Some Outlets Distort and Exaggerate Meaning
of August 2001 Memo
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Some outlets over the weekend hyped the meaning of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) memo<font size=3> which was publicly released Saturday afternoon, <font size=4>suggesting it contained a warning specific enough for President George W. Bush to act on, thus leading the White House to keep it secret for so long.<font size=3> ABC anchor Claire Shipman breathlessly announced that <font size=4>“a classified anti-terrorism report told President Bush, before September 11th, that al-Qaeda wanted to carry out attacks inside the U.S.”
Though PDB’s are never released, Shipman suggested<font size=3> the
White House went out of its way to keep this one
secret: <font size=4>“It’s something the administration wanted to keep
out of public view.” <font size=3>
On CNN’s Capital Gang on Saturday night, the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt declared: <font size=4>“It shatters what was a very forceful appearance by Dr. Rice.”<font size=3> Later, on CNN’s 10pm EDT hour of news, anchor Carol Lin insisted <font size=4>“it reads like a laundry list of red flags”<font size=3> before she quizzed 9-11 Commission member James Thompson about why it didn’t prompt immediate action.
On Sunday, though the memo only talked about the
possibility of plane hijackings, not of flying them into
buildings, the subhead on a front page Washington Post
story suggested Bush learned more than he did: <font size=4>“Aug. 6
Report to President Warned of Hijacking.”<font size=3>
Reporters Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus opened their April 11 story with a very misleading sentence:
<font size=4>
“President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists
might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States
and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan.”
Not until four paragraphs later did the Post duo
acknowledge that the “targeting of a building in lower
Manhattan” had nothing to do with what actually occurred
on September 11, noting how “officials said the
photographing of the federal buildings was later judged to
be 'tourist activity,’” by some Yeminis. <font size=3>
Now, further rundowns of the items quoted above:
-- ABC’s World News Tonight/Saturday. Anchor Claire Shipman teased at the top of the April 10 broadcast: “On World News Tonight this Saturday, a classified anti-terrorism report told President Bush, before September 11th, that al-Qaeda wanted to carry out attacks inside the U.S.”
She set up the lead story: “The White House, under pressure, has released portions of a classified anti-terrorism document given to the President shortly before September 11th. It’s something the administration wanted to keep out of public view.”
-- CNN’s Capital Gang. Moderator Mark Shields asked: “Al Hunt, what is the impact, at the end of this tumultuous week, of the released presidential memo?”
Al Hunt, Executive Washington Editor of the Wall Street Journal, contended: “It shatters what was a very forceful appearance by Dr. Rice. You recall she said of that daily presidential briefing on August the 6th, 2001, that it was vague, that it was really an historical document. Well, what was released today -- and it was -- they only redacted, apparently, the names of sources. It not only is headlined, as we learned a couple days ago, that 'Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.,’ but it went on to say that intelligence sources were talking about bin Laden hijacking an airplane and there was a lot of suspicious activity in New York. That's not vague and historical. Could it have, could it have been prevented? Who knows? But her -- the impression she left on Thursday was clearly misleading on that score and a number of other scores, Mark.”
-- CNN Saturday Night, CNN’s 10pm EDT hour-long newscast. Anchor Carol Lin asserted: “A two page report on the threat al-Qaeda posed to America. The President got it just one month before the 9/11 attacks. Now at first, it reads like a laundry list of red flags. Al-Qaeda, recruiting and plotting attacks in the United States. The White House declassified that document tonight.”
Interviewing 9/11 Commission member James Thompson about it, after he argued there wasn’t much to the memo, Lin countered: “Even though the evidence seems circumstantial that Osama bin Laden specifically says that he wants to attack in the United States, that young Muslims were being recruited in New York, that bin Laden specifically mentioned Washington, D.C., that the FBI had 70 separate investigations on al-Qaeda related activities here in the United States, that did not add up to what you witnessed on 9/11, as we all did?”
Thompson, standing outside on a city street somewhere, answered: “No, because the first four of those possibilities were three years old. And the fact that the FBI was conducting 70 full field investigations by al-Qaeda activities would have reassured me, not startled me or frightened me, if I were the President of the United States. I would have assumed that things were going forward, but all the other things in the PDB released tonight relate to things that were three years old. And even some of the things in the PDB we learned subsequently didn't pan out.
“For example, the PDB talks about suspicious activity in New York with people surveilling federal buildings. Well, the FBI found those people. They happened to be two Yemeni citizens. They were tourists. And the FBI questioned and released them. And they had nothing to do with September 11. In fact, nothing in the PDB report tonight has anything to do with September 11.”
Answering another question, Thompson maintained: “So I think out of all the PDBs that we have, and we have many more than this one, and of the 2.5 million pages of pages of documents that we have, and the thousand witnesses that we've heard, with more to come, this is not something that would have triggered anything in anybody's mind from the president of the United States on down, about the possibility of September 11.”
Lin responded: “Then Governor, given the outcome, I mean when you see the memo, and you in hindsight you know what happened, what went wrong then? I mean, these were all red flags that did ultimately, whether they were true at the time or not added up.”
Thompson repeated his point with which Lin disagreed: “Nothing in the PDB is a red flag, but we know from other evidence that there were reports at FBI field offices about suspicions of people taking flight training, for example. And there's no doubt that mistakes were made in not transmitting information that FBI field offices had up to the head of the FBI...”
-- Washington Post front page, April 11. The headline: “Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S.” The subhead: “Aug. 6 Report to President Warned of Hijacking.” An excerpt from the top of the story by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus in Crawford, Texas:
President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan.
The information was included in a written Aug. 6, 2001, briefing to Bush that was declassified Saturday night by the White House in response to a request from the independent commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks.
The short article, titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," also included information that the FBI had "70 full field investigations" underway in the United States that were believed related to Osama bin Laden, and that a caller to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives.
The document, citing a foreign intelligence service whose identity was redacted, said bin Laden told followers he wanted to "retaliate in Washington" for the United States' 1998 missile attack on his facilities in Afghanistan.
In a conference call Saturday with reporters, administration officials who insisted on anonymity said there was no evidence that either the call to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE or the surveillance of federal buildings in New York by Yemenis was related to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The officials said the photographing of the federal buildings was later judged to be "tourist activity," but they did not say whether that judgment was made before or after the attacks.
The White House originally resisted releasing the article, part of the President's Daily Brief, or PDB, citing the sensitivity of intelligence information. It characterized the document as a historical summary with little current information on which the president could have acted.
In her testimony to the 9/11 commission on Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "this was a historical memo....It was not based on new threat information."
While the two-page document included information dating to 1997, it also contained information that the government suspected al Qaeda was actively preparing for an attack in the United States. While it gave no information about specific targets or dates, the briefing warned that U.S. intelligence believed bin Laden had serious plans to hit the United States....
END of Excerpt
For the Post story in full: www.washingtonpost.com
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