White House releases pre-Sept. 11 memo that warns of possible al-Qaida attacks

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Yielding to increasing outside pressure, the White House on Saturday relented and released a newly declassified memo to President Bush, warning of possible al-Qaida terrorist attacks within the United States a month before the Sept. 11 strikes on New York and Washington.

Bush received a one-and-a-half page memo, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," from the CIA on Aug. 6, 2001, while vacationing at his Texas ranch. It included two recent warnings that al-Qaida terrorists might be plotting attacks inside the United States, the White House said Saturday.

One incident described in the Aug. 6 memo mentioned "patterns of suspicious activity in this country with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks in this country, consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including the recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The other item was a call in May 2001, to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates, warning that supporters of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network were "in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

The White House, however, said investigators at the time could not determine any links to terrorism.

"There is no information that either incident was related to the 9-11 attacks," the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the release of the Aug. 6 memo, called a President's Daily Brief.

The president was also told that the FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related."

The widow of one man who died in the World Trade Center attacks, remained unconvinced, though, that the government had done everything it could to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Mindy Kleinberg of New Jersey said she was "kind of sick to her stomach" after reading the memo, which the White House released Saturday night in a carefully orchestrated series of events, just before Easter Sunday.

"This is a piece of a puzzle," she said. "Somewhere in the government there was an understanding that attacks could happen here - not just overseas."

"I want to know what follow-up was there," she said. "Did the president then go and ask the FBI what was going on with the 70 full-field investigations, did he then contact NORAD and say you know what, you're looking outward in a Cold War posture but we're getting some indication here that something could happen inside the United States so perhaps you should be looking inward?"

In its fact sheet and a background briefing by a pair of senior administration officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, the White House said the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration had issued an unspecified "number of warnings about the possibility of terrorist attacks, including raising the specific possibility of airliner hijackings to free "imprisoned al-Qaida members inside the United States and the possibility of attacks in response to law enforcement actions against al-Qaida members.

While Kleinberg said much of the information released Saturday wasn't new to her, having been revealed by the congressional inquiry into 9-11 intelligence failures and the work of the special Sept. 11 investigating commission, she said it would have an impact on the public debate.

"To the public this is new because there's been a constant hum of `We couldn't have known, we didn't know anything, we didn't have a memo as to time and place,' " she said.

"That was not true. We were not totally caught off guard.

"They can't bring my husband back, I already know that. But they are holding nobody accountable for dropping the ball."

Another widow, Lorie Van Auken, said she found the brief "disturbing."

"Washington. New York. Bin Laden. Hijackings," she said. "It just doesn't say the date."

"Yeah, 20-20 hindsight is 20-20, but this wasn't in a vacuum," she said.

Asked if the release of the memo changed anything, she said: "We already know that this was an enormous failure."

Both she and Kleinberg are members of the Family Steering Committee, a survivors' group that was instrumental in lobbying Congress to create the 9-11 Commission.

The declassification of the presidential brief was in its own right a historic release of government secrets.

It had been prepared by the CIA in the summer of 2001 after the president had raised questions about whether al-Qaida terrorists might strike the United States.

It was delivered to him on Aug. 6 at his ranch, where he was on vacation for most of the month.

The White House had sought to keep the briefing paper confidential because of its classified nature, but finally relented under continuing pressure from Congress, the Sept. 11 commission and from relatives of some of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York.

For months, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had characterized the brief as an historic or analytic document that offered the president no specific warnings of pending terrorist attacks.

For instance, on May 16, 2002, Rice described the document as an "analytic report," saying: "It was not a warning ... There was no specific time or place mentioned."

"It mentioned hijacking, but hijacking in the traditional sense," she said.

The brief, in which the names of several other countries were blacked out to protect intelligence sources, also said bin Laden had "told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington" after former President Bill Clinton had ordered cruise missile strikes on his camp in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the intelligence memo indicated that plans to attack the United States from Canada around the time at the end of 1999 "may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S."

Convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam, the memo said, had told the FBI that he had thought of an attack at about the same time on Los Angeles International Airport, and a top bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation."

Members of the al-Qaida terrorist network, including some U.S. citizens, had "resided in or traveled in the U.S. for years," the memo said, and apparently maintained "a support structure that could aid attacks," the brief reported.

Still, the memo cautioned that "some of the more sensational threat reporting," such as reports that bin Laden wanted to hijack planes to win the release of imprisoned "extremists," could not be corroborated.

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