Documents keep trickling out that make one ask the question of whether the Bush administration really got the al Qaeda threat before 9/11 slapped them upside the head.

The latest to emerge is a 13-page memo from counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke to Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, in January 2001. It outlined the al Qaeda threat and offered some options for dealing with it.

For details, read the NYT story, but here's the excerpt I found interesting:

Dr. Rice, now the secretary of state, and other administration officials have asserted that the documents did not amount to a full plan for taking on the terrorist network.

"No Al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration," Dr. Rice wrote in an op-ed article for The Washington Post last March. She wrote that Mr. Clarke and his team "suggested several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted."

Mr. Clarke had served in high-level government posts since the Reagan administration and stayed on from the Clinton administration. He resigned in February 2003 and last year published a memoir, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror." (Mr. Clarke began writing a column on security matters for The New York Times Magazine this month.)

Nearly nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks, the papers described the danger posed by the bin Laden network and sought to focus the attention of the new administration on what to do about it. But the texts are unlikely to resolve the debate over whether they should have led to more urgent action by the administration.

"I think Condi Rice has at least an arguable case that it's short of a plan," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a security analyst at the Brookings Institution.

Mr. O'Hanlon called Mr. Clarke's memorandums a set of "very dry data points. There's not a heightened sense of, 'Now our homeland is at risk.' "

But Matthew Levitt, who was an F.B.I. counterterrorism analyst in 2001, disagreed. He called the 13-page strategy memorandum "a pretty disturbing document."

Mr. Levitt, now director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that whether the document constitutes a "plan," as Mr. Clarke averred and Dr. Rice denied, is "a semantic debate." But he said the experience of reading the original documents for the first time Friday left him with a strong impression of the danger Al Qaeda posed.

"I think it makes the threat look pretty urgent," Mr. Levitt said. "I look at this and I see something that to my mind requires immediate attention."