Sept. 11 intelligence report questions answers given by Rice

WASHINGTON -- The congressional report on pre-Sept. 11 intelligence calls into question answers that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave the public last year about the White House's knowledge of terrorism threats.

It's a fresh credibility issue for the adviser whose remarks about prewar Iraq information also have been questioned by members of Congress.

President Bush's adviser told the public in May 2002 that a pre-Sept. 11 intelligence briefing for the president on terrorism contained only a general warning of threats and largely historical information, not specific plots.

But the authors of the congressional report, released last week, stated the briefing given to the president a month before the suicide hijackings included recent intelligence that al-Qaida was planning to send operatives into the United States to carry out an attack using high explosives.

The White House defended Rice, saying her answers were accurate given what she could state publicly at the time about still-classified information.

'Strongly committed'

On Monday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush had full confidence in Rice. "She is strongly committed with the president to making America safer," he told reporters.

The Sept. 11 congressional investigators underscore their point three times in their report, using nearly identical language to contrast Rice's answers with the actual information in the presidential briefing.

The president's daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, contained "information acquired in May 2001 that indicated a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives," the report stated.

A footnote to that passage compares the information with what Rice told the public at a May 16, 2002, news conference.

Rice "stated, however, that the report did not contain specific warning information, but only a generalized warning, and did not contain information that al-Qaida was discussing a particular planned attack against a specific target at any specific time, place, or by any specific method," the footnote said.

At the same May 2002 press briefing, Rice also said that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

But the congressional report states that "from at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons."

The report says that Rice and other top officials, including Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, seemed unaware of the intelligence and concludes the information must not have been widely circulated.

White House officials defended Rice's answers.

"Dr. Rice's briefing was a full and accurate accounting of the materials in question without compromising classified material that could endanger national security," National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said.

More recently, Rice's explanations about what the White House knew about Iraq also have been questioned by members of Congress and by Democrats seeking the presidential nomination.

Rice told the press several weeks ago that Bush's State of the Union message never would have included any mention of Iraq shopping for uranium in Africa "if we had known what we know now."

But Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy, disclosed last Tuesday that two CIA memos and a phone call from CIA Director George Tenet had persuaded him to take a similar passage about Iraq and uranium out of a presidential speech three months before the State of the Union address.

Hadley said he had forgotten about the CIA's objections by the time the State of the Union was being crafted in January.

Hadley said one of the memos casting doubt on the intelligence was sent to Rice. She doesn't recall reading it, the NSC's spokesman said. Hadley said he didn't consult Rice on the matter.

In regard to Sept. 11, Rice said in the May 2002 press conference that intelligence reports prior to the attacks had focused on "traditional hijacking."

But in its first hearing last September, the congressional inquiry emphasized that the intelligence community had produced various reports over the years suggesting that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons.

In 1998, the government obtained information that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center. A month later, intelligence agencies obtained information that Osama bin Laden's next operation could possibly involve flying an aircraft loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport.

"It shouldn't have been a shock to anybody that the people would take airplanes and make them weapons of mass destruction, or at least local destruction," Sen. Bob Graham, the inquiry's co-chairman, said last week.