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The White House is defending its actions in the weeks and months
leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Officials acknowledge the
president was briefed about a month before the attacks on the possibility of a
hijacking by followers of Osama bin Laden. But they say there was no warning
that terrorists planned to turn a hijacked plane into a missile, and stress the
government responded appropriately.
The president got the information last August while at his
Texas ranch.
White House national security advisor Condoleezza Rice says
intelligence officials did not deliver a warning to the president, but a status
report on existing terrorist threats. "On August 6th, the president received a
presidential daily briefing that was not a warning briefing but an analytic
report," she said.
She says that report did not mention any specific time or place
and was extremely general in nature.
White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer says it was similar to
information about possible hijackings that intelligence officials had delivered
many times before.
"The possibility of a traditional hijacking in the pre-September 11th
sense has long been a concern of the government dating back decades," he
said.
The White House says the president asked for the report after a
sudden increase in tips regarding possible terrorist activities. Ms. Rice says
there was a sudden spike in information related to Al-Qaida and threats to
American targets overseas. But she stresses none of this information was
specific.
"It simply said these are people who train and seem to talk
possibly about hijackings. You would had risked shutting down the American
civil aviation system with such generalized information," he said. "You would
have had to think five, six, seven times about that very, very
hard."
Congressional critics say they want access to this information
and stress this new admission from the White House warrants further scrutiny.
They point to other indications that the Bush administration did not piece
together several signs that Al-Qaida was planning something new and
horrifying.
The top democrats in the House and Senate are calling for answers.
During an appearance on ABC television, North Carolina Senator John Edwards
posed the questions on the minds of many party leaders.
"Why are we finding this out now, so many months after this
occurred? Why did the American people not get this information before?," he
asked.
Senator Edwards pointed to another recent revelation, word that
an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Arizona wrote a memo last
July warning that a large number of Arabs were seeking flight training in the
United States.
Alabama Senator Richard Shelby the top Republican on the Senate
Intelligence Committee told NBC television's "Today" show that similar
information indicating a generalized threat was passed on to his
panel.
"There was a lot of information, I believe and others believe, if it
had been acted on properly we may have had a different situation on September
11th," he said.
Senator Shelby also discussed the issue in an interview with
CNN. He wondered aloud why it took the White House so long to acknowledge the
president knew of the hijacking threat.
The White House answer is simple. Officials say the president
was only told of a generalized hijacking threat the kind of information the
government has been getting for decades and handling behind the
scenes.
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