From briefing, new questions on 9/11

Disclosure of a top-secret presidential briefing is fueling new questions, just as the White House was hoping to set the issue to rest in an election year, about how seriously the Bush administration took the terrorist threat before 9/11.

In the document, the President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence officials raised concerns about Al Qaeda activities - including the threat of hijackings - in the US.

It is true, as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testified last week, that this "PDB" did not contain specific warning of the strikes that were to occur weeks later.

But the memo appears likely to amplify concerns that the White House responded passively when warned of a dire threat.

The finger-pointing over whether the administration lacked enough solid information to act could continue Tuesday, when the 9/11 commission will hear testimony then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"The question is not whether you had enough specific intelligence to know where or when they would attack," says Jim Walsh, an international security expert at the Kennedy School of Government. "The question is: Did you engage a series of actions that would be sent throughout the system so you could protect yourself?"

While Dr. Rice was poised and unflappable in three hours or questioning last week, she repeatedly shifted responsibility to underlings, especially former counter-terrorism chief now uber-critic Richard Clarke, to make sure that presidential directives for more vigilance on terrorism were reached FBI field offices. "The responsibility for the FBI to do what it was asked was the FBI's responsibility," she said.

But a blame game is exactly what the administration didn't want. The White House originally opposed establishing an independent commission. But, pressed by 9/11 families, the commission was launched and now, as the campaign season heats up, it is still expanding its messy deconstruction of decisionmaking inside the executive branch.

Just 470 words long, the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB looms large in the 9/11 investigation because it's the one document that the president is sure to see. Until 6:05 p.m. on Easter eve, the general public had never seen the text of a PDB.

Pressed about the PDB last week, Rice described it as just a "historic document." Despite its title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike at the United States," nothing in it signaled the 9/11 attacks or could have prevented them, she said.

But in two days of hearings with law enforcement and intelligence officials starting Tuesday, Democrats on the 9/11 commission are sure to press questions about why the Bush administration did not respond more forcefully to the threats the memo outlined.

"It [the Aug. 6 PDB] is obviously is of signal importance because of its timing and where it went," says Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat on the 9/11 commission. "That's where the issue of leadership comes. People who are in the top echelon of leadership in this country know that the FBI is a very difficult bureaucracy to deal with, and unless there is constant direction ... it will revert to its normal way of doing business."

Critics are focusing on four observations in this briefing, likely to come up in further questioning on the 9/11 panel this week:

• That Osama bin Laden had wanted to bring the fight to America for four years.

• That Al Qaeda members, including US citizens, had been in the US for years.

• That the FBI was reporting "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparation for hijacking," including the surveillance of federal buildings in New York City.

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