TERROR RESPONSE PROBE Memo wasn't specific, Bush says

Some panel members might want to see scores of other memos.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Sunday that a memo he received a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not contain enough specific threat information to prevent the hijackings and "said nothing about an attack on America."
In his most extensive public remarks about a briefing he received Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US," Bush also said he "was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into" by the FBI and CIA that summer and that they would have reported any "actionable intelligence" to him.
"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," Bush told reporters after Easter Sunday services in Fort Hood, Texas. "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."
Agreed with reporter
Bush agreed with a reporter who characterized the memo as containing "ongoing" and "current threat information." But he added that if the FBI or CIA "found something, they would have reported it to me ... 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."
Bush's comments came a day after the White House reversed its long-standing objections and declassified the page memo, part of the President's Daily Brief (PDB), in response to a demand from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. The document has moved to the center of a continuing furor over the administration's actions during a period of unprecedented terrorism warnings in the summer of 2001 amid allegations by former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke, who has said the Bush White House largely neglected terrorism issues until the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The bipartisan commission investigating the events leading up to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is expected to make the once-classified document -- and the Bush administration's reaction to it -- a prime focus of its hearings Tuesday and Wednesday. Top FBI and Justice Department officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations, along with CIA Director George J. Tenet, are scheduled to testify.
Other memos
One Democratic commission member said Sunday that the release of the August 2001 document will renew a push by some members to gain access to scores of similar intelligence memos provided to Presidents Bush and Clinton over the past six years, including about 40 others from the Bush administration that mention Al-Qaida or bin Laden. Restrictions set by the White House meant that only three of the panel's members read any PDBs directly, while the rest of the members relied on a 17-page summary screened by the White House.
"One of the things that the release of this PDB does is reveal the importance of these PDBs in general," said commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska. "If the American people really want to get a full analysis of what happened, these PDBs are an important part of this landscape ... . We need complete access to all of them."
The 2001 memo declassified late Saturday reported that the FBI had information that Al-Qaida operatives had been in the United States for years; that they might be planning a hijacking in the United States and targeting a building in lower Manhattan; that the FBI had 70 investigations under way related to bin Laden; and that a caller to a U.S. embassy in May 2001 said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives.
Demands for release
Although the document has been an object of scrutiny for nearly two years -- and although its title and many other contents had been revealed in media reports and official accounts -- demands for its public release reached a crescendo Thursday with the testimony of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who told the Sept. 11 commission that the PDB contained "historical information based on old reporting" and that it "did not warn of attacks inside the United States." Several Democrats on the panel disagreed, and the commission asked that the memo be released.
Bush stood firm Sunday in defending his administration's response to the information contained in the memo, but he referred several times during his brief remarks to the responsibility of the FBI and CIA to investigate any threats. The Sept. 11 commission will turn its focus in the coming week to the actions of the FBI and Justice Department during the summer of 2001 and whether law enforcement officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, took the Al-Qaida threat seriously enough.
The president also stressed that the memo's two explicit references to hijackings "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."
The PDB, prepared by the CIA with some information provided by an FBI analyst, is an uncorroborated report from a foreign intelligence service in 1998 that bin Laden "wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release" of Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, who has been named as the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and was convicted of a later plot to blow up New York landmarks, bridges and tunnels.
The memo goes on to warn that "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."