White house releases secret bin Laden memo

A secret US government memo released early today reveals President George Bush was told more than a month before the September 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America’s shores and the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.

Since 1998, the FBI had observed “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks”, according to the declassified memo prepared for Bush.

Presidential aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president ever publicly releasing the highly-sensitive document, known as a PDB, for presidential daily briefing.

The August 6, 2001, PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the US embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May, 2001, “saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives”.

The commission investigating the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, asked the US administration to declassify the document at its meeting on Thursday.

The memo is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike.

The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years.

Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former US senator, said the memo’s details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more intelligence information about possible domestic hijackings.

“The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States – this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn’t scramble our agencies to that,” he said.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner, said the memo called into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s assertion on Thursday that the memo was purely a “historical” document.

“This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security,” he said.

Senior US administration officials said Bush saw more than 40 mentions of al-Qaida in his daily intelligence updates during the first eight months of his presidency.

The CIA prepared the document “in response to questions asked by the president about the possibility of attacks by al-Qaida inside the US”, one said.

But the officials refused to say what Bush’s response to the memo was.

Republican commissioner James Thompson, a former state governor, said the memo “didn’t call for anything to be done” by Bush.

The memo’s details confirmed that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving planes as missiles, Thompson said.

“The PDB backs up what Dr Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun,” he said.

“Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,” the memo to Bush stated.

Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America”.

After President Bill Clinton launched missile strikes on bin Laden’s base in Afghanistan in 1998, in retaliation for bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people, “bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington”, the memo said.

The memo cited intelligence from other countries in three instances, but the administration blacked out the names of the nations.

Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or travelled to the United States for years, the memo said.

“The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks,” it warned.

The document said that “some of the more sensational threat reporting” - such as an intelligence tip in 1998 that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to win the release of fellow extremists – could not be corroborated.

One item in the memo referred to “recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York”. An administration official said that was a reference to two Yemeni men the FBI interviewed and concluded were simply tourists taking photographs.

On May 15, 2001, a caller to the US embassy in the United Arab Emirates warned of planned bin Laden attacks with explosives in the United States, but did not say where or when.

The CIA reported the incident to other government officials the next day, and a dozen or more steps were taken by the CIA and other agencies “to run down” the information from the phone call, senior administration officials said.

One official said references to al-Qaida in prior presidential briefings “would indicate ‘they are here, they are there’ in various countries” and the CIA director would tell the president what was being done to address ”these different operations”.