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Sat 10 Apr, 2004 09:45 am
al-Qaida Threat Included in Bush Memo
Apr 10, 12:08 AM (ET)
By JOHN SOLOMON
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to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 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 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 - weren't deemed credible enough to tell the president or his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the officials said. Neither involved the eventual Sept. 11 plot.
The sources who read the presidential memo would only speak on condition of anonymity because the White House has not yet declassified the highly sensitive document, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States."
That declassification process is expected to be completed soon, allowing the Bush administration to make the document public in a historic disclosure of secret presidential intelligence briefing materials.
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 trips of suspected al-Qaida operatives, including some U.S. citizens, in and out of the United States. It suggested 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 commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks 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.
And the final bullet told the president of a recent intelligence report indicating al-Qaida operatives were trying to get inside the United States to carry out an attack with explosives, the sources said. There was 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 clear 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 final bullet in the presidential memo was based on an intelligence report received in May 2001 that indicated bin Laden operatives were trying to cross from Canada into the United States for an attack.
A joint congressional inquiry report into the Sept. 11 failures first divulged the existence of the May 2001 threat report last year but did not reveal it was included in Bush's briefing. The congressional inquiry described the intelligence this way:
"In May 2001, the Intelligence Community obtained information that supporters of Osama bin Laden were reportedly planning to infiltrate the United States via Canada in order to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives."
In her testimony Thursday to the Sept. 11 commission, Rice described Bush's Aug. 6 daily briefing as including mostly "historical information" and said most threat information in the summer of 2001 involved overseas targets.
Rice also testified that she did not recall seeing any warnings before Sept. 11 that a plane might be used a terrorist weapon, though it was possible others in the White House did.
Current and former government officials familiar with terrorism intelligence told the AP that in the same month Bush received his briefing, U.S. intelligence received two uncorroborated reports - among hundreds - suggesting terrorist might use planes but that neither reached the president or Rice.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said one report in August 2001 said there was uncorroborated information that two bin Laden operatives had met in October 2000 to discuss a plot to attack the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi using an airplane.
That report stated the operative would either bomb the embassy using the airplane or drive the airplane into it, according to information provided congressional investigators and cited in their report released last year.
Separately, the CIA sent a warning to the Federal Aviation Administration in August 2001 asking the agency to advise commercial airliners that six Pakistanis in Latin America, not connected to al-Qaida, were considering a hijacking, bombing or sabotage of an airliner. That warning did not have specifics on a time or location but said it could involve Britain, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, Cuba, among others, according to information made public by the congressional inquiry.
Rice stated emphatically on Thursday she did not see any such reports about al-Qaida using a plane as a weapon until after Sept. 11, suggesting the intelligence may have reached someone lower in the White House.
"To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us," she said. "I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."
Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S.
Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S.
Lack of Fresh Information Frustrated Bush
By Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 19, 2002; Page A01
The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said.
The document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America," in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to knowledgeable sources.
Bush had specifically asked for an intelligence analysis of possible al Qaeda attacks within the United States, because most of the information presented to him over the summer about al Qaeda focused on threats against U.S. targets overseas, sources said. But one source said the White House was disappointed because the analysis lacked focus and did not present fresh intelligence.
New accounts yesterday of the controversial Aug. 6 memo provided a shift in portrayals of the document, which has set off a political firestorm because it suggested that bin Laden's followers might be planning to hijack U.S. airliners.
In earlier comments this week, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials stressed that intelligence officials were focused primarily on threats to U.S. interests overseas. But sources made clear yesterday that the briefing presented to Bush focused on attacks within the United States, indicating that he and his aides were concerned about the risks.
The new reports came amid continued demands for an independent investigation on Capitol Hill, along with more revelations about possible intelligence missteps before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Intelligence sources said last night that at least two names listed in a July 2001 FBI memo about an Arizona flight school have been identified by the CIA as having links to al Qaeda. The FBI memo was never acted upon or distributed to outside agencies prior to Sept. 11 and was not provided to the CIA until last week, sources said.
The memo, sent to FBI headquarters by a Phoenix FBI agent, warned that bin Laden could have been using U.S. flight schools to train terrorists and suggested a nationwide canvass for Middle Eastern aviation students. The CIA's discovery of an al Qaeda link was first reported by ABC News.
