Bush to releasepre-attack memo

The White House will release a highly classified memo to the president early next week that outlines the threat assessment Mr. Bush was given one month before the September 11 attacks.

Pressure to release the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,” has increased since National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testified before the September 11 commission Thursday.

The bipartisan 10-member panel voted unanimously to urge the White House to release the memo, and two Democratic members, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, and lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste, pushed Miss Rice about the matter at the hearing.

Liberal interest groups and Democrats have implied for weeks that the Bush administration is attempting to hide its pre-September 11 failures by withholding key documents from the committee and the public.

America Coming Together, a political organization operated by Jim Jordan — former campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts — said Mr. Bush “has put the American people on a need-to-know basis.”

“On the fight against terror, George W. Bush opposed the forming of a commission, then went to lengths to limit the amount of information it has access to, thereby hiding the truth,” ACT said yesterday.

White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said yesterday that the national security team is now “going through the declassification process” of the memo.

“There’s important measures that have to be adhered to in doing so,” Mr. Bartlett said. “[Mr. Bush] has taken these extraordinary steps to make sure that the American people understand what the administration knew then and what we can more importantly do now to protect America.”

Mr. Kerrey, who has sharpened his criticism of the White House in recent days, accused the Bush administration yesterday of “selectively declassifying [portions of the memo] when it benefited them.”

He told NBC’s “Today” show that a full reading of the memo shows that the president’s top intelligence aides “had credible information that indicated the possibility of a hijacking.”

The Associated Press reported yesterday that the memo, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al Qaeda was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several unidentified sources who said they have seen the document.

Miss Rice told the commission on Thursday that while the memo mentioned hijacking, the intelligence community didn’t anticipate airplanes being used as weapons.

Mr. Kerrey called that explanation “a straw man,” and faulted the Bush administration for failing to act on the information contained in the memo.

“We were surprised that one plane was hijacked,” Mr. Kerrey said on “Today.” “Everything that happened on the 11th of September indicated that we were unprepared for something, in my view, that we should have at the very least suspected might have happened.”

Miss Rice told the commission on Thursday that she received reports of “chatter” from terrorists suggesting an attack was in the works in the summer of 2001, but none of the information was “actionable.”

Polls taken since Miss Rice’s public testimony under oath show that a growing percentage of Americans believe the Bush administration did all it could to stop the September 11 attacks.

In a Time/CNN survey taken Thursday, 48 percent said they believe the president did everything possible to stop the attacks, up from 42 percent who thought that two weeks ago.

A CBS News poll, also conducted Thursday, showed that 32 percent believe the Bush administration did all it could, up from 22 percent last week.

The hearings before the September 11 commission, set up with the hopes of being a nonpartisan examination of the intelligence failures of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, has taken on a harsher, partisan tone.

Richard A. Clarke, a former terrorism expert and subordinate to Miss Rice, testified last month that the Clinton administration was more attuned to the threat of al Qaeda than was Mr. Bush.

The Time/CNN poll, however, showed that 43 percent of Americans were more likely to believe Miss Rice’s testimony debunking that opinion, while 36 percent believe Mr. Clarke. Another 21 percent said they didn’t know whom to believe.

James Jay Carafano, senior research fellow for defense and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, said releasing one of the president’s highly classified intelligence briefs could hamper the ability of the president to get good, honest information from his top aides.

“These are staff actions and staff people,” Mr. Carafano said. “It’s supposed to be closed and in-house to let the president have the freedom of ideas and expression. I don’t think it sets a good precedent.”

The September 11 commission hearings, Mr. Carafano fears, have become highly politicized, and threaten to make the whole exercise pointless.