Memo gave warning

CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.

Additional information    • Text of Aug, 6, 2001 memo

Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to a memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday.

The 1 1/3-page memo, delivered to Bush at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, did not include specific information pointing to the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon about five weeks later.

Even so, the public release of the document seems certain to fuel criticism that Bush did not act aggressively enough in the summer of 2001 to prevent terrorist attacks, as his former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke maintained in his new book and in public testimony before investigators last month.

The memo was released in full except for three phrases in the text blacked out. Senior officials said that was necessary to protect the identity of foreign intelligence services that cooperated with U.S. intelligence.

The so-called PDB or "President's Daily Brief" referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

The memo also said the FBI "is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related." It went on to say, "CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska, said the memo's details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more intelligence information about possible domestic hijackings.

"The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States — this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn't scramble our agencies to that," he said.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo calls into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's, assertion last week that the memo was purely a "historical" document.