Sources cautioned that CIA officials are not sure that they could have linked the two names to al Qaeda had they been given the memo last summer.
Three of the Sept. 11 hijackers received flight training in the United States, although all had ended their classes by the time the memo was written. The document was never shared in August with FBI investigators in Minnesota, who were scrambling to ascertain whether French national Zacarias Moussaoui was part of an al Qaeda plot. He since has been charged as a Sept. 11 conspirator.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said yesterday that criticism of the administration's intelligence actions before Sept. 11 is unfair.
"What you have are some folks trying to do -- and unfortunately in a fairly accusatory way -- take the benefit of 20-20 hindsight with pre-9/11 information and trying to impart upon it a post-9/11 wisdom," Ridge said in an interview.
Ridge said there were no formal mechanisms in place before Sept. 11 to guarantee that the FBI's activities in Arizona and Minnesota were put into the overall intelligence picture, and that he and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III were talking about ways to coordinate key agencies.
"The FBI's working on it; the CIA's working on it; we're working on it with them," he said. He added that the solution "is not more spies and satellites" but an analytic team devoted to intelligence about domestic terrorism.
Under growing criticism for a failure to act on the Phoenix memo and other potential warning signs, Bush administration officials have said repeatedly that U.S. intelligence analysts never envisioned the possibility that terrorists would use jetliners as suicide missiles and slam them into such buildings as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people . . . would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Rice said Thursday.
But a 1999 report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an affiliate of the CIA, warned that terrorists associated with bin Laden might hijack an airplane and crash it into the Pentagon, White House or CIA headquarters.
The report recounts well-known case studies of similar plots, including a 1995 plan by al Qaeda operatives to hijack and crash a dozen U.S. airliners in the South Pacific and pilot a light aircraft into Langley.
"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.
In other developments yesterday, CIA officials said Cofer Black, head of the agency's Counterterrorism Center for the past three years, has been assigned to another position. They described the move as part of normal turnover at the agency.
After weeks of interviews, a joint, bipartisan congressional committee investigating intelligence before Sept. 11 announced it has hired Eleanor Hill, a lawyer and former Defense Department inspector general, to head its staff. Hill served for 15 years as staff member for former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) on the Senate permanent investigation subcommittee and was Nunn's person on the joint Iran-contra investigation.
But the sharpest focus remained on the Aug. 6 presidential briefing memo, which Rice described Thursday as historic and analytic in nature. But she did not explicitly note that the memo, according to sources, was focused primarily on a discussion of possible domestic targets.
As an example, sources said the memo cited the case of Ahmed Ressam, who was caught attempting to smuggle explosives across the Canadian border for an al Qaeda attack on Los Angeles International Airport during the 2000 millennium celebrations.
The briefing also notes that al Qaeda members were known to live in or travel to the United States, and that still more would attempt to enter the country.
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters yesterday said the headline on the document was, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States." But sources who have read the memo said the headline ended with the phrase "in U.S."
Fleischer described the briefing as a summary containing "generalized information about hijacking and any number of other things."
Rice and other Bush administration officials have said the memo contains no reference to suicide attacks of the kind carried out on Sept. 11, focusing instead on "hijackings in the traditional sense." Hijackings were a minor part of the analysis, officials said.
In one brief mention, sources said, the memo noted that unconfirmed information from British intelligence in 1998 showed that al Qaeda members talked about using an airline hijacking to negotiate the release of imprisoned Muslim cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who had been convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks.
Some sources familiar with the briefing told The Washington Post on Thursday that the FBI added the notion of hijackings to the document, and that it had not included such references in early drafts.
But other senior U.S. officials said yesterday that the report, prepared by the CIA, "was never looked at by the FBI." One source said the document also is incorrect in citing the FBI as providing information related to hijackings.
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Staff writers Mike Allen, Bill Miller, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
Isn't it amazing that people who have never read the memo keep saying what is in it? If the memo was any different than Condoleeza Rice said it was, the designated Democrat attack dogs on the 9/11 commission would have said so by now. They have read the memo.
Instead they phrase questions that make it appear there is something there that isn't, and then tried to keep her from giving a full explanation that would dispel the imagery they attempted to create.
BBB
One thing has puzzled and frustrated me with the thinking in Washington about al Qaeda. Bin Laden has demonstrated a clear pattern of going back to the site and plan where al Qaeda's attack was blocked or failed to complete the plan. Why couldn't the security people recognize and understand the pattern that was evident throughout the world before 9/11?
