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 Ladin Determined To Strike In U.S.," 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 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."
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 memo, part of the president’s daily briefing, in response to a demand from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Commission chairman Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview this weekend that he will push for declassification of another specific daily briefing related to al-Qaida that was delivered to former President Clinton, raising the possibility of heightened public scrutiny of the previous administration’s response as well.
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 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 briefs directly, while the rest of the members relied on a 17-page summary screened by the White House.
The 2001 memo declassified late Saturday — prepared by the CIA with some information provided by an FBI analyst — 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 buildings in New York; that the FBI had 70 investigations underway 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 the brief’s public release reached a crescendo Thursday with the testimony of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who told the Sept. 11 commission that the brief contained "historical information based on old reporting" and that it "did not warn of attacks inside the United States."
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 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."
Commission member Slade Gorton said Sunday on "Fox News Sunday" that when Clinton testified before the commission Thursday, he said the White House is "limited" in its dealings with and its control over the FBI.
Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, said he was surprised to learn that there wasn’t, at least at the time, more White House authority over the nation’s law enforcement agency.
"After all the scandals of the J. Edgar Hoover and some of the Nixon years, the White House has felt that it couldn’t give direct directions to the FBI," Gorton said. "And I think that was a great inhibiting factor, and it’s the reason I’m so interested in these so-called 70 field investigations."
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