Washington ? Congress sets out this week to learn why, despite disturbing reports at home and abroad, the FBI and CIA didn’t do more to anticipate and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Our main goal is to protect the American people,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “In order to do that, we must find out what got us to where we are now.”

The House and Senate intelligence panels meet jointly behind closed doors Tuesday to begin an analysis of intelligence agencies’ preparedness for Sept. 11 and future terrorist threats.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to hear in public session from Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who has charged that bureau headquarters mishandled the investigation of an alleged terrorist now linked to the attacks.

The FBI has come under sharp criticism for not seeing a link between the Minneapolis case and the warnings of a Phoenix field agent that Middle Eastern men were training at American flight schools.

The CIA tracked two of the Sept. 11 hijackers when they attended an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and afterward, but didn’t inform the FBI or the Immigration and Naturalization Service so they could be denied entry into the United States or be monitored while in the United States, Newsweek magazine reports this week.

The CIA declined comment, but a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press that the significance of the meeting increased after it became clear the two _ Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar _ were associated with an alleged mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. “In retrospect, we all could have done better,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Some hard questions have to be answered,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees, said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” She said the hearings would probably reveal other missed chances to foresee the attacks. “I expect there are numbers of bits and pieces that weren’t put together.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft, appearing separately on several Sunday news programs, agreed that the agencies need to improve how they gather and share information. But they added that better coordination still probably wouldn’t have stopped the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“There is a torrent of information that comes in” from the FBI’s 56 U.S. and 44 overseas offices, Mueller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The bureau’s inspector general is looking into the Minneapolis and Phoenix cases, he said, but “there was nothing specific in either of those instances that had a direct relationship to Sept. 11.”

Last week, Mueller announced major FBI changes intended to better collect and analyze information about terrorist threats and place more emphasis on prevention.

The Bush administration also decided last week to issue new surveillance guidelines that allow the FBI to monitor Internet sites, libraries, churches and other places open to the public to help prevent domestic terrorism.

Critics of the expanded powers say they will infringe on civil liberties.

“We’ve got a wartime situation,” Ashcroft said on CNN, stressing that the guidelines would apply only to anti-terrorism activities. “We need to make sure that we’re doing everything possible to prevent the next attack.”

Mueller said the FBI was aware it must not return to the “bad old days” when the agency was spying on Martin Luther King and other prominent Americans. Preventing terrorism has to be carefully balanced against “incursion on the freedoms that we enjoy and that we’re trying to protect,” he said.

Lawmakers said concerns about civil liberties would be taken up at the hearings. “We are going to have a national debate about privacy and your rights as an American citizen,” Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told NBC.