American Morning

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMES WOOLSEY, FMR. CIA DIRECTOR: If they say they’re going to do it, I’m sure they will be able to find a way to get any information about intelligence sources and methods out of it. The reason that the president’s daily brief is so highly classified is that we always used to — and I’m sure they’ve done this for years — put a lot of material in it where it would help the president understand material about the source and the method by which the intelligence was collected. And most intelligence material doesn’t have that. But you can understand a lot of things better if you know how it was obtained and exactly who it came from.

So, presumably, they will edit out anything that might relate to that and leave the substance behind. At least if I were responsible for doing it a few years ago, that’s what I would have done.

O’BRIEN: What Dr. Rice said about this particular document was that it was historical, that it had no real New information in it. And I’m curious to know, since you’re a person who obviously has prepared easily hundreds of these for President Clinton, is that how these briefs usually are?

Are they historical documents? Are they assessments overall with no New information? And what exactly would historical mean?

WOOLSEY: Sometimes they can be. They could be any of a whole range of things.

I take it what she meant from that was that there was nothing that said that bin Laden was planning to seize aircraft and fly them into buildings. And clearly, that seems logical to me, because if there had been anything remotely like that, the government would have taken a lot more precautions than it did.

So I imagine this was in response to a question the president asked because there was one report that he had said, “Don’t just tell me about attacks overseas. I want to know what we know about possible attacks in the United States.”

And so whatever they had picked up, I’m sure, was in there. But if there were anything specific, as Condoleezza Rice said yesterday, about planes flying into buildings, certainly they would have done something different than what they did.

O’BRIEN: The public, those of us who have not had an opportunity to take a look at the document, look at the title of the document which is, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.,” and say, well, gee, doesn’t that kind of say it all? I mean…

WOOLSEY: Well, no. Is says determined to attack inside the U.S. Not how, where, or when, which is often the problem with intelligence.

You will get things that they got that summer. “Big attack coming.” And maybe some of them say in the U.S., maybe many of them said somewhere else. But that isn’t enough for you, unfortunately, to prevent it.

It may be enough, for example, back at the millennium. The concern about attacks at the time of the millennium was probably one of the things that led to that wonderful Customs agent up in Washington State being a little more alert. And so she spotted Rasam (ph) coming across the border and helping prevent an attack on Los Angeles Airport.

You can bring people to a somewhat higher state of readiness. But unless you know more than maybe in the U.S. sometime soon, it’s hard to figure out exactly what one does about it.