Washington ? Moving to shore up the Bush administration’s record on terrorism before the 9-11 attacks, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft on Tuesday laid the blame for counterterrorism failures squarely at the feet of the Clinton administration.

“The simple fact of Sept. 11 is this: We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies,” he told the independent commission investigating the 9-11 attacks.

In a statement relentlessly critical of the previous administration, the attorney general said Clinton officials did not fully fund the FBI; handcuffed agents by limiting information sharing between intelligence and criminal investigators; failed to begin an aggressive al-Qaida disruption strategy; and created a murky policy that stressed the capture, rather than the killing, of Osama bin Laden.

But former FBI Acting Director Thomas Pickard, who was at the bureau’s helm during the summer of 2001, said Ashcroft rejected a request for $57 million in extra counterterrorism funding the day before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Testifying under oath, Pickard said Ashcroft did not appear to view terrorism as a top priority and declined that summer to be briefed on terrorist threats — an assertion the attorney general, also under oath, rejected.

And two commissioners, Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste and Republican Fred Fielding, pointed to a still-classified Clinton-era memo and suggested that Ashcroft misrepresented the rules of engagement for the CIA’s capture or killing of bin Laden.

Finger-pointing took center stage at the 10th public hearing of the 9-11 commission, which has until late July to prepare a report chronicling the failures that led up to the attacks and proposing fixes.

While Ashcroft faulted his predecessor Janet Reno — and her one-time deputy, 9-11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick — for enshrining the “wall” between criminal and intelligence investigators, blame was spread in many other directions.

Pickard and former FBI Director Louis Freeh criticized policy-makers who refused to fully fund FBI funding requests. That lament was echoed by Cofer Black, former CIA Counterterrorism Center chief, regarding his agency.

U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is sworn in before the commission investigating the 9-11 attacks. Ashcroft defended the Bush administration's handling of pre-attack intelligence during Tuesday's meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

But it was the FBI, already raked over the coals last year during a congressional investigation into intelligence failures, that found itself on the hot seat during much of the daylong hearing.

The bureau was accused of inability to properly identify, analyze and share intelligence information; failed attempts at reform; and lethargy in the field regarding a terrorism warning system that CIA Director George Tenet has described as “blinking red” during the spring and summer of 2001.

Though Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the commission last week that U.S. agencies were placed at “battle stations” amid a surge of intelligence warnings, the 9-11 commission has found that most of the FBI’s 56 field offices and agents were unaware of the alert.

“I don’t understand why they didn’t hear it,” Pickard testified, noting that he personally advised field supervisors of the threat during a July conference call.

Pointing to a pair of reports issued Tuesday by the 9-11 commission staff, Chairman Tom Kean said: “I read our staff statement as an indictment of the FBI for over a long period of time.”

Louis Freeh, who headed the FBI from 1993 through June 2001, bristled at the description.

He blamed the “very limited resources” the FBI was given, noting that the bureau received only 3.5 percent of the federal government’s counterterrorism spending before Sept. 11.

But Reno, who was Freeh’s boss, gently chided the FBI for doing a poor job of tracking and sharing the intelligence its agents collected.

“Quickly when I came into office, I learned the FBI didn’t know what it had,” she said. “The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”