ASHINGTON, April 10 — In a single 17-sentence
document, the intelligence briefing delivered to President
Bush in August 2001 spells out the who, hints at the what and
points toward the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington that followed 36 days later.
Whether its disclosure does lasting damage to Mr. Bush's
presidency and re-election prospects may depend on whether the White
House succeeds in persuading Americans that, as a whole, its
significance adds up to less than a sum of those parts.
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In a written rebuttal twice as long as the document itself, the
White House sought Saturday night to drive home a single major
point: that the briefing "did not warn of the 9/11 attacks." The
idea that Al Qaeda wanted to strike in the United States was already
evident, senior officials argued. They also said that while the
document cited fresh details to make that case, they were
insufficient to prompt any action.
Still, after two years in which the White House sought to prevent
the disclosure of the document, Mr. Bush's critics are bound to
seize on those details as evidence that the president had something
to hide. While the White House has insisted the document was mostly
vague and historical, critics will certainly seek now to paint it as
something historic.
At a time, in the summer of 2001, when Mr. Bush and his advisers
have said that the vast bulk of intelligence information pointed to
the danger of a terrorist attack abroad, the Aug. 6 briefing can be
read as a clear-cut warning that Osama Bin Laden had his sights set
on targets within the United States and had already launched
operations within America's borders. Based in part on continuing
investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Central Intelligence Agency, the brief spelled out fresh reason for
concern about Qaeda attacks, very possibly using hijacked airplanes
and conceivably in New York or Washington.
Depending on which side is arguing the point in this rancorous
election year, the "patterns of suspicious activity" cited in the
document will be presented either as yet another sign that the
pre-Sept. 11 warnings were always too vague to act on, as the White
House has argued, or as new evidence that Mr. Bush and his advisers
were too slow to sense the danger at hand.
In making their case, White House officials who spoke to
reporters in a conference call and issued a three-page "fact sheet"
sought repeatedly to minimize the significance of the document.
"None of the information relating to the `patterns of suspicious
activity' was later deemed to be related to the 9/11 attacks," the
document issued by the White House said. The idea that Mr. bin Laden
and his supporters wanted to carry out attacks in the United States,
a senior official said, "was already publicly known," while the
fresh concerns outlined in the document — about surveillance of
federal buildings in New York, and a telephone warning to an
American Embassy in the Persian Gulf — "were being pursued
aggressively by the appropriate agencies."
Still, a preview of a very different assessment could be heard
even last week, as Democratic members of the independent commission
on the Sept. 11 attacks confronted Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser, with pointed questions about the briefing.
Why, Timothy J. Roemer, the former congressman, wanted to know in
that session, had not Mr. Bush, vacationing in Texas, responded to
the warnings at least by summoning cabinet-level advisers for a
meeting on terrorism, something that had not occurred by that point
in his administration.
"At a time when our intelligence experts were warning of a
possible strike against the United States, it's clear that the
administration didn't take the threat seriously enough to marshal
the resources that might have possibly thwarted the attack," said
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on
the Intelligence Committee.
In deciding to release the portion of the daily briefing
document, something no previous White House has ever done, Mr. Bush
and his advisers were clearly attuned to the potential political
damage that had been caused as its contents began to leak out
following Ms. Rice's testimony on Thursday. In taking the step,
White House officials seemed determined to head off the protests
before accounts in the Sunday morning newspapers and on talk shows
inflicted another round of damage.
But in taking the step after 6 p.m. on Saturday, the day before
Easter, the White House may also have been seeking to shorten the
time that critics might have to offer their own interpretations of
the document.
Particularly in recent weeks, after the former counterterrorism
adviser Richard A. Clarke accused the White House of having failed
to treat terrorism as an urgent priority in the months before Sept.
11, Mr. Bush's advisers have asked that their actions be viewed in
their proper context.
In the summer of 2001, they have argued, the wave of warnings
about possible attacks was indeed alarming, but it was almost always
too vague to prompt any concrete action. While the intelligence was
often credible, they contend, it was rarely specific.
With the disclosure of the Aug. 6 document, however, the
specific, contemporary nature of what it contained will almost
certainly confront the White House with more questions asking "what
if?" Of the specific, contemporary information, the most tantalizing
may be the May 15 warning to the American Embassy in the United Arab
Emirates, "saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the
U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
White House officials said Saturday they had "no information"
connecting that call to the Sept. 11 attacks. But they conceded that
they could not rule out such a link.
"Nothing pointed to a specific attack in a specific location," a
senior White House official said on Saturday night, in trying to
minimize the significance of the C.I.A.'s concern about the
"patterns of suspicious activity." Whether that lack of specificity
should have made it any less arresting as a call to action by Mr.
Bush and his aides will be debated in the days ahead, perhaps most
importantly by the commission as it prepares to render a judgment
about Mr. Bush's performance.
