Bush says memo lacked specific facts

WASHINGTON -- President Bush insisted yesterday that the Aug. 6, 2001, classified briefing he received on domestic threats by Al Qaeda satisfied him there was no specific terrorist attack planned and that he certainly was prepared to respond to "actionable intelligence."

"I'm satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America at a time and a place of an attack," the president told reporters after attending Easter services with US troops at Fort Hood, Texas.

Bush made his remarks less than 24 hours after the White House, under pressure from the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, released the previously classified President's Daily Brief, or PDB, of Aug. 6. The memorandum discloses that US intelligence agencies were aware of an active domestic terrorist network within the United States, and the FBI suspected Al Qaeda could be preparing for airline hijackings and had federal buildings in New York under surveillance.

The report could have political consequences for the president if the public perceives that the White House had advance warning of the deadly Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington and did not act to protect the targets. Yesterday, the president said that before Sept. 11, his administration had been engaged in following leads and examining "every scintilla of evidence."

"Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack," Bush added, noting that he had requested the secret briefing because there had been specific international terrorist threats from Al Qaeda. "Had there been actionable intelligence, we would have moved on it."

In her testimony before the Sept. 11 commission Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice described the material in the 1 1/2-page briefing as "historical information based on old reporting and contained no new threat information." Yesterday, the president did not assert that the information was stale but argued the threats were not specific and were being monitored by the FBI.

"It was said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that," said Bush, referring to an unsubstantiated intelligence report cited in the memorandum that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US airliner to gain the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. "What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we need to react to?

"The question was, you know, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what?" Bush said, adding that he was "satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into." Bush received the briefing during a vacation at his Texas ranch.

The document revealed that the FBI was conducting some 70 full field investigations in the United States that it considered "bin Laden-related," and the CIA and FBI also were investigating a call to the US Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 that said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives.

This week, the current FBI director, Robert S. Mueller, and former director Louis Freeh will appear before the Sept. 11 commission and are expected to be grilled on why those field investigations did not yield information that could have foiled the hijackers' plot. In an interview yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," former senator Slade Gorton, a commission member, said "the FBI has more questions to answer than anyone we've had testify before us so far."

Gorton, a Washington state Republican, said that the most surprising information provided to the commission last week by former President Clinton was "how limited the White House is in dealing with the FBI."

"You know, after all of the scandals of [former FBI director] J. Edgar Hoover and some in the Nixon years," he said, "the White House has felt that it couldn't give direct directions to the FBI, and I think that was a great inhibiting factor." Gorton called Clinton's testimony, made to the commission in private on Thursday, "totally frank and forthcoming."

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commission member, said on "Fox News Sunday" that if the FBI had paid more attention to warnings from agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis about Arab men training at US flight schools, "it might have led to the unraveling of the plot." FBI officials have said that the presidential briefing document may have exaggerated the scope of its antiterrorism investigations.

The commission will also hear from CIA director George Tenet, former attorney general Janet Reno, and her successor, John Ashcroft, this week. "We're going to look at how the Justice Department prioritized counterterrorism in its various activities," Ben-Veniste said.

Senator John F. Kerry has made no comment on the newly released document. The Massachusetts Democrat said late Saturday he will not discuss the intelligence details about the Sept. 11 attack until the commission releases its final report.

But Senator John S. McCain, Republican of Arizona, said yesterday the memorandum to the president "should have raised more of an alarm bell than it did.

"The administration, both Clinton and the Bush administration, hold responsibility," McCain said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Our intelligence service, our Congress -- where was Congress? We have intelligence committees. Where was the media when some of this information came to light? We're all responsible. But there's only one group that's to blame, and that's Al Qaeda."

Yesterday, both Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and McCain asserted that the United States will need to increase its troop strength in Iraq. "It's obvious that we're paying a heavy price, I think, for not having had enough troops there from the beginning," McCain said.

Bush told reporters that it had been a "tough week" in Iraq, and said the violence was largely the work of gangs -- "a few people trying to stop progress toward democracy." He said "our troops are taking care of business," but added that he would not rule out increasing the size of the force, now at about 135,000 soldiers, if US commanders on the ground in Iraq request it.

Glen Johnson of the Globe staff contributed to this report.