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Pre 911 briefing said that qaeda active in us { April 11 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11INTE.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11INTE.html
April 11, 2004
Pre-9/11 Secret Briefing Said That Qaeda Was Active in U.S.
By DOUGLAS JEHLand DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, April 10 — The classified briefing that President Bush received 36 days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks reported that the Al Qaeda terrorist network had maintained an active presence in the United States for years, was suspected of recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York and could be preparing for domestic hijackings.
But the briefing did not point to any specific time or place of attack and did not warn that planes could be used as missiles.
After releasing the "President's Daily Brief" on Saturday evening, White House officials said that none of the information given to the president at his ranch in Texas on Aug. 6, 2001, was later found to be related to the attacks. But the page-and-a-quarter-long document showed that Mr. Bush was given more specific and contemporary information about terrorist threats than the White House had previously acknowledged.
As recently as Thursday, the White House described the brief only as a "historical" account of Al Qaeda activity.
The declassification of the document, which was released under pressure from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, is likely to fan the already fierce debate about whether Mr. Bush and his team acted aggressively enough to confront the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the weeks and months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The president's critics are likely to embrace the specific and unresolved nature of some of the warnings — particularly a reference to "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks" — as a further indication that Mr. Bush had ample information about a domestic threat, and should have pressed for further action after the briefing. But the White House and its allies were already asserting late Saturday that the document described a threat that had existed for at least three years, that alerts had already been sent out by the Federal Aviation Administration, and that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. were already pursuing any credible leads.
"Since there was no threat reporting, no new action was required," said Sean McCormack, the spokesman for the National Security Council.
The White House also summarized its argument on Saturday in a "fact sheet" — twice as long as the intelligence document itself — to advance its interpretation of the document's meaning.
The release on Saturday marked the first time a President's Daily Brief has been made public while the president who received it was still in office. White House officials, speaking not for attribution, insisted its contents were "underwhelming" given all the speculation and conspiracy theories that have swirled around it. But the document itself is striking for both the familiarity of some of the information and its specificity in warning Mr. Bush that he faced a potent threat within United States borders.
For example, it warned that a foreign intelligence service — its name is blacked out — determined that Mr. bin Laden told followers "he wanted to retaliate in Washington." It warned that "Al Qaeda members — including some who are U.S. citizens — have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."
White House officials said they were not authorized to say what Mr. Bush said in response to that part of the briefing, or the rest of its contents. Some commission members have openly questioned why there was no apparent follow-up by the president or his staff about how well those members were being identified and tracked, or whether they were on watch lists, particularly as they came and left the country. According to accounts provided by White House officials, no precautions beyond a general F.A.A. alert were taken to deter hijacking.
The reference to "patterns of suspicious activity" is particularly notable, because it is tied directly to an F.B.I. investigation of "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." A portion of that sentence was revealed during testimony Thursday by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, before the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ms. Rice argued that most of the material in the report was old. For example, a report included the assertion from a clandestine source, dating to 1998, that a bin Laden cell in New York "was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks."
The document also said that the C.I.A. had "not been able to corroborate" reporting from 1998 that Mr. Bin Laden wanted to hijack an American airliner to gain the release of Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
At the hearing of the Sept. 11 commission, Ms. Rice, one of the closest aides to Mr. Bush, said the information in the briefing had been requested by the president after several months of intelligence reports warning of a possible attack, most likely abroad.
The briefing also referred to a telephone warning in May 2001 to the American Embassy in the United Arab Emirates, in which a caller reported that supporters of Mr. bin Laden were "in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives." A senior official said Saturday evening that embassies received many such calls, and that the investigation into this one was inconclusive.
At the time that Mr. Bush was briefed, while on vacation at his home in Crawford, Tex., the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were actively pursuing leads on the surveillance of Federal Plaza in New York as well as the call to the embassy in the United Arab Emirates, the officials said. At some point after the briefing, two Yemeni nationals involved in apparent surveillance of Federal Plaza were interviewed by the F.B.I., which determined that the incident was "tourism related," the White House official said.
