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Bush told of hijack warning weeks before 9/11
(Julian Borger, The Guardian, April 9, 2004)
President Bush was given an intelligence briefing, entitled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States just weeks before the September 11 attacks, it emerged yesterday. . . . Details of the August 6 briefing in 2001, which warned of terrorist preparations being made for hijackings on American soil, surfaced in testimony given by the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to a commission of inquiry studying the September 11 attacks. . . . The existence of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) had been publicly known for some time, but Ms Rice's confirmation of its title and some of its contents pushed it centre stage in the explosive political row over whether the al-Qaida attacks could have been prevented. . . . The emotive significance of the briefing - in the form of a memorandum sent to the president summarising potential threats to the US - is all the greater because at the time he received it, Mr Bush was on a month-long "working holiday" at his Texas ranch and spent much of the following days fishing and clearing undergrowth on his land. He did not cut short his vacation or apparently take dramatic steps in response to the briefing. . . . Bob Kerrey, a former senator, said the PDB informed the president that "the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking". . . . In exchanges in which the questions were often more revealing than the answers, the commissioners made public a series of stunning findings on the extent of apparent bureaucratic incompetence in the weeks between August 6 and September 11 2001. . . . "Secretary [Norman] Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this," Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic commissioner, told Ms Rice. . . . "You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings

posted by LoZo 9:50 PM