CNN– The White House declassified and released Saturday the daily intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush a month before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The declassified intelligence report said the FBI had detected “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.”
The names of countries that supplied the CIA with intelligence have been removed from the memo dealing with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and dated August 6, 2001.
“We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to secure the release of ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists,” the memo says in part.
Rahman is serving a life sentence for conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and to blow up New York landmarks.
The White House said the presidential daily briefing, or PDB, was requested by Bush, who sought information about the possibility of an al Qaeda attack in the United States.
“The PDB article did not warn of the 9/11 attacks,” the White House said in a statement released Saturday night. “Although the PDB referred to the possibility of hijackings, it did not discuss the possible use of planes as weapons.”
The memo, titled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.,” had been described by the White House as a largely historical document with scant information about domestic al Qaeda threats.
The memo includes intelligence on al Qaeda threats as recent as three months before the attacks.
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