A rchive Date
[ 13-04-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
|
[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4700899/
August 2001 memo included recent information
Briefing reportedly noted al-Qaida plots as late as that spring
MSNBC and NBC News
Updated: 10:19 p.m. ET April 09, 2004
WASHINGTON - President Bush’s August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, which national security adviser Condoleezza Rice dismissed this week as an unspecific historical document, included information from three months earlier that the al-Qaida terror network was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.
The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 - a month before the Sept. 11 attacks - said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and was continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.
The same month as that briefing of Bush, U.S. intelligence officials received two uncorroborated reports suggesting terrorists might use airplanes, including one that suggested that al-Qaida operatives were considering flying a plane into a U.S. embassy, current and former government officials said.
Those August 2001 reports - among thousands of varied and uncorroborated threats received by the government each month - were not deemed credible enough to tell the president or Rice, the officials said. Neither involved the eventual Sept. 11 plot.
Report still classified
The sources who read the presidential memo would speak only on condition of anonymity because the White House had not yet declassified the highly sensitive document. White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said Friday on NBC’s “Today” show that it would be released after it was reviewed for any sensitive material.
“We're working on that right now,” said Bartlett, who was not more specific. A White House source told NBC News that the memo would probably not be released before Monday.
The sources said the presidential memo included a series of bullet items that brought Bush through a history of mostly uncorroborated intelligence that cited al-Qaida’s interest in hijacking planes to win the release of Islamic extremists who had been arrested in 1998 and 1999, as well as the travelings of suspected al-Qaida operatives, include some U.S. citizens, in and out of the United States. It suggested that al-Qaida might have a support system in place on U.S. soil, the sources said.
The document also included FBI analytical judgments that some al-Qaida activities were consistent with preparation for airline hijackings or other types of attacks, some members of the Sept. 11 commission said earlier this week.
The second-to-last bullet told the president that there were numerous - at least 70 - terror-related investigations under way by the FBI in 2001 involving matters or people on U.S. soil, the sources said.
The final bullet told the president of a recent intelligence report indicating that al-Qaida operatives were trying to get inside the United States to carry out an attack with explosives, the sources said. There were no specifics about the timing or target, the sources said.
The sources said the briefing memo did not provide the exact date of that intelligence but made it clear that it was in the 2001 time frame and that FBI and other agencies were investigating it. The information had been provided to intelligence and law enforcement agencies well before Bush’s briefing, the sources said.
They said the final bullet in the presidential memo was based on an intelligence report received in May 2001 that indicated that bin Laden operatives were trying to cross from Canada into the United States for an attack.
‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack’
The PDB has become the center of the controversy over the Bush administration’s terrorism strategy before Sept. 11 since Rice revealed its title - “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States - during her testimony Thursday before the independent commission investigating the attacks.
The White House had earlier refused to release the memo to the commission, citing national security concerns. The panel asked for it again Thursday after Rice acknowledged that Bush received the briefing warning of Osama bin Laden’s determination to launch terrorist strikes inside the United States.
Rice, who testified that “no silver bullet” could have prevented the attacks, dismissed the document as unimportant, heatedly insisting that it was “a historical memo” that lacked specifics.
“It did not warn of attacks inside the United States,” Rice said in response to aggressive questioning from commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic lawyer from Washington. “... And it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.”
Commissioner Bob Kerrey, a Democratic former senator from Nebraska, said on “Today” that while he felt Rice had been honest, her conclusions were completely off. The memo indicated that bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror network was planning airplane hijackings, he noted, and yet “we were surprised by a hijacking.”
Speaking in ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Kerrey said: “Look, she is in charge of it. Everybody in national security understands the FBI and CIA don’t talk to one another and knows their missions are different. You can’t blame the structure of the CIA when you know.
“On the 25th of January [2001], she was told that al-Qaida was in the United States of America. We knew that al-Qaida was a very highly sophisticated military force that attacked us twice before. So this isn’t a case of, you know, a generalized threat announcement.”
‘Not on a war footing’
Rice’s three hours of testimony before the panel Thursday was tense and at times confrontational.
“It was not easy to get all my questions answered, frankly,” Ben-Veniste said Thursday night in an interview on MSNBC’s “Countdown.”
Democrats on the commission accused the Bush administration of failing to grasp the growing threat that al-Qaida posed before the attacks, which killed 2,749 people, destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and blasted a hole in the Pentagon. Had the administration been more attentive, “just maybe we could have intervened in a way that would have rolled up this plot,” Ben-Veniste told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.
Rice testified that the administration received many indications that al-Qaida was dangerous, but she maintained that the warnings were not specific enough to act upon.
But while repeating the administration’s contention that the attacks could not have been prevented, Rice acknowledged that the United States was ill-prepared for the terrorist strikes before Sept. 11, 2001.
“Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing,” Rice said in testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Rice alternated between defending the administration’s response to warnings that terrorists were planning a “big event” and arguing that previous administrations, notably the Clinton administration, share responsibility for failing to take pre-emptive action.
The president “made clear to me that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida one attack at a time. He told me he was ‘tired of swatting flies,’” Rice said, implicitly rejecting claims made last month by Bush’s top former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke.
Clarke: Rice’s words self-serving
Asked to rebut Clarke’s claim that Bush pressed him to find an Iraqi connection to the suicide hijackings, Rice said she did not recall such a discussion but added, “I’m quite certain the president never pushed anybody to twist the facts.”
Clarke said Friday that had Rice “interpreted” the information in a way that was most “favorable to her and her boss.”
Clarke said in an interview on “Good Morning America” that Rice led dozens of Cabinet meetings before Sept. 11, 2001, “and not one of them was on al-Qaida. I think the facts speak for themselves.”
“The commission, which has not only her testimony and mine, but also has all of the documents, all of the memos, all of the e-mails - I think the commission now has a basis for making a judgment,” said Clarke, who has joined ABC as a news consultant.
The commission, meanwhile, continued with its work. It met in private later Thursday with former President Bill Clinton and then Friday morning with former Vice President Al Gore. A private joint meeting with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney has yet to be scheduled by the panel, which will issue a final report in July.
FBI representatives are scheduled to go before the commission when its hearings resume next week. A member of the commission told NBC News on condition of anonymity that those sessions could be critical to unraveling what went wrong, saying, “Of all the bureaucracies that failed us, and there were many, the FBI was the worst.”
MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson, NBC’s David Gregory in Crawford, Texas, and The Associated Press contributed to this report
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|