Records Confirm Rice Was Warned Prior to 9/11

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Secretary of State Rice did receive a CIA briefing about terror threats just about two months before the September 11, 2001, attacks, but the information was not new, her chief spokesman said.

In doing so, Sean McCormack confirmed a meeting — on July 10, 2001 — that his boss had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. She had said earlier that there were virtually daily meetings at the time.

The McClatchy Newspapers reported that an official who helped to prepare the briefing described it as a "10 on a scale of one to 10" that "connected the dots" in intelligence reports to show that Al Qaeda, which had already killed Americans in East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and was ready to attack America again.

A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Ms. Rice had brushed off. Ms. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.

Although spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council indicated Sunday that such a meeting had taken place, Ms. Rice was still saying Monday that she was not sure about it. She said she would have remembered the sort of forceful warning the book claims was conveyed there.

"We can confirm that a meeting took place on or around July 10, 2001," Mr. McCormack said late Monday.

"The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks," he added.

Mr. Woodward's book "State of Denial" recounts the meeting among then-director of central intelligence George Tenet, Ms. Rice, and the CIA's top counterterror officer, Cofer Black. The book said the session stood out in the minds of the CIA officials as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his network. Mr. McCormack said that after the meting, Ms. Rice had asked that the same material be given to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General Ashcroft.

Materials from this meeting were made available to the independent September 11 Commission, and Mr. Tenet was asked about the session when interviewed by the commission, Mr. McCormack said.

The meeting is not part of the commission report.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on America. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information," he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

"The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism," Mr. Ashcroft said. He said both Messrs. Tenet and Black should have been aware that he had pressed for a more aggressive policy in going after Mr. bin Laden and his followers in America and should have briefed him as well. Ms. Rice knew of this advocacy, he suggested.

According to the September 11 Commission, Mr. Ashcroft was briefed on July 5, 2001, "warning that a significant terrorist attack was imminent." The report noted that the briefing addressed only threats outside the country.