Ex-Aide Recounts Terror Warnings

The drama of Clarke's appearance nearly overshadowed a series of notable disclosures at yesterday's hearing. Among them:

• The CIA now says that a controversial August 2001 briefing summarizing potential attacks on the United States by al Qaeda was not requested by President Bush, as Rice and others had long claimed. The Aug. 6, 2001, document, known as the President's Daily Brief, has been the focus of intense scrutiny because it reported that Osama bin Laden advocated airplane hijackings, that al Qaeda supporters were in the United States and that the group was planning attacks here.

After the highly classified document's existence was first revealed in news reports in May 2002 , Rice held a news conference in which she suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer. But Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commission member, disclosed at the hearing yesterday that the CIA informed the panel last week that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA.

But a White House official who demanded anonymity replied: "We did request such a document. It's not out of the question that the CIA and others had the same idea."

• Commission investigators disclosed that during the Clinton administration, the president and other White House officials signed a series of secret orders for covert action that, according to the top Clinton aides, authorized the killing of bin Laden by CIA proxies.

But CIA Director George J. Tenet and other agency employees, including those in the field, told commission investigators that they interpreted the orders as requiring them to attempt a "credible capture" of bin Laden and to kill him only if it was necessary as a part of that attempt. When the leader of the Northern Alliance was briefed on the perceived restrictions, he laughed and, according to the staff report, said: "You Americans are crazy. You guys never change."

The report also found that Tenet and others at the CIA never told anyone in the Clinton White House that they felt constrained. Tenet testified yesterday that he would have done so if he had thought it was necessary.

• In the summer of 2001, veteran counterterrorism officers privy to reports on al Qaeda threats "were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns," according to one of two staff reports issued by the commission yesterday. Senior CIA officials were also frustrated by some Bush appointees who were not familiar with surges in terrorist threat information and questioned their veracity, the report said.

Tenet said that the death of bin Laden, even in the summer of 2001, probably would not have stopped the attacks on New York and the Pentagon because the plot was already "up and running."

The two staff reports issued yesterday appeared to confirm many of Clarke's key allegations and criticisms, including his assertion that the Bush administration halted use of Predator surveillance drones over Afghanistan to conduct tests on arming the aircraft.

In his testimony, Clarke described the Sept. 4, 2001, National Security Presidential Directive, a strategy for addressing al Qaeda that administration officials have characterized as a bold departure from the Clinton years. But Clarke said the three-stage plan differed little from strategies already in place under Clinton that included first warning the Taliban government in Afghanistan, then pressuring it to turn over bin Laden and finally ousting it through third parties.

It was only after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the introduction of U.S. forces was added, although contingency plans by both the CIA and the Pentagon existed, Clarke said.

Clarke said that he had wanted the directive to say "that our goal should be to eliminate al Qaeda," but that Bush officials called that "overly ambitious." It was reworded to say the goal was to "significantly erode" bin Laden's network. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the word "eliminate" was added back into the directive, he said.

Former deputy attorney general Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic commission member, asked Clarke whether Rice's recent statement that the Bush plan "called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets, taking the fight to the enemy where he lived" was accurate.

Clarke responded, "No, it's not."

Staff writer Mike Allen and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.