White House releases memo

CRAWFORD, Texas — The Bush administration last night released the declassified contents of a presidential briefing document that contains mostly historical information about Osama bin Laden’s terrorist plans — almost all of it compiled from open sources, including television and news reports.

The 1-page document, prepared for President Bush and presented in person at the Bush ranch in Texas on Aug. 6, 2001, contains 17 sentences, 14 of which are “historical in nature,” a senior administration official said. The memo did not warn of the September 11 attacks and did not discuss the potential use of planes as weapons.

“Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate [bin Laden] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,” said the memo, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”

That information was gleaned from U.S. television interviews from 1997 and 1998, in which the al Qaeda mastermind implied that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America,” said the document, known as a “presidential daily brief,” or PDB.

The PDB — in which the three redactions have been made “to protect the names of foreign governments that provided information to the CIA,” administration officials said — cited a clandestine source’s claim in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was “recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.”

But the document notes that U.S. intelligence agencies “have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that [bin Laden] wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists,” some of whom were responsible for the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.

Of the three sentences that are not historical, one says: “Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

A senior administration official said last night that the “surveillance,” investigated by the FBI, turned out to be “consistent with tourist activity.”

“This information was based on a report that two Yemeni men had been seen taking photographs of buildings at Federal Plaza in New York. The FBI later interviewed the men and determined that their conduct was consistent with tourist activity and the FBI’s investigation identified no link to terrorism,” the official said.

The second of the three sentences that is not historical said that the FBI was “conducting approximately 70 field investigations throughout the US that it considers [bin Laden]-related.”

The third sentence said: “CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the [United Arab Emirates] in May saying that a group of [bin Laden] supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.” The caller did not say where or when the attacks might occur, the administration said in a statement.

Two days after that May 15, 2001, call, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism staff convened the Counterterrorism Security Group, whose members include the State, Defense and Justice departments, as well as the FBI and CIA, to review the information provided by the caller. The information was also shared with the U.S. Customs Service and the Federal Aviation Administration, the administration officials said.

In addition, the officials said that between June and September, the FAA and FBI issued several advisories that included specific warnings about potential hijackings to free al Qaeda members jailed in the United States.

But nowhere in the PDB is there mention of turning U.S. airliners into missiles, as the al Qaeda terrorists did on September 11, 2001, killing about 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington.

“There’s nothing in here that’s tied to the 9/11 plot,” the senior official told reporters last night during a conference call.

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