HEY!!!
The press conference was a diversion. Quit talking about how dyslexic Shrub is, and start focusing on what we were all focusing on Sun... I told youse guys Rove was going to do this to you
Cassandra
Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings
Reports Preceded August 2001 Memo
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A01
By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."
The intelligence included reports of a hostage plot against Americans. It noted that operatives might choose to hijack an aircraft or storm a U.S. embassy. Without knowing when, where or how the terrorists would strike, the CIA "consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil," according to one of two staff reports released by the panel yesterday.
"Reports similar to these were made available to President Bush in the morning meetings with [Director of Central Intelligence George J.] Tenet," the commission staff said.
The information offers the most detailed account to date of the warnings the intelligence community gave top Bush administration officials, and it provides the context in which a CIA briefer put together a memo on Osama bin Laden's activities in the Aug. 6 brief for Bush.
The government moved on several fronts to counter the threats. The CIA launched "disruption operations" in 20 countries. Tenet met or phoned 20 foreign intelligence officials. Units of the 5th Fleet were redeployed. Embassies went on alert. Cheney called Crown Prince Adbullah of Saudi Arabia to ask for help. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice asked the CIA to brief Attorney General John D. Ashcroft about an "imminent" terrorist attack whose location was unknown.
"The system was blinking red," Tenet told the commission in private testimony, the panel's report noted.
In this context, Bush "had occasionally asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States," the report said. Or, as one U.S. senior official more intimately involved in the summer reporting paraphrased the president's question to the CIA: "This guy going to strike here?"
A partial answer was contained in the very first sentence of the Aug. 6 President's Daily Brief: "Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US."
The document ended with two paragraphs of circumstantial evidence that al Qaeda operatives might already be in the United States preparing "for hijackings or other types of attacks" and said that the FBI and the CIA were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May "saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
The commission also released new details showing how the CIA and FBI failures to track the movements of two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, and share information foiled what now appears to have been the best chance to disrupt the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The CIA knew Almihdhar had attended a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000 where, officials later learned, he had helped plan the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Aden, Yemen. After the meeting, Almihdhar and others went to Bangkok, but the CIA station in Malaysia did not inform the CIA station in Bangkok in a timely manner.
Only two months later, in March, did the CIA learn that Almihdhar had left Bangkok with a visa to the United States.
In January 2001, two surveillance photographs from the Kuala Lumpur meeting were shown to an informant who was helping both the CIA and the FBI. He helped them understand that Almihdhar was at the meeting with a man identified as "Khallad" -- who by then was known to have planned the Cole bombing. But "we found no effort by the CIA to renew the long-abandoned search for [Almihdhar] or his traveling companions," the staff report noted.
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