April 11, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Warning, but Clear?
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, 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.

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.



________________________________________________________________