Bush: If I'd Known, I Would Have Acted
May 17 -- President Bush said today that if he had known terrorists planned to "use an airplane to kill Americans," he would have done everything possible to stop them, but the furor over his administration's alleged failure to respond properly to pre-Sept. 11 terror attack information continued to grow.
"The American people know this about me and my national security team and my administration: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," he said in an address to Air Force Academy cadets in the Rose Garden.
The White House acknowledged this week that it had received intelligence in the weeks before Sept. 11 that terrorists might try to hijack U.S. jets, but said the information was too vague to act upon. While the Bush administration has maintained that there was no reason for anyone in the government to expect that terrorists would crash planes into buildings, a government profile of terrorists done in 1999 that was funded by the CIA says otherwise.
"Suicide bomber[s] belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency or the White House," the report says.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer today denied the significance of the report, which was entitled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?, saying, "It is not a piece of intelligence information, suggesting that we have information about a specific plan."
"I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that terrorists think in evil ways, in unimaginable ways, and it describes several of the ways," Fleischer said.
The Key Phoenix Memo
However, before Sept. 11 the FBI did receive key information from its Phoenix office in a memo that named individuals who were enrolled in flight schools in the area and were ultimately linked to bin Laden. And the memo never made to the White House before the attacks.
The memo, dated July 10, 2001, said it was believed that bin Laden had sent terrorists to the United States to learn how to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools.
"The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York [the seat of the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force] of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges," the memo began, sources told ABCNEWS.
The eight-page memo contains the names and background of at least eight individuals from the Middle East who were enrolled in aviation schools in the Phoenix area. When the FBI first sent the memo to its unit that dealt with Osama bin Laden and radical fundamentalists, agents could not link any of the individuals to bin Laden or al Qaeda. The memo urged the FBI to discuss the individuals' possible links to bin Laden with the wider intelligence community but the discussions never made it out of the agency's mid level offices.
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