Associated Press
April 13, 2004
Officials: Pre-9/11 Memo Excluded Data
By John SolomonPresident Bush wasn't the only one to get a memo in August 2001 about the threat of Osama bin Laden striking on U.S. soil. Senior government policy-makers got a similar document one day later, but theirs excluded most of the recent threat information the president had received, officials say.
The Aug. 7, 2001, Senior Executive Intelligence Brief didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al-Qaida activity that the president had been told of a day earlier in a top-secret memo titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.," government officials told The Associated Press.
The senior executives' memo also did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of possible attacks with explosives in the United States or that the FBI had concerns about recent activities like the casing of buildings in New York, the officials said.
Some members of Congress on Monday said they were concerned that senior executive memos and other similar documents may have given policy-makers below Bush an incomplete picture of the terror threat at the time.
But administration officials said there was nothing sinister about the deletions because such memos are prepared for two different audiences. The CIA historically uses different standards for the president's daily intelligence update and the one for senior policy-makers, the officials said.
Typically, the senior executives' memo goes to scores of Cabinet-agency officials from the assistant secretary level and up and doesn't include raw intelligence or sensitive information about ongoing law enforcement matters, officials said.
That is done to guard against unnecessary leaks and because that type of sensitive information isn't deemed essential to be distributed to all policy-makers, officials said.
Terrorism policy-makers and those on the front lines get that information directly from targeted raw intelligence reports. For instance, CIA, FBI, Customs and immigration and White House anti-terror officials had received the May 2001 intelligence report about a possible al-Qaida explosives plot on U.S. soil shortly after it arrived and were investigating it by the time the president learned of it, the officials said.
The senior executives' memo "is not used as a way to transmit actionable (raw) intelligence," an administration official said. "Instead, policy-makers making counterterrorism policy receive their information about particular threats through a variety of other ways such as human source reports, signal intelligence and law enforcement reports."
The officials would only discuss the senior executives' memo on condition of anonymity because it remains classified.
Some who saw the memo say they feared it gave policy-makers and members of the congressional intelligence committees a picture of the domestic threat so stale and incomplete that it didn't provide the necessary sense of urgency one month before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., said Monday he had not yet been able to compare the two memos, but would be concerned if senior policy-makers and congressional intelligence committee members weren't aware at the time that they were missing some relevant intelligence provided to the president.
"I think it is an important policy issue that we may not know everything the president knows but we at least should know we don't know some things, that there is something being withheld," Graham said.
Members of Congress, outside experts and the independent commission investigating pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures are more broadly questioning whether useful intelligence was, and still is, being held too closely.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee who on Monday urged the release of all classified materials on bin Laden since 1998, said the sharing of classified information is still being affected by "fundamental issues of trust" and turf battles.
"The system is dysfunctional. It is more than broken. It is more than the left hand doesn't, from time to time, communicate with the right hand," he said.
Bush administration officials stress that regardless of what was put in the two August 2001 memos, nothing given to the president or senior policy-makers foretold of the horrors that would unfold five weeks later during the suicide hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Access to both the presidential and senior executive intelligence briefings was greatly reduced across the government at the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush administration because of concerns about repeated leaks.
Government watchdogs, however, question assertions by the Bush administration that the public release this weekend of the president's daily intelligence memo from August 2001 set a potentially dangerous precedent that could hamper future presidents' ability to get candid advice.
The National Security Archive, which collects previously secret government documents, has published at least 10 declassified presidential daily briefings over the years.
Steven Aftergood, who oversees the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said former CIA Director Robert Gates also was allowed to publish information from at least two presidential briefing memos in his memoir.
"It shows the claim that this whole category of documents must remain secret is utterly hollow," Aftergood said. "There must be many more briefs that could be released like this one with absolutely no harm to security, and to the benefit of the public understanding."
Copyright 2004 Associated Press