April 11 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush said an intelligence memo he received a month before the Sept. 11 attacks contained no specific warning of a terrorist strike on U.S. soil.

``I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America, at a time and a place,'' Bush said after Easter Sunday services at Fort Hood, Texas. ``The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what.''

The White House released the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing document yesterday in response to a bipartisan commission's inquiry into intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks. Former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has told the panel Bush's administration didn't make terrorism an urgent priority before Sept. 11 and, after the attacks, focused more on Iraq.

The memo, entitled ``Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,'' warned that terrorists might be preparing for hijackings in the U.S., and that followers of Osama bin Laden, including some American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and kept a ``support structure that could aid attacks.''

CIA and FBI Investigated

The CIA and the FBI also were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 warning that bin Laden supporters in the U.S. were planning attacks with explosives, the memo said.

``It's nothing really different than Osama bin Laden was saying,'' Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, told CBS ``Face the Nation.''

``He's been saying that since 1997 on tape,'' Roberts said. ``We knew that.''

A majority of Americans said Bush underestimated terrorist threats before Sept. 11, according to a Newsweek magazine poll April 8-9. Sixty percent of Americans in the survey said the Bush administration focused too much on security issues such as missile defense and Iraq before the attacks in on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; 23 percent said the administration took the threat of terrorism seriously.

Bush said today the briefing document ``was no indication of a terrorist threat.''

``Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack,'' Bush said today at Fort Hood, a U.S. Army post about an hour's drive from Austin, Texas. ``Any administration would have acted,'' Bush said. ``The previous administration would have acted, that's our job.''

Bush's Democratic rival in the November elections, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, 60, declined to answer reporters' questions after Easter services in Boston today. Kerry leads Bush, 57, by his widest margin yet -- 50 percent to 43 percent-according to Newsweek's poll.

`Important Question'

Government agencies followed up on the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing, Bush said. Whether they did enough is ``an important question'' for the commission. The memo contained no information that planes would be used as weapons, he said.

``I'm satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that there was going to be an attack on America at a time and at a place,'' Bush said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was conducting about 70 investigations throughout the U.S. that it considered related to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the memo said.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft didn't see the Aug. 6 memo because Bush restricted access to it to seven national security officials, Newsweek magazine reported without disclosing who provided the information. Ashcroft was briefed on July 12 by acting FBI director Tom Pickard about rising al-Qaeda threats abroad, Newsweek said. Pickard will tell the Sept. 11 commission this week that he alerted all 56 FBI field offices in a July conference call to be on the lookout for al-Qaeda activity, Newsweek said.

Bush and Cheney

The commission will interview Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ``in the relatively near future,'' commission member Slade Gorton told Fox News.

``You'll learn about it after it's taken place,'' Gorton, a former Republican U.S. senator from Washington, told Fox News.

Commission members won't have 10-minute time limits for questions, as they did with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, he said.

Rice, 49, told the commission Thursday that the memo was mostly a historical review of al-Qaeda and bin Laden. ``There was no threat reporting of any substance about an attack coming within the United States,'' she said. The administration was more focused on potential attacks overseas, she said.

Hindsight `Perfect'

``Hindsight is always perfect,'' Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, told ABC's ``This Week'' program. ``I just don't think its fair to go back and say if you only collect all these dots when I don't think anyone was able to do that.''

Blaming Bush for intelligence failures ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks is ``to some extent unfair,'' said Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. No one could have known the extent, timing or location of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

The Aug. 6 briefing referred to the possibility of hijackings, without discussing the possible use of planes as weapons, a White House fact sheet said. From June through September, the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI ``issued a number of warnings about the possibility of terrorist attacks,'' the fact sheet said.

``FAA warnings included specific warnings about the possibility of a hijacking to free imprisoned al-Qaeda members inside the United States and the possibility of attacks in response to law enforcement against al-Qaeda members,'' the fact sheet said.

``We had a summer of extraordinary threat level,'' said panel member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat and former Watergate prosecutor. ``Bin Laden was saying that a calamitous event, a spectacular event, would occur.

``They didn't know that 9-11 was going to happen, but I think the author of this memo was alerting the president to the possibility that the strikes that we were all anticipating in the summer of 2001 might occur in the United States,'' Ben-Veniste said on CNN.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jon Steinman in Washington at jsteinman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 11, 2004 16:35 EDT