From briefing, new questions on 9/11

• That in May 2001 an informer in the United Arab Emirates reported that a group of bin Laden supporters were in the US planning attacks with explosives.

All these observations challenge whether Bush administration officials can get by with saying no one knew what this meant or could have responded better to protect Americans on 9/11.

Already, national security experts are challenging whether that briefing was merely "historical."

"Condi Rice was being a little disingenuous when she said this was a historic document - that it wasn't current. Most intelligence estimates include history. History is what happened right up to yesterday. You always describe patterns and trends that lead you to a certain conclusion," says Judith Yaphe, a security expert at the National Defense University in Washington and former Iraq analyst at the CIA.

"If you write something for the PDB, it means there is a reason this has to be brought to the attention of the president.... I wrote enough to know why you write them that way," she adds.

Others say the document must be understood as just one of many national-security issues brought before the president.

"You get briefs like that every day," Richard Perle, a former Pentagon adviser, said Sunday on ABC. "There was not enough specificity to take action."

Still, critics' concerns are at the heart of the questions expected to be taken up when the 9/11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, questions top law enforcement officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations this week.

Experts expect that the FBI will bear a brunt of the criticism for failure to move on Al Qaeda operatives in the US in 2001. The congressional joint inquiry on the 9/11 attacks concluded that the FBI was "unable to identify and monitor effectively the extent of activity by Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups operating in the United States."

More recently, former Rep. Tim Roemer (D) of Indiana reported that after thousands of interviews, "We have found nobody ... at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices" to step up investigation of the terrorist threat that summer.

"The FBI does have to answer this question that Rice put on the table so bluntly: Why don't you cooperate with the CIA and why didn't you before 9/11, when we know Al Qaeda had become such a serious threat to the US," says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution.

Critics say that, ultimately, the answer to that question goes all the way to the top of the Bush administration.

It's enough of a problem that Republicans are now worried the 9/11 investigation is turning into something like an impeachment hearing.

"Individual members have certainly displayed an attitude which is very troubling," says Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas, commenting on release of the briefing. "Even through the lens of hindsight, I find it difficult to see how anything in the briefing could or should have led to a specific action that would have prevented the tragedy of 9/11."

"It was inevitable that the 9/11 commission would get mixed up in presidential politics," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. "The American people wanted a nonpartisan Warren commission, and instead they got a partisan Clinton impeachment hearing."

• Faye Bowers contributed to this story.

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