‘Some Things I Wish We’d Have Done’

WASHINGTON — President Bush acknowledged Tuesday night that “there are some things I wish we’d have done” before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but he said there was no way to anticipate that hijackers would crash planes into buildings.

In some of his most extensive remarks about the lessons learned from attacks, Bush defended his handling of pre-Sept. 11 warnings of terrorist threats, saying that if he had had any knowledge of the hijackers’ plot, he would have “moved heaven and Earth” to prevent it.

The president and his aides have been on the defensive since former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke said, in a book and in testimony before the federal commission investigating the attacks, that during its first eight months in office, the Bush administration did not pay enough attention to threats posed by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. The president has made national security a central tenet of his reelection campaign.

A top-secret intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” was given to the president five weeks before Sept. 11, but Bush and his aides have argued that the information was not specific enough for them to take steps to prevent the strikes by three hijacked planes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another hijacked plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people.

Asked about Clarke’s public apology to the families of Sept. 11 victims, Bush responded, “I’m sick when I think about the death that took place on that day.” But he added, “The person who is responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden.”

Bush’s remarks, in a rare prime-time news conference at the White House, came after a daylong hearing by the Sept. 11 commission that examined the activities of the FBI and the Justice Department before the hijackings. Bush, accompanied by Vice President Dick Cheney, is expected to testify privately before the panel soon.

Bush was asked about doubts, raised Tuesday during the hearing, about the accuracy of a portion of the memo asserting that the FBI was conducting 70 “full field investigations” into possible terrorist activities.

“As the ultimate decision-maker for this country, I expect information that comes to my desk to be real and valid,” he said, adding that part of the Sept. 11 commission’s job is to find out what went on and what can be done differently to better protect the country.

Commission members said Tuesday that they considered the figure of 70 an exaggeration, and even Thomas J. Pickard, the acting director of the FBI during the summer of 2001, said he was not sure where the number came from.

“Seventy full field investigations have the aura of being a major, massive ‘going to battle stations,’ where in fact it really referred to every single individual that was under investigation,” said commissioner John F. Lehman.

“So it was an exaggeration which gave a wrong perception at a time when the threat that we now know was really much further along. It seems kind of a backhanded, offhanded way to be telling the president of the United States of efforts that the bureau was doing,” Lehman added.

Pickard testified that he did not have access to the memo before it was declassified and released over the weekend, and he said that “the FBI did not get to vet the article.”

He told the commission he learned recently from the FBI that the number included a wide assortment of suspects -- from two individuals convicted in connection with a pair of U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa to individuals picked up on immigration charges for overstaying their visas. A dozen or so of the individuals were determined to have no links to terrorism, he said.

“I’d like to also caution that the number 70 is somewhat inaccurate. I don’t know how that got into the [memo] that way. But the actual number is inaccurate, and it’s a classified number. I would not want Osama bin Laden to know how many we thought of his operatives were in the United States,” Pickard told the commission.

In his news conference, Bush said that no one, including the previous administration, anticipated the kind of attack that occurred on Sept. 11.

Referring to Bin Laden, he said: “We knew he had designs on us. We knew he hated us. But there was nobody in our government ... and I don’t think [in] the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.”

He said, “I’ve stepped back and I’ve asked myself a lot, ‘Is there anything we could have done to stop the attacks?’

“The answer is that had I had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and Earth to save the country, just like we’re working hard to prevent a further attack.”

Bush added, “It’s easy for a president to stand up and say now that I know what happened, it would have been nice if there were certain things in place.” In hindsight, he said, he would have liked to have seen a Department of Homeland Security already in place, greater cooperation between the FBI and the CIA in the sharing of intelligence, and the country on a war footing.

“The country was not on a war footing,” he said, “and yet the enemy was at war with us.” He cited the Sept. 11 attacks to defend another of his policies that has come in for criticism: the U.S. military effort in Iraq. One of the lessons of Sept. 11, he said, was that “we must deal with gathering threats.”

Another lesson, he said, “is that this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense. In order to secure the country, we must do everything in our power to find these killers and bring them to justice before they hurt us again.”

The government, he said, is better prepared to prevent and respond to a terrorist attack. “But we’ve still got a lot of work to do,” he said.