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How Much Did President Know and When Did He Know It?

Aired May 20, 2002 - 10:55   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Now we're going to bring back up the topic that roiled Washington and set the tongues of the talking heads wagging all last week. How much did the president know and when did he know it? That quintessential question of Washington journalism echoes with new veracity in today's debate over terror warnings.

"Time" magazine, a sister company to CNN, goes in search of the answer in the cover article this week, looks into the intelligence dredged up in the weeks before the September 11th attacks.

And joining us to discuss that is Matt Cooper "Time's" deputy bureau chief in Washington.

Good morning. Thanks for coming in.

MATT COOPER, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Hey, thanks, Leon.

HARRIS: I got to tell you, that first line got me -- "None of this is pretty." Take it from there.

COOPER: Well, it's true. It's not a pretty story. I think until very recently, most people kind of thought of the September 11th disaster as something that was totally unforeseen, like a meteorite hitting the earth, or something you couldn't have possibly imagined. And of course it's turned out over the last week or so that there were some warnings, if not about a specific attack on that day, at that site, at least generally, about the question of hijacking and Al Qaeda, so a lot of questions are being raise in Washington.

HARRIS: Tell us this, though. Is the article making the mistake -- I should say the mistake. But is the article at least going from the standpoint of using 20/20 hindsight here, because that is the one line that most people try to be careful about, not trailing over and looking back at what happened.

Now that we have the advantage of knowing, what sort of lens do you use when you look at what happened here and how much information had been gathered?

COOPER: I think what we try to do in this week's "Time" magazine cover story is to really not use 20/20 hindsight, and oppose some standard of clairvoyance, because we know now what happened.

But to look at what people knew at the time and what -- where information was flowing or not flowing, the bureaucracy, you know, you had an agent by the name of Williams out of the Phoenix office the FBI, who wrote a very prescient memo, saying that he had noticed a large number of suspicious characters from the Middle East attending flight schools in the United States, and he had written a memo saying, hey, maybe they're up to something, and we tracked bits of information like that and see where they went and where they should have gone and where they didn't go.

HARRIS: Without using the word "blame," how much of this do you lay at the feet of the FBI now?

COOPER: Well, I think from what's emerging so far is the FBI has got explaining to do. Clearly this fellow, Williams, the agent in Phoenix, who wrote this very prescient memo, his memo doesn't seem to have made it very high. In fact, in "Time," we kind of went, and it not only didn't get the FBI, but it certainly didn't make it to the White House, which had the job of coordinating lots of the counterterrorism.

So the FBI has got some blame to do. The CIA didn't show any great curiosity in what the FBI was doing. The White House probably could have been more prescient. So you know, I think there seems to be plenty of blame to go around.

HARRIS: Boy, I wish we could talk some more about it, but because of the speech Mr. Bush gave, we have to pretty much wrap things up right now, Matt.

But a very interesting article, and one of the conclusions you reach is that even this late in the whole thing, many of these problems have not been fixed yet, so very interesting piece.

Matt Cooper, thanks very much. Appreciate it. That of course is in this week's "Time" magazine. "While America Slept" is the cover.

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