12 April 2004, Matt Bivens, The Daily Outrage
Only George W. Bush could study a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US," and then blithely assert that it "said nothing about an attack on America."
Note to the President: "US" is a common abbreviation for "the United States of America", the country we live in and of which you are the highest elected official, a country also often referred to in shorthand as "America." Good luck with that whole national security thing from here on out.
The "Bin Laden Determined to Strike" memo, reluctantly released this weekend, was first presented as an intelligence briefing for the President on Aug. 6, 2001 -- while he was in Texas enjoying a near-record-setting month-long siesta. Ever since -- and outrageously, even to the present day, when the actual document is out there contradicting them -- Bush and Condoleeza Rice have slyly characterized it as a brief history lesson about al-Qaida, when it is actually a reasonably specific warning.
"There was nothing in there that said, you know, 'There is an imminent attack'," Bush insisted again as late as today. "That wasn't what the report said. The report was kind of a history of Osama's intentions."
Horsefeathers. You can read the whole memo here and judge yourself. It says, among other things, that "al-Qaida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks"; that "FBI information ... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks"; that this suspicious activity includes "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York;" that the FBI is conducting 70 full field investigations across the country that are "bin-Laden related;" and that an anonymous tip in May 2001 warned "that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks."
In fact, this "Bin Laden to Strike" memo is a truly damning piece of evidence. If the President and his team had acted appropriately on it -- by which I mean, if he'd simply ordered his top people to get together to discuss how serious it was -- 9/11 might well have been prevented.
That's the opinion of one veteran of intelligence work for the State Department and the CIA, a man who's also a registered Republican and Bush backer. He writes:
"At a minimum, the details in the 6 August [memo] should have motivated Rice to convene a principals' meeting. Such a meeting would have ensured that all members of the president's national security team were aware of the information that had been shared with the president. George Bush should have directed the different department heads to report back within one week on any information relevant to the Al Qaeda threat. Had he done this there is a high probability that the FBI field agents' concerns about Arabs taking flight training would have rung some bells. There is also a high probability that the operations folks at CIA would have shared the information they had in hand about the presence of Al Qaeda operators in the United States."
* * *
The President counters, essentially, that he trusted the FBI to do its job. Fair enough. But consider the following exchange he had today with journalists -- and note in particular everybody's confusion about who was in charge of the FBI in those days:
Q: I'd like to take you back to August 6, 2001, if I could, and ask you about your personal response when you received the [Presidential Daily Briefing]. Do you recall whether you called Bob Mueller and asked him about what the FBI was doing, asked about these 70 field investigations? And, also, did your mind go back to the PDB when September 11th hit?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Bob Mueller wasn't the Director of the FBI at the time.
Q: Did you call the Director?
PRESIDENT BUSH: I don't think there was a Director.
What's all this about? Well, we were between FBI directors: Louis Freeh left in June 2001, and Robert Mueller took over one week before 9/11. All that summer, the Acting Director of the FBI was a man named Thomas J. Pickard.
The President continues his remarks:
President Bush: [The Aug. 6 memo] included the fact that the FBI was conducting field investigations, which comforted me. You see, it meant the FBI was doing its job, the FBI was running down any lead. And I will tell you this, Scott [the President is addressing a journalist directly here], that had they found something, I'm confident they would have reported back to me. That's the way the system works. And whoever was the Acting FBI Director, had they found something, would have said, Mr. President, we have found something that you need to be concerned about in your duties to protect America. That didn't happen.
Hmm. Well, first of all, if the President had been truly engaged instead of vacationing, then he ought to have known "whoever was the Acting FBI Director." But the FBI director answers to the Attorney General; perhaps Bush assumed it was enough for him to be in touch with John Ashcroft on these matters.
More importantly, that particular "whoever was" -- Acting FBI Director Pickard -- will be testifying this week before the 9/11 commission. Apparently all that long summer of 2001, a frustrated Pickard was writing internal memos critical of Ashcroft's lack of interest in counterterrorism. The AG himself may have stopped flying commercial flights in July 2001 out of terrorism concerns, but that seems to have been the limit of his commitment. That, plus Ashcroft's decision on September 10, 2001, to cut the FBI's counter-terrorism budget by $58 million.
Chalk this up to yet another opportunity missed. An engaged President who had ordered his national security team to gather and discuss the Aug. 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" report might have seized it, instead of kicking back while it slipped away.
Keystone Kounter-Terror
