Probing The Memo

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As the commission looking into the intelligence failures preceding 9/11 resumes its hearings this week, there will be a new exhibit A under public scrutiny: the supersecret CIA report on al-Qaeda that was given to George W. Bush as part of the President's Daily Brief (PDB) on Aug. 6, 2001, just weeks before the attacks on the U.S. At the hearings last week, the PDB had been an elephant in the room. Although the commissioners had read the 1 1/4 page text or a summary, and its title--"Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"--had been in the public domain since then White House press secretary Ari Fleischer mentioned it in May 2002 to indicate that Bush was aware of the al-Qaeda threat, the White House had refused to declassify the contents. After the commission demanded last week that the report be made public--with the families of 9/11 victims insisting as well--the White House released it last Saturday with only the names of intelligence sources blacked out.

The 9/11 commissioners will now be free to ask more specific and politically freighted questions about it, and the document is provocative yet vague enough in its discussion of terrorist threats to allow partisans on each side to see what they want. As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testified last week, the report fails to give specific indications about where, when or exactly how terrorists would attack. And much of the information is "historic," as Rice characterized the document. "The release of this PDB should clear up the myth," declared a senior White House official, "that the President was warned about the attacks of Sept. 11."

But the report, which was presented to Bush while he was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, seemed to be written by a CIA eager to sound an alarm. Citing clandestine and foreign-government sources, it asserts that the terrorist network had set up shop in the U.S., was carrying out suspicious activity, hoped to strike Washington, might even be planning to hijack airliners and was the focus of 70 FBI field investigations. The PDB also contains two new pieces of specific information that are likely to prompt more questions. One was a mention of "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." The Administration said last week it had followed up on that report and found that the suspicious characters turned out to be Yemeni tourists. Another item described a threat phoned in to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 in which the caller said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives. The caller gave no more specifics, and federal investigators never found a link between the tip and 9/11, the White House said.