Memo's no smoking gun
By Boston Herald editorial staff
Monday, April 12, 2004
If Democrats on the 9/11 commission are still looking for a smoking gun to hold to the head of President Bush [related, bio], they're going to have to look somewhere other than that Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing memo released Saturday night.
Oh, the title is shocking enough: ``Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.'' But it was entirely as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice described it, an historical document, recounting a series of vague threats bin Laden had been making since 1997 - including in television interviews - that he wanted to ``bring the fighting to America.''
The now declassified memo also said, ``After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin [sic] told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.''
Another possible target referred to in the memo was the foiled millennium plot to attack Los Angeles International Airport.
In short, much of this ``shocker'' could have been put together by any semi-literate Web surfer who Googled bin Laden - which sadly says much about this government's intelligence operations prior to Sept. 11.
There were some indications that Muslim-American youths were being recruited in New York, but as we all know now, they didn't have a role in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Another false trail the FBI spent time chasing was possible terrorist ``surveillance of federal buildings in New York.''
What the memo does document is that ``the FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related.''
And there is one reference to ``preparations for hijackings,'' but no hint of using planes as weapons.
To have anticipated the Sept. 11 attacks would have taken not just superb intelligence - and coordination between the CIA and FBI - but a look directly into the mind of a master terrorist.
Now the nation and the world can read the memo partisan Democrats on the 9/11 commission have harped on repeatedly. It tells us little we didn't know before. But it tells us a great deal about what lengths Democrats will go to create confusion around the worst terror attack on American soil - all in an effort to win back the White House.
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