It seems the WH in July 2001 ordered the FBO to do something as evidenced in this NY Times Art. today.
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from
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/12/po...68738453237481
Disclosures Put F.B.I.'s Actions Under Scrutiny
April 12, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, April 11 - New disclosures about the warnings President Bush received before Sept. 11, 2001, are fueling a central question for the commission investigating the attacks on that date: What exactly was the F.B.I. doing that summer to deter an attack by Al Qaeda on American soil?
The answer, Mr. Bush said on Sunday, was that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating known links to Osama bin Laden in the United States, with 70 active cases reported that summer. "That's great, that's what we expect the F.B.I. to do," he told reporters.
Critics of the F.B.I., however, say the bureau missed
numerous opportunities to head off the attacks.
Agents that summer were tracking tantalizing leads that included a suspicious flight student in Minneapolis, an ominous warning in Phoenix and a phone call to a United States embassy in the Middle East.
But investigations were stymied by miscommunication, dead
ends, bureaucratic and legal obstacles and unclear
priorities, officials say. And it is still unclear what the bureau's response was to a classified White House memo in July 2001, which officials said directed all 56 field offices to increase surveillance of suspected terrorists.
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will hear testimony this week from current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft; his predecessor, Janet Reno; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.; and Louis J. Freeh and Thomas J. Pickard, former directors.
Among the main questions will be whether the bureau
responded aggressively enough to warnings in the summer of
2001 and whether the internal changes made since go far
enough to solve structural problems.
A joint Congressional committee concluded last year that
the F.B.I. and the Central Intelligence Agency had failed
to heed warnings about Al Qaeda's desire to strike the
United States and that intelligence officials had "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot."
Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the Sept. 11
commission, said on "Fox News Sunday," "It seems to me the F.B.I. has more questions to answer than Condoleezza Rice or Dick Clarke or anyone we've had testify before us so far."
Mr. Gorton said he was interested "in these so-called 70
field investigations."
"I don't know where they were," he said. "I don't know what they did. I don't think they got to a point where anyone could take action on them."
A senior F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of
anonymity said the 70 investigations cited in the White
House briefing "show that we were actively looking at what
was going on with anyone who might be connected to bin
Laden, but we did not have specifics on the plot."
Lee H. Hamilton and Richard Ben-Veniste, Democratic members
of the 9/11 panel, said in interviews on Sunday that this week's hearings would be critical in reaching recommendations about the F.B.I.'s future role in fighting terrorism.
Mr. Ben-Veniste said, "There's general agreement that
despite the extraordinary individual efforts of F.B.I.
agents, there is a dysfunctional element in the operation
that interfered with its efficient counterterrorism
functions" before Sept. 11.
Mr. Hamilton, the co-chairman of the commission, said Mr. Mueller "wants genuinely to change the culture of the F.B.I."
"The question is how effective is that effort and how long-lasting will it be when you have different leadership." Mr. Hamilton said.
At the time of the attacks, the bureau was undergoing a
change in leadership, with Mr. Freeh having left in June
2001, and it was consumed with internal problems like the arrest of an agent, Robert P. Hanssen, on espionage charges and the disappearance of documents in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
But critics said such issues did not fully explain the
bureau's inability to piece together strands of information before Sept. 11.
"The F.B.I.'s budget for counterterrorism was vastly
increased prior to 9/11, and its failure to take serious
note of the threat is really just unfathomable," said
Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council aide.
Mr. Freeh, in an op-ed article for Monday's issue of The
Wall Street Journal, defended the Bush administration for
its "prompt response and focus on terrorism."
He added, "The fact that terrorism and the war being waged
by Al Qaeda was not even an issue in the 2000 presidential campaign strongly suggests that the political will to declare and fight this war didn't exist before Sept. 11."
In the weeks and months before the attacks, as an alarming
rise in possible terrorist warnings was detected, F.B.I.
agents pursued leads that signaled the possibility of an
attack within the United States:
¶In the United Arab Emirates, the United States Embassy received a call in May saying that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives," according to a briefing that was given to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, and was declassified on Saturday.
¶In Phoenix, an F.B.I. agent warned superiors in July that
he suspected extremists might be training at American
flight schools and urged a nationwide inquiry.
¶In Minneapolis, a French citizen named Zacarias Moussaoui
was arrested on immigration charges in August after
arousing suspicions at a flight training school.
¶In Seattle, interrogations of Ahmed Ressam, arrested in
1999 in a failed attempt to blow up Los Angeles
International Airport, revealed details about Qaeda's
tactics.
¶In New York City, the bureau had detected "recent
surveillance of federal buildings," pointing to possible preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, according to the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing memorandum.
¶In Yemen, an investigation into the 2000 bombing of the
Navy destroyer Cole brought the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. close
to 2 of the 19 eventual hijackers.
But the leads ultimately went nowhere. Supervisors deemed
the Phoenix memorandum too speculative. A Minneapolis agent said headquarters had blocked her office from conducting a more aggressive investigation into Mr. Moussaoui, now charged with conspiracy in the Sept. 11 plot. Miscommunication between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. prevented investigators from discovering that the two hijackers linked to the Cole bombing were living in San Diego. Men suspected of casing New York buildings were found to be Yemeni tourists, and the United Arab Emirates report also appears to have been unconnected to the Sept. 11 plot, White House officials said.
"You add all the different leads together and you see
colossal, glaring failures," said Kristen Breitweiser,
whose husband died in the attacks. "The overriding question
is, what did we do in the summer of '01, knowing that there
was going to be an impending domestic attack by Al Qaeda?"
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