there was no hope of finding anyone alive in the ruins of the World Trade Center.
With 6,453 people listed as missing, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the number of confirmed dead had risen by 15 to 276 206 of them identified.
Federal aviation officials were also considering major changes in the way Americans travel, such as possibly banning early seat selection and carryon baggage.
