Washington ? President Bush on Sunday forcefully defended his administration’s response to warnings of terrorist activity in the period before the Sept. 11 attacks, one day after a declassified memo gave critics fresh ammunition to assert that the Bush administration responded too sluggishly to such warnings.

Bush specifically dismissed any notion that his administration should have responded more aggressively to the memo, called a President’s Daily Brief, or PDB. He suggested the information in the memo — dated Aug. 6, about five weeks before terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon — was far too vague.

“The PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat,” Bush said at Fort Hood, where he was visiting troops for Easter near his Texas ranch. “There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?”

Bush added, “That PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America. Well, we knew that.”

The memo, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and prepared at Bush’s request for his daily briefing on intelligence matters, has been the subject of controversy for weeks. It was declassified by the White House on Saturday night.

Critics say the memo leaves little doubt that just weeks before Sept. 11, the Bush team was warned that bin Laden and his al-Qaida network were planning a major assault inside the United States, possibly involving hijackings. Given the nature of the threat, they said, the administration’s response was startlingly lacking in urgency.

The memo noted that the FBI had about 70 bin Laden-related investigations under way and cited “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

But Bush officials say the document was largely historical, citing information dating back to 1997 and describing bin Laden’s goals in general terms. The issue flared up last Thursday, when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, under questioning from the special commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, maintained that the memo was “historical.”

Bush noted Sunday that agencies such as the CIA and the FBI were investigating and trying to disrupt any attacks. He repeated his assertion that if he’d had any “actionable intelligence” about an impending attack, he would have responded strongly.

The debate is not likely to flag this week, when the commission conducts hearings Tuesday and Wednesday into the actions of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11. Among the witnesses scheduled to appear are Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and his predecessor, Janet Reno, as well as FBI Director Robert Mueller and his predecessor, Louis Freeh.