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Bush: Nothing Warned of 9/11 Attacks

Posted on: Sunday, 11 April 2004, 06:00 CDT

FORT HOOD, Texas - President Bush said Sunday he was satisfied before Sept. 11, 2001, that federal agents were on top of the terrorist threat when he read a briefing memo on Osama bin Laden's intention to strike inside the United States.

"I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence," Bush said, and when he read the memo of Aug. 6, 2001, "I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into."

In his first comments since Saturday's release of the presidential daily brief, Bush said the document contained "nothing about an attack on America."

Bush said if there had been any specific intelligence pointing to threats of attacks on New York and Washington, "I would have moved mountains" to prevent it.

Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot. Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to the memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday.

White House aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president ever publicly releasing the highly sensitive document, known as a PDB, for presidential daily briefing.

The Aug. 6, 2001 PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, asked the White House to declassify the document at its meeting Thursday. It is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike.

The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years.

Senior administration officials said Bush saw more than 40 mentions of al-Qaida in his daily intelligence updates during the first eight months of his presidency. The CIA prepared the document "in response to questions asked by the president about the possibility of attacks by al-Qaida inside the U.S," one said.

But the senior officials refused to say what Bush's response to the memo was.

Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said the memo "didn't call for anything to be done" by Bush.

The memo's details confirm that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving airplanes as missiles, Thompson said.

"The PDB backs up what Dr. Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun," he said.

"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.," the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After President Clinton launched missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington," the memo said.

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