WASHINGTON — Just one day after President Bush received a
pre-Sept. 11 briefing on al-Qaida’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-Qaida activity that Bush had been
told of a day earlier in a memo entitled “Bin Ladin
Determined 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 the senior
executives’ 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 terror
threat.

But administration officials said there was nothing sinister
about the deletions because the memos are destined for two
different audiences. The CIA historically uses different standards
for the president’s daily intelligence update and the one
provided to senior policy-makers, officials said.

Typically, the senior executives’ memo goes to scores of
Cabinet-agency officials from the assistant secretary level up and
doesn’t include raw intelligence or sensitive information
about ongoing law enforcement matters, 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.

Terrorism policy-makers and those on the front lines get that
information directly from targeted raw intelligence reports. For
instance, CIA, FBI, Customs and immigration and White House
anti-terror officials had received the May 2001 intelligence report
about a possible al-Qaida 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.

The senior executives’ memo “is not used as a way to
transmit actionable [raw] intelligence,” a senior
administration official said. “Instead, policy-makers making
counterterrorism policy receive their information about particular
threats through a variety of other ways such as human source
reports, signal [electronic] intelligence and law enforcement
reports.”

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 the necessary sense of urgency one
month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

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.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee,
urged the release of all classified materials on bin Laden since
1998. He said the sharing of classified information is still being
affected by “fundamental issues of trust” and turf
battles.

“The system is dysfunctional. It is more than broken. It
is more than the left hand doesn’t, from time to time,
communicate with the right hand,” Wyden said Monday.
“... Everybody feels that by sharing any information, that
somehow this makes it hard for them to protect issues that are
important to them.”

Bush administration officials stress that regardless of what was
put in the two memos, nothing given to the president or senior
policy-makers foretold of the horrors that would unfold five weeks
later during the suicide hijackings in New York and Washington that
killed 3,000 people.

Access to both the presidential and senior executive
intelligence briefings was greatly reduced across government during
the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush
administration because of concerns about repeated leaks.

Government watchdogs, however, question assertions by the Bush
administration that the public release Saturday of the
president’s daily intelligence memo from August 2001 set a
potentially dangerous precedent that could hamper future
presidents’ ability to get candid advice.

The private National Security Archive, which collects previously
secret government documents, has published at least 10 declassified
presidential daily briefings over the years.

Steven Aftergood, who oversees the Project on Government Secrecy
for the Federation of American Scientists, said former CIA Director
Robert Gates also was allowed to publish information from at least
two presidential briefing memos in his memoir.

“It shows the claim that this whole category of documents
must remain secret is utterly hollow,” Aftergood said.
“There must be many more briefs that could be released like
this one with absolutely no harm to security, and to the benefit of
the public understanding.”
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