Crawford, Texas ? President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that al-Qaida had reached America’s shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.

Since 1998, the FBI had observed “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,” according to a memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday.

White House aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president publicly releasing the highly sensitive document, a presidential daily briefing known as a PDB.

The Aug. 6, 2001, PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a May 2001 call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates “saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.”

The commission investigating the 9-11 attacks asked the White House to declassify the document at its meeting Thursday. It is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike.

The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years.

Democratic and Republican members of the 9-11 commission saw the document differently.

Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska, said the memo’s details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more information about possible domestic hijackings.

“The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States — this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn’t scramble our agencies to that,” he said.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo called into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s assertion Thursday that the memo was purely a “historical” document.

“This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security,” he said.

Senior administration officials said Bush saw more than 40 mentions of al-Qaida in his daily updates during the first eight months of his term.

Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said the memo “didn’t call for anything to be done” by Bush.

The memo’s details confirm that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving airplanes as missiles, Thompson said.

“The PDB backs up what Dr. Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun,” he said.