Spring Break
Debate continues over the pre-Sept. 11 memo to Bush
By: Pete Yost — The Associated Press
Issue date: 4/12/04 Section: News
CRAWFORD, Texas - For two years, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice left Americans with the impression that President George W. Bush's pre-Sept. 11 terrorism briefing focused on historical information dating to 1998 and that any current threats mostly involved overseas targets.
Yet the release, under public pressure, of the president's briefing memo from Aug. 6, 2001, showed that Bush had received intelligence reporting as recent as May 2001 and that most of the current information focused on possible plots in the United States.
Bush insisted Sunday he was satisfied that federal agents were on top of the terrorist threat when he read that memo, which detailed Osama bin Laden's intentions on U.S. soil.
''I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into'' and had any specific intelligence pointed to threats of attacks on New York and Washington, ''I would have moved mountains'' to prevent it, Bush said during a visit to Fort Hood in Texas.
But he said the document, which the White House released Saturday night, contained ''nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America - well, we knew that.''
Should the memo - a leading topic of the Sunday talk shows - have raised ''more of an alarm bell than it did? I think in hindsight that's probably true,'' said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He said the Clinton and Bush administrations bear responsibility for Sept. 11.
The existence of the president's briefing memo was disclosed to the public at a news conference in May 2002. The ''overwhelming bulk of the evidence'' before Sept. 11, Rice declared, was that any terrorist attack ''was likely to take place overseas.''
Most of the CIA reporting during the summer of 2001 did focus on possible overseas targets. But the memo specifically told Bush that al-Qaida had reached American shores, had a support system in place and was engaging in ''patterns of suspicious activity ... consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.''
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