Some got an incomplete memo

One day after President Bush received an August 2001 briefing on al Qaeda's efforts, senior officials got a similar memo without the current threats.

BY JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Just one day after President Bush received a pre-Sept. 11 briefing on al Qaeda's effort to strike on U.S. soil, senior government executives received a similarly titled memo that excluded information about current threats and investigations, say federal officials who have read both documents.

The Aug. 7, 2001, memo, known as the senior executive intelligence brief or SEIB, didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al Qaeda activity that Bush had been told of a day earlier in a memo entitled Bin Laden Entitled to Strike in U.S., the officials said Monday.

The senior executives' memo also did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of a U.S.-based explosives attacks or say that the FBI had concerns about recent casing of buildings in New York, the officials told The Associated Press.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because that memo remains classified.

Some members of Congress said Monday they were concerned that senior executive memos and other similar documents may have given policy-makers working for Bush an incomplete picture of the threat.

But administration officials said there was nothing sinister about the deletions.

Typically, the senior executives' memo goes to scores of Cabinet-agency officials doesn't include raw intelligence or sensitive information, officials said.

That is done to guard against unnecessary leaks and because that type of sensitive information isn't deemed essential to be distributed to all policy-makers, they said.

Those on the front lines get that information directly from targeted raw intelligence reports.

For instance, CIA, FBI, Customs and immigration and White House antiterror officials had received the May 2001 intelligence report about a possible al Qaeda explosives plot on U.S. soil shortly after it arrived and were investigating it by the time the president learned of it, the officials said.

Nonetheless, some who saw the memo said they feared it gave policy-makers and members of the congressional intelligence committees a picture of the domestic threat so stale and incomplete that it didn't provide a sense of urgency one month before Sept. 11.

Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., said Monday he has not yet been able to compare the two memos, but would be concerned if senior policy-makers and key lawmakers weren't aware they were missing some relevant information provided to the president.

''I think it is an important policy issue that we may not know everything the president knows, but we at least should know we don't know some things, that there is something being withheld,'' Graham said.

Members of Congress, outside experts and the independent commission investigating pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures are more broadly questioning whether useful intelligence was, and still is, being held too restrictively.