Nonetheless, neither of those investigations were complete at the time Mr. Bush received the briefing from a C.I.A. official in the living room of his ranch. Senior administration officials said Saturday night that even if those investigations had been completed faster, there was nothing revealed in them that would have deterred the Sept. 11 hijackings. Moreover, they noted, by the time Mr. Bush received the briefing, the spike of terror warnings had declined, and there had been no attack where it had been most feared: at a meeting of Western leaders in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001.
"No one was standing down," one senior official said. "But by the time the president hears this, a lot has already happened."
For nearly two years, ever since the White House first acknowledged the existence of the classified briefing item, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the White House had sought to shut the door on its disclosure. The President's Daily Brief, prepared six days a week by the C.I.A., is one of the government's most highly classified documents.
Until late last year, the White House had insisted that not even members of the independent commission could see the documents, and relented only under an agreement in which most commissioners saw only portions of them.
Repeatedly, top White House officials, while refusing until Saturday to release the Aug. 6, 2001, document to the public, have insisted that although it might have addressed Mr. bin Laden's determination to strike inside the United States, it contained nothing substantially new. In her testimony before the commission, Ms. Rice described the document as reporting primarily "historical information based on old reporting."
On Saturday night, White House officials sought to reinforce that message, but acknowledged that in the 17-sentence document, the two sentences referring to the surveillance of the federal buildings in New York and the call to the embassy in the United Arab Emirates could be considered "closer to the present time." One official called it "recent."
In a background briefing for reporters and the accompanying fact sheet, White House officials said that none of the information relating to the "patterns of suspicious activity" cited by the C.I.A. had later been determined to be deemed related to the Sept. 11 attacks. It is only in retrospect, they argued, that the disparate pieces of evidence in the report seem to point toward what happened five weeks later. "Remember, this is just one report in a stream of reports — and the others pointed overseas," one official said.
The officials said that it remained unclear, however, whether the May 15 call to the embassy in the United Arab Emirates, which had not previously been disclosed, might have been a credible warning. They said the caller did not say where or when the attacks might occur, but that the call nevertheless prompted a May 17 meeting by the Counterterrorism Strategy Group, run at the time by Richard A. Clarke, to review the information.
Still, the White House fact sheet said, "We had no information, either before or after 9/11, that connects the caller's information with the 9/11 attacks."
The White House said that the surveillance of Federal Plaza in May 2001, which has previously been publicized, was of concern as late as August 2001 because the site was home to the courthouse where Mr. Rahman had been convicted.
The release of the document was itself historic; the few that have been released came only years after the president who received them left office. It has been produced by the C.I.A. for presidents since the 1960's.
The only items deleted from the version of the document that was made public were the names of foreign intelligence services that had provided information used in the report, White House officials said.
Ms. Rice and other White House officials have said that the Aug 6. assessment of the threat Mr. Bin Laden posed inside the United States was prepared in response to questions Mr. Bush had raised at previous briefings. In her testimony on Thursday, Dr. Rice told the commission, "I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States," referring to the possibility of domestic strikes by Al Qaeda.
Still, she added, "I don't remember the Al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about."
Asked directly if she had ever informed the president of intelligence suggesting that Qaeda terrorists were already in the United States and planning for attack, Ms. Rice said in her testimony that she could not remember.
In a background briefing for reporters and its fact sheet, the White House sought to minimize the significance of the document.
"The P.D.B. article did not warn of the 9/11 attacks," the White House said in the fact sheet. "The article advised the president of what was publicly well-known: that bin Laden had a desire to attack inside the United States."
While the White House would not describe what, if anything, Mr. Bush did with the information in the briefing, senior officials said their reading of it was that nothing beyond the efforts already under way appeared to be justified at the time.
Among other information presented in the Aug. 6 briefing, Mr. Bush was told that the F.B.I. was "conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related," according to the document. Ms. Rice disclosed that information in her testimony last week, as evidence that the government was on guard against the possibility of terrorist attacks. It is not clear how the F.B.I. came to that number, and some officials have said in recent days that it may have overstated their activity.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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