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Bush Says Brief on Al Qaeda Threat Was Not Specific
April 12, 2004
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, April 11 - President Bush said on Sunday that
the intelligence briefing he received on Al Qaeda one month
before the Sept. 11 strike contained no specific
"indication of a terrorist attack" on American soil. He
also defended the adequacy of his response to the warnings
that terrorists in the United States might be planning
hijackings.
Mr. Bush, in his first public remarks since the release of
his top-secret briefing Saturday evening, played down the
urgency of the information he was given at his ranch 36
days before terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. In doing
so, Mr. Bush echoed the testimony last week by his national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, before the commission
investigating the attacks, which had pushed for the release
of the briefing.
"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," Mr. Bush said after attending
Easter services in Fort Hood, Tex. "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."
Still, Mr. Bush for the first time suggested that others in
his administration may not have done enough to head off the
attacks. "That's what the 9/11 commission should look into,
and I hope it does," he said.
Mr. Bush said he understood in the summer of 2001 that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into domestic
terrorist threats, adding, "That's what we expect the
F.B.I. to do." The bureau's counterterrorism efforts are
the focus of hearings this week by the independent
commission.
Mr. Bush's remarks came after a week in which the president
had remained largely out of view, even as violence was
escalating in Iraq and as his terrorism policies were being
challenged.
His comments were part of a White House effort to quell the
storm about the briefing he received on Aug. 6, 2001.
Democrats and Republicans said on Sunday that the release
of the document - combined with images of American
bloodshed and the disorder in Iraq - was threatening the
central pillar of the president's re-election campaign, his
record on managing national security.
The Aug. 6 report to Mr. Bush that was released Saturday
evening was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
It cited evidence of active Qaeda cells in the United
States, as well as reports that members of the terrorist
organization had conducted recent surveillance of a federal
building in Manhattan and could be preparing to stage
hijackings. The briefing cited threats logged as recently
as May 2001.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bush, like Ms. Rice in her sworn
testimony, said the Aug. 6 report, the President's Daily
Brief, or P.D.B., contained no new information that merited
a stepped-up response by the White House.
"The P.D.B. was no indication of a terrorist threat," Mr.
Bush said. "There was not a time and place of an attack. It
said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew
that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything
specifically going to take place in America that we needed
to react to?"
His comments came as the chairman of the independent
commission, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of
New Jersey, said in an interview that he would push for
public disclosure of a second highly classified
presidential briefing, this one provided to former
President Bill Clinton. Mr. Kean said that document also
involved Qaeda threats and was "very pertinent to our
work."
In a sign of the potential impact that the commission
investigation could have in the fall, Rand Beers, the
senior policy adviser to John Kerry, Mr. Bush's likely
Democratic opponent, said on Sunday that the White House
had failed to pay proper heed to warnings included in the
briefing. Mr. Beers noted that he had worked in the
National Security Council under four presidents, including
Mr. Bush, a post that gave him access to such briefings.
"To the knowledgeable reader of the presidential daily
brief - and I read it for a number of years when I was in
the Clinton White House, and I read it again when I was in
the Bush White House, although just the terrorism portions
of it - that document was intended to tell the president of
the United States that there was a serious problem," he
said on the ABC news program "This Week."
"The title, `Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack the
U.S.,' was not a lightly chosen title," Mr. Beers said,
adding: "It said there was an intent to attack. It said
there were cells within the United States, and they had
been there for some time. It said that Al Qaeda was very
deliberate in its planning process and would take the time
necessary in order to attack the United States. And then
there were several pieces of information which suggested
that there was some current activity within the United
States."
Mr. Kerry himself continued to step carefully around the
issue, offering reporters an Easter greeting as he left
church in Boston, but declining to answer any questions.
Some Republicans have also questioned whether the White
House did enough in response to the Aug. 6 report. "Should
it have raised more of an alarm bell?" Senator John McCain,
an Arizona Republican who is often critical of the Bush
administration, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think in
hindsight, that's probably true."
In a telephone interview, Mr. Kean said he was pleased that
the White House had agreed to the commission's request to
release the briefing, and said he did not see its finding
as "a smoking gun."
"I don't think there's a lot of new information in it," Mr.
Kean said, adding: "It's time the public saw it. It has
been characterized and mischaracterized. There's nothing in
it that I've seen that in any way jeopardizes security."
Mr. Kean, who has been allowed to read large portions of
the daily briefings that were provided to both President
Bush and President Clinton, has said before that he did not
believe any of the briefings before Sept. 11 contained
information that would now suggest government malfeasance
before the attacks.
Mr. Bush's appearance at Fort Hood came at the start of
what could be a critical week in his presidency. His
administration faces more hearings, questions generated by
the release of the Aug. 6 briefing and challenges by some
Democrats to Ms. Rice's credibility based on her
characterization of the report.
A Newsweek poll published on Sunday showed that just 36
percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the
way "things are going," a finding that members of both
parties said was reason for concern for Mr. Bush.
But Republicans close to Mr. Bush said they were confident
that he was surviving this storm, and suggested that
challenges to Ms. Rice would be dismissed by most Americans
as partisanship.
"I actually think that the commission has not changed
people's opinion," said one senior Republican official, who
would only discuss the political ramifications of the
investigation on the promise of anonymity. "If anything,
Condi's testimony has reinforced everything this
administration has done for terror."
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York,
disparaged Republicans who had grown nervous over the turn
of events. "Let's face it: The president's campaign depends
upon him - over the course of time, not in a one-week time
span - showing that the situation in Iraq is improving,
that we are winning, and we do have a strategy to get out,"
he said.
"He has seven months to show that," Mr. King said. "I'm
positive that in the fullness of time, the president is
going to show that it works. But he's chosen a tough road
to go down."
Still, Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential scholar at
Princeton University, said Mr. Bush was in a difficult
spot.
"The cumulative effect for Bush of just everything that is
going on - the seeming hemorrhaging in Iraq, as the
hearings - is very painful," Mr. Greenstein said. "I think
the administration might have well hoped that by this time
in the election cycle, things would have settled down in
Iraq and they would have been busy defining Kerry as soft
on national security and building on triumphant images of
Bush on aircraft carriers."
And Samuel Popkin, a professor of political science at the
University of California in San Diego, said that Mr. Bush's
first response on the subject would not do much to staunch
what he, too, described as a significant threat to his
re-election.
"Truman said, `The buck stops here,' " Mr. Popkin said.
"Bush is saying, `The buck never got to me.' "
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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