Airlines sued by victims of the September 11 attacks filed complaints with a U.S. court on Tuesday to compel testimony from FBI and CIA agents in a bid to make the federal government more culpable for not preventing the attacks.

In separate complaints filed in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of New York, seven U.S. airlines sought testimony from two members of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency unit that investigated Osama Bin Laden and five current and former FBI agents who investigated al Qaeda.

Fidel Castro suggested that Washington has deliberately failed to stop terrorist attacks against Americans because it needed to “deliver a bang” that would justify its war on terror.

In the latest in a series of essays that Cuba’s 80-year-old Maximum leader has begun writing every few days, Castro on Sunday seized on U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s comments this past week expressing a “gut feeling” that the United States faces an increased risk of attack this summer.

“The government of the United States sees and hears all, with or without legal authority,” Castro wrote. “They can prevent any attack on their people, unless there is some imperial need to deliver a bang so that they can carry on with and justify the brutal war which has been declared against the culture, religion, economy and independence of other peoples.”

Al-Qaida is using its growing strength in Pakistan and Iraq to plot attacks on U.S. soil, heightening the terror threat facing the United States over the next few years, intelligence agencies concluded in a report unveiled Tuesday.

At the same time, the intelligence analysts worry that international cooperation against terrorism will be hard to sustain as memories of Sept. 11 fade and nations’ views diverge on what the real threat is.

Ex-EPA chief Christie Whitman was bombarded by boos and a host of accusations Monday at a hearing into her assurances that it had been safe to breathe the air around the fallen World Trade Center.

The confrontation between the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and her critics grew heated at times. Some members of the audience shouted in anger, only to be gaveled down by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who chaired the hearing.

For three hours Whitman faced charges from Nadler and others that the Environmental Protection Agency’s public statements after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave people a false sense of safety.

“The report, prepared by the CIA’s inspector general, is the only major 9/11 government review that has still not been made publicly available,” Michael Isikoff reported in January. “When it was completed in August 2005, Newsweek and other publications reported that it contained sharp criticisms of former CIA director George Tenet and other top agency officials for failing to address the threat posed by Al Qaeda, as well as other mistakes that might have prevented the attacks.”