Bush defends memo stance

FORT HOOD, Texas — President Bush said yesterday a declassified briefing document on al Qaeda that he received 36 days before the September 11 attacks “was no indication of a terrorist threat.”

“I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America — at a time and a place, an attack,” the president told reporters after attending church at a military base.

“It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was: Is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?”

Mr. Bush defended his administration’s take on the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing (PDB) — a 1 page document that senior administration officials said Saturday contained mostly already known facts from clandestine operatives, foreign governments and news reports.

“That PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America — well, we knew that,” he said.

“Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what.”

Asked about a sentence in the al Qaeda PDB that said the FBI had gleaned information that “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,” Mr. Bush said the information did not refer to anything like the September 11 plan to hijack airliners and use them as missiles in suicide strikes.

“You might recall the hijacking that was referred to in the PDB. It was not a hijacking of an airplane to fly into a building; it was hijacking of airplanes in order to free somebody that was being held as a prisoner in the United States,” Mr. Bush said.

The president was referring to another section in the PDB that said U.S. intelligence agencies “have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [name redacted] service in 1998, saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of Blind Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists,” some of whom were responsible for the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.

Republicans on yesterday’s political talk shows also said they saw “nothing remarkable” about the Aug. 6 memo

Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said the memo “restated a lot of things that we already knew.”

“We knew since the original World Trade Center attack in 1993 that al Qaeda was going to attack us here at home. We knew that there were sleeper cells in the country. And there was nothing in there about a specific attack on a specific target,” Mr. McConnell told “CNN’s Late Edition.”

Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican and a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on ABC’s “This Week” that it is easy to “go back now and pick out a clue here and a tidbit there. … We have to keep in mind the volume of reporting that the president and his advisers are dealing with each and every day.”

Former Sen. Slade Gorton, Washington Republican and a commission member, said that the memo discussed potential attacks in the United States but that “it didn’t give the slightest clue as to what they would be or where they would be.”

The PDB was declassified Saturday at the request of Democrats on the commission probing intelligence lapses before the September 11 terrorist attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people.

The document, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike Inside the U.S.,” contained 17 sentences, and 14 of them are historical in nature. For example, one said: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.”

Another said members of the terrorist group “have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”

The White House contends that information has been “well-known to the intelligence and law-enforcement communities for a number of years.”

Mr. Bush said yesterday he had “asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat.”

“As the president, I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing, I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into.”

Mr. Bush also said his administration — as well as that of President Clinton — would have acted immediately if intelligence had provided more specific information about an attack.

“Look, let me just say it again: Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack. I would have done everything I can. … Had there been actionable intelligence, we would have moved on it,” he said. “The previous administration would have acted. That’s our job.”

He said the PDB shows that his administration was working properly. “We were doing precisely what the American people expects us to do: run down every lead, look at every scintilla of intelligence and follow up on it.”

The memo cited intelligence gathered from the late 1990s, but said the FBI had initiated 70 investigations to review those terrorist threats in the United States.

Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, questioned what happened to those 70 investigations, and Mr. Gorton said the FBI will have more questions to answer than any other institution that has come under panel scrutiny.

Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste said the panel will ask the FBI what actions where taken between the memo’s issuance and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“We had over a month from the 6th [of August] to the 11th of September. What was done? Who did they meet with? What did they ask them to do?” Mr. Ben-Veniste said.

But Mr. McConnell said yesterday the September 11 commission needs to “stop the finger-pointing and give us specific recommendations about how we can improve the structure in the future, to make it more possible this won’t happen again.”

“Look, we need to remember who caused the attack on 9/11,” he said. “It was al Qaeda. It wasn’t President Clinton, it wasn’t President Bush.”

However, Rand Beers, the national security adviser to Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign, said yesterday the memo shows that “the president could have done more.”

“I’m talking as an expert. I’ve been inside, and I know what that means. And I think they could have done more,” he said on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”

• Audrey Hudson contributed to this report from Washington.