BBB
BBB
How can we expect dumb and dumber to understand and interpret the information they were being given. Miss Rice is out of her element and Bush is out of this world.
BBB
Do you think our government has learned enough of al Qaeda's pattern to realize they will return to finish the attack on the Los Angeles airport that was foiled by an alert border guard hero? Al Qaeda never gives up, just like the old saying: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
BBB
Bush told of hijack warning weeks before 9/11
Bush told of hijack warning weeks before 9/11
Rice says briefing contained no fresh information
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday April 9, 2004
The Guardian UK
President Bush was given an intelligence briefing, entitled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States just weeks before the September 11 attacks, it emerged yesterday.
Details of the August 6 briefing in 2001, which warned of terrorist preparations being made for hijackings on American soil, surfaced in testimony given by the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to a commission of inquiry studying the September 11 attacks.
The existence of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) had been publicly known for some time, but Ms Rice's confirmation of its title and some of its contents pushed it centre stage in the explosive political row over whether the al-Qaida attacks could have been prevented.
The emotive significance of the briefing - in the form of a memorandum sent to the president summarising potential threats to the US - is all the greater because at the time he received it, Mr Bush was on a month-long "working holiday" at his Texas ranch and spent much of the following days fishing and clearing undergrowth on his land. He did not cut short his vacation or apparently take dramatic steps in response to the briefing. [/size]
The president was at the ranch yesterday, watching Ms Rice's performance on television. According to his spokesman he telephoned her from his pickup truck to say she had done "a great job".
In the course of a frequently testy interrogation lasting more than two hours, Ms Rice repeatedly insisted that the content of the August 6 briefing to the president did not live up to its dramatic title. She said it was largely a historical review by the CIA and FBI of previous hijacking plots and contained no fresh information or warnings. There was no "silver bullet" that could have stopped the attacks, she said.
However, Democratic members of the commission questioned that interpretation. Bob Kerrey, a former senator, said the PDB informed the president that "the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking".
Ms Rice countered that the FBI had been given the task of looking into the report, airport authorities were informed, and that there was not much more the president and his top officials could have done. She blamed the failure to catch the al-Qaida hijackers before the attack on long-term bureaucratic barriers which prevented the sharing of information between the CIA and FBI.
In exchanges in which the questions were often more revealing than the answers, the commissioners made public a series of stunning findings on the extent of apparent bureaucratic incompetence in the weeks between August 6 and September 11 2001.
"Secretary [Norman] Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this," Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic commissioner, told Ms Rice.
"You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country - Miami in particular - had no knowledge of this."
The justice department and FBI will come under particular scrutiny in the commission's hearings next week, when the attorney general, John Ashcroft, will be under fire. In his first seven months in office, he cut the FBI's counter-terrorism budget, and did not even list terrorism on his list of justice department priorities on the eve of the al-Qaida attack.
Ms Rice had been singled out by a former White House counter-terrorism "tsar", Richard Clarke, for her failure to focus the president and his team on the threat from al-Qaida in early 2001.
Sitting alone in front of the 10 commissioners, Ms Rice began the day with a prepared statement, read with a shaky voice which gradually grew in confidence. She argued that reports of an increase in intelligence "chatter" about an impending attack in the summer of 2001 had been overstated, and made public examples of vague intercepted comments from terrorist subjects to illustrate her argument: "Unbelievable news in coming weeks" and "Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar."
"Troubling, yes. But they don't tell us when; they don't tell us where; they don't tell us who; and they don't tell us how," Ms Rice said. She hotly denied the August 6 briefing paper amounted to an urgent warning of an impending attack.
"It is just not the case that the August 6 memorandum did anything but put together what the CIA decided that they wanted to put together about historical knowledge about what was going on and a few things about what the FBI might be doing," she said.
The commission later questioned former President Bill Clinton privately for more than three hours.
BBB,
I would like to see MORE of what the PDB's could reveal.
Actually, Richard Clarke said the administration focused more on Iraq, than any other subject concerning terrorist.
I don't suppose we will have any access to briefings and conversations verifying all the "Iraqi talk" prior to 9/11.
But who knows, maybe we will.
The PDB will be released later today!
I just want to see the airline executives testimony.
They are going to put it online in PDF form shortly.
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