Yet many in Congress are demanding public hearings into who knew what and when, and why it wasn't acted upon.
By PAUL DE LA GARZA, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 17, 2002
Yet many in Congress are demanding public hearings into who knew what and when, and why it wasn't acted upon.
WASHINGTON -- The White House scrambled Thursday to douse a political firestorm ignited by revelations that U.S. intelligence warned President Bush a month before Sept. 11 that the al-Qaida terrorist network might hijack American planes.
Angry lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, immediately called for an investigation of the classified briefing Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 6, 2001.
"What we have to do now is find out what the president -- what the White House -- knew about the events leading up to the events of 9/11, when they knew it and, most importantly, what was done about it," said House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo.
Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "There was a lot of information. I believe and others believe, if it had been acted on properly we may have had a different situation on Sept. 11."
Lawmakers pressed Bush to hand over the secret, 11/2-page CIA analysis and to release an FBI memo written earlier that warned bureau headquarters that many Middle Eastern men were training in at least one U.S. flight school. The existence of both documents has been confirmed by the government.
Bush did not comment publicly, but in a closed-door meeting with GOP senators, he suggested politics might be at play. Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., said, "He said, if there had been a strong warning -- to trust him, that he would have reacted quite forcefully."
The White House -- first in a briefing with White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and later with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- insisted that the intelligence Bush received on Aug. 6 had been vague, with no hint that hijacked airplanes would be used as weapons.
Calling the intelligence an "analytic report" rather than a "warning briefing," Rice said it "did not have warning information in it of the kind that said, they are talking about an attack against so forth or so on" but instead focused on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's methods of operation and "what he had done historically, in 1997, in 1998."
"It mentioned hijacking," Rice said, "but hijacking in the traditional sense" -- not using an airplane as a missile. She added: "I want to reiterate, it was not a warning. There was no specific time, place or method mentioned."
Asked why the White House did not make the information available to Americans who were getting on aircraft in the summer of last year, Rice emphasized the nonspecific nature of the intelligence. "It simply said, these are people who train and seem to talk possibly about hijackings -- that you would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information, I think you would have had to think five, six, seven times about that very, very hard."
Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, defended the White House's handling of the information.
The Florida Democrat said the purpose of intelligence briefings is to help leaders make policy choices. "But," he said, "no one should expect the president of the United States nor members of Congress to put on their James Bond uniforms and start becoming CIA case officers."
Paul Anderson, Graham's spokesman, said the senator learned about the Bush intelligence briefing on Monday.
Rep. Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the information Bush received was nothing new. A former CIA officer, Goss said his committee had received a similar "analytical profile" before Sept. 11.
"This is sort of business as usual when you're dealing with the No. 1 terrorist threat and methods used," the Sanibel Republican said.
Considering Bush's popularity, Goss said he would not be surprised if politics was behind the disclosure of the Aug. 6 briefing. "I would suggest the leak was designed to embarrass him," he said. He added, "There is no reason to be embarrassed."
Goss and Graham are the co-chairmen of upcoming congressional hearings into the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
Scott Brenner, an FAA spokesman, said the intelligence community had been passing warnings along regularly in the period before Sept. 11. As a result, he said, the FAA issued several bulletins to airlines and airports to take the appropriate measures.
"We never saw anything that identifed a specific threat and never told the airlines to take a specific course of action," Brenner said. "We just were sensitizing airlines and airports to the increased level of activity by terrorist groups."
Last summer, one of the warnings the FAA received mentioned bin Laden by name.
"We were letting the airports and airlines know everything that we knew," Brenner said. "We never had a specific threat that terrorists would be using aircraft for what they did."
Bill Harlow, a CIA spokesman, tried to put the intelligence briefings, which the president gets six times a week, in context. He said U.S. intelligence collects "tons" of information regarding potential terrorist attacks every day. Mostly, however, it's not enough to act on, he said.
"There are tons of information like that -- information, unsubstantiated information -- about possible terrorist acts," Harlow said, including potential biological, chemical and radiological attacks. "And it's very difficult to sift through it and provide the context necessary."
In its daily intelligence briefings to the president, Harlow said, the CIA routinely provides information related to terrorism. Responding to criticism that the intelligence community had failed to "connect the dots" represented by the flight school memo and the Bush briefing, Harlow said, "At the time, there was not one or two dots, but thousands of dots."
Indeed, Rice told reporters that the intelligence community began to detect an increase in the amount of "chatter" relating to terrorist strikes against U.S. interests both at home and abroad as early as December 2000. The chatter ebbed and flowed through the spring and summer.
"There was a clear concern that something was up, that something was coming," Rice said, "but it was principally focused overseas."
There was sufficient concern about a potential attack that national security officials at the White House were meeting twice a day, Rice said. She said the CIA went into "a full-court press" and managed to disrupt attacks in Paris, Turkey and Rome.
Still, bin Laden's interest in hijacking aircraft was no secret.
The 2000 edition of the FAA's annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation said, "bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation."
The previous year's edition of that report said that an exiled Islamic leader in Britain proclaimed in August 1998 that bin Laden would "bring down an airliner, or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States." The report did not identify the leader.
In 1994, Algerian terrorists hijacked a plane in a foiled attempt to destroy the Eiffel Tower. In 1995, terrorists in the Philippines plotted to hijack several U.S. planes, and there was even talk of crashing into CIA headquarters.
Some family members of the Sept. 11 victims reacted with anger. "I believe our whole government let people down," said Bill Doyle of New York City, whose son, Joseph, was killed inside the World Trade Center.
But Rice had a message for the families.
"This government did everything that it could in a period in which the information was very generalized, in which there was nothing specific to react to," Rice said. "And had this president known something more specific, or known that a plane was going to be used as a missile, he would have acted on it."
-- Times staff writer Bill Adair contributed to this report, which also used information from Times wires.
This is the key. We've dealt with the threat of hijackings for thirty years now. But the threat of hijacking in order to deliberately crash a plane was unprecedented up to September 11.
"When did Bush know of the threat?" Same day the rest of us did: September 11, 2001. F you, Daschle and rest of you 'Rats.