Briefing on Al Qaeda Included Specifics

Briefing on Al Qaeda Included Specifics
White House Says Declassification of Pre-9/11 Document Will Be Delayed
By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A05

The classified briefing delivered to President Bush five weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks featured information about ongoing al Qaeda activities within the United States, including signs of a terror support network, indications of hijacking preparations and plans for domestic attacks using explosives, according to sources who have seen the document and a review of official accounts and media reports over the past two years.

The information on current threats in the briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," stands in contrast to repeated assertions by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials as recently as this week that the document is primarily historical and includes no warning or threat information.

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which has demanded that the 11/2-page document be declassified, referred to it in a March 24 report as "an article for the president's daily intelligence brief on whether or how terrorists might attack the United States."

White House officials, after indicating Thursday that the briefing document could be declassified within a day, announced yesterday that they were delaying any release until at least next week.

"We are actively working on declassification and are not quite ready to put it out," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council. He attributed the delay to "unprecedented activity" needed to prepare for public release the article from the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB), the daily report of significant new intelligence and analysis provided the chief executive and his most senior national security advisers.

Also yesterday, the panel met for a three-hour interview with former vice president Al Gore. The session followed a similar meeting Thursday with former president Bill Clinton, who defended his decision not to retaliate after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen because the FBI and the CIA had not formally linked the attack to al Qaeda at that time.

The commission said in a statement that Gore "was candid and forthcoming." The panel is arranging a joint private meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. None of the meetings are under oath and all are likely to remain secret, officials said.

Because the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB in dispute has not been released publicly, it is impossible to be precise about its contents or the context in which it was delivered. Yet much of the information in the document has become public over the last two years through testimony, official accounts and news reports.

Newspaper articles in May 2002 noted the briefing document's alarming title and reported that the PDB mentioned al Qaeda members living in the United States and others traveling in and out of the country. A July 2003 report from a House-Senate inquiry into intelligence failures said the PDB found that al Qaeda "apparently maintained a support structure" inside the United States.

The same report also said the PDB mentioned "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attack," and included intelligence acquired in May 2001 that "indicated a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."

Rice added in testimony on Thursday that the document says the FBI had 70 ongoing field investigations related to suspected al Qaeda cells or operatives. During the same hearing, Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste said the PDB reported "that al Qaeda members have resided or traveled to the United States for years and maintained a support system in the U.S."

Since details about the briefing first surfaced in May 2002, Rice and other administration officials have repeatedly sought to play down its importance and to suggest that it contained little information about current threats or, at first, to even acknowledge that it was focused on domestic attacks.

During a White House briefing with reporters on May 16, 2002, Rice referred to the briefing as "an analytic report" that "did not have warning information in it of the kind that said they are talking about an attack against so forth or so on." She added that it was about Osama bin Laden's "methods of operation" that "talked about what he had done historically, in 1997, in 1998."

Rice and other officials did not disclose at that time that the briefing included information about ongoing FBI field investigations, possible preparations for hijackings or other contemporary material.

Even the briefing's heading is a matter of minor disagreement. Then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters on May 17, 2002, that the briefing was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States," while Rice testified Thursday that it was "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Numerous sources said in 2002 and this week that the correct title is "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

Rice emphasized in her testimony Thursday that the PDB included "a long section on what bin Laden had wanted to do -- speculative, much of it -- in '97, '98, that he had in fact liked the results of the 1993 [World Trade Center] bombing."

"The president was told this is historic information," Rice said.

But Democratic commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said in an interview yesterday that Rice ignores the importance of more current information that was also included in the August 2001 document.

"She is right in a sense that it does not contain a warning per se," said Gorelick, one of only three commissioners who have seen the CIA-prepared PDB as part of a special deal with the White House. "She is also wrong in that it is not just an analytical piece. . . . It is a summary of what the agency knew that gave them reason to believe bin Laden wanted to attack the United States."

Another commissioner, Republican John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary, is one of seven commissioners who have seen only a summary of the PDB. He said the current information within it is not particularly specific.

"On the FBI's part of it, it says don't worry about it, we've got 70 field investigations going," Lehman said. "That's the tone of it. . . . I found it to be net favorable to the president, which is why I can't understand why they were so restrictive in the first place to letting us have access to it."

The Sept. 11 commission, which has been at the center of a political storm over the last two weeks, is gearing up for another round of explosive hearings here Tuesday and Wednesday. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and their predecessors, Janet Reno and Louis J. Freeh, are expected to defend their anti-terrorism efforts when they testify.

Former FBI acting director Thomas J. Pickard, who will also testify, has told the commission in private that Ashcroft had little interest in terrorism in the summer of 2001, numerous sources have said. Thomas H. Kean, the panel's Republican chairman, said in an interview yesterday that "the hearing will focus very closely on the failures by the FBI and many others" prior to the attacks.