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Sat 10 Apr, 2004 12:34 pm
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.
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PDB runs 11 and one-half printed pages, instead of the usual two to three, and carries the title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
Only 1 1/2 pages were released and the page numbers are blacked out. Why weren't the other 10 pages released?
And here's a news story on the same subject by a newspaper that is not blatantly anti-Bush:
White House releases memo
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
CRAWFORD, Texas ?- The Bush administration last night released the declassified contents of a presidential briefing document that contains mostly historical information about Osama bin Laden's terrorist plans ?- almost all of it compiled from open sources, including television and news reports.
The 1½-page document, prepared for President Bush and presented in person at the Bush ranch in Texas on Aug. 6, 2001, contains 17 sentences, 14 of which are "historical in nature," a senior administration official said. The memo did not warn of the September 11 attacks and did not discuss the potential use of planes as weapons.
"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate [bin Laden] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US," said the memo, titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US."
That information was gleaned from U.S. television interviews from 1997 and 1998, in which the al Qaeda mastermind implied that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America," said the document, known as a "presidential daily brief," or PDB.
The PDB ?- in which the three redactions have been made "to protect the names of foreign governments that provided information to the CIA," administration officials said ?- cited a clandestine source's claim in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was "recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks."
But the document notes that U.S. intelligence agencies "have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that [bin Laden] wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of 'Blind Shaykh' 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists," some of whom were responsible for the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.
Of the three sentences that are not historical, one says: "Nevertheless, 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."
A senior administration official said last night that the "surveillance," investigated by the FBI, turned out to be "consistent with tourist activity."
"This information was based on a report that two Yemeni men had been seen taking photographs of buildings at Federal Plaza in New York. The FBI later interviewed the men and determined that their conduct was consistent with tourist activity and the FBI's investigation identified no link to terrorism," the official said.
The second of the three sentences that is not historical said that the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 field investigations throughout the US that it considers [bin Laden]-related."
The third sentence said: "CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the [United Arab Emirates] in May saying that a group of [bin Laden] supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives." The caller did not say where or when the attacks might occur, the administration said in a statement.
Two days after that May 15, 2001, call, the National Security Council's counterterrorism staff convened the Counterterrorism Security Group, whose members include the State, Defense and Justice departments, as well as the FBI and CIA, to review the information provided by the caller. The information was also shared with the U.S. Customs Service and the Federal Aviation Administration, the administration officials said.
In addition, the officials said that between June and September, the FAA and FBI issued several advisories that included specific warnings about potential hijackings to free al Qaeda members jailed in the United States.
But nowhere in the PDB is there mention of turning U.S. airliners into missiles, as the al Qaeda terrorists did on September 11, 2001, killing about 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington.
"There's nothing in here that's tied to the 9/11 plot," the senior official told reporters last night during a conference call.
The PDB, prepared by the CIA after consultation with an FBI analyst to respond to questions posed by the president, contains in large part widely known ?- and general ?- information. At some points, the briefing is speculative. For instance, it says that a foiled effort by terrorists to launch an attack from Canada near the millennium "may have been part of [bin Laden's] first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US," although no documentation is provided.
That theory was based on the fact that convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam, who was caught trying to cross the Canadian border with explosives about 60 miles north of Seattle in late 1999, told the FBI that he alone conceived a planned attack on Los Angeles International Airport, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation," the PDB states.
Mostly, though, the report ?- the 40th PDB in which al Qaeda was mentioned, the senior official said ?- contained already-known information. At one point, the memo states that members of the terrorist group "have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."
Democrats have seized on the briefing, making it a focal point of testimony by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice before the commission probing intelligence lapses in advance of the September 11 attacks. Democrats on the commission demanded its release, questioning whether Mr. Bush was keeping secret information that could have prevented the attacks.
Commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, told the Associated Press yesterday that the memo's details should have given the president enough warning to push for more intelligence information about domestic hijackings.
"The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States ?- this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn't scramble our agencies to that," he said.
Richard Ben-Veniste, another Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, told the Associated Press yesterday evening that the details in the memo call into question Miss Rice's assertion that the memo was purely a "historical" document.
"This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security," he said. In particular, he said he wanted to know what Mr. Bush's reaction to the memo was.
Miss Rice, in her three hours of questioning Thursday, repeatedly said the briefing contained mostly historical information and did not warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.
"Most often," Miss Rice told the commission, "the threat reporting was frustratingly vague."
Republican John F. Lehman, a member of the September 11 commission, told United Press International that he was "very glad" the document had been released.
"It paints a very good picture ?- that the American people need to see ?- of the best intelligence available to the president. There was not a specific warning in there."
Mr. Lehman said the document showed "increasing capacity and an intention" by al Qaeda to strike at the United States, but he said partial leaks that came from Democrats on the panel implying that the PDB warned of hijackings were "the opposite of the truth."
"Rather it suggests that the intelligence services are on top of this," he said.
The Bush administration had not initially released the brief memo for fear that doing so would bring more demands to release confidential and sensitive briefings the president receives from top staff.
But the document gives neither a time nor a suspected target for an attack and provides almost no actionable intelligence. The senior official said it was not unusual for a PDB to be a compilation of known facts, scattered with a few bits of intelligence from clandestine operatives and foreign governments.
"One of the biggest issues in intelligence and analysis these days is how much information is simply publicly available and can be used and analyzed and how much information comes from clandestine sources," the official said. "There's a whole cottage industry of people out there who in fact say, 'Look, if you spend enough time collecting, analyzing, compiling the open-source intelligence, you can tell a lot.' "
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