There’s been plenty of debate over the text of the President’s Daily Brief from Aug. 6, 2001, and whether it was just “historical information” about Osama bin Laden or whether the memo raised new the specter of a present threat describing bin Laden’s desire to “retaliate in Washington,” make “preparations for hijackings,” and look at “buildings in New York.”
This discussion, however, focuses only on whether one document should have prompted Bush to take the terrorist threat more seriously. The problem is that this single PDB was actually part of a series of warnings Bush received but didn’t act upon.
As the Washington Post’s Dana Priest explained today in a devastating story:
By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief headlined “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda’s intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush’s top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports “Bin Laden planning multiple operations,” “Bin Laden network’s plans advancing” and “Bin Laden threats are real.”
Sure, but did these dire warnings tell Bush what to do about the imminent threat?
The Post article paints the warnings as incredibly serious, including references to possible hijacking plots.
Without knowing when, where or how the terrorists would strike, the CIA “consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil,” according to one of two staff reports released by the panel yesterday.
“Reports similar to these were made available to President Bush in the morning meetings with [Director of Central Intelligence George J.] Tenet,” the commission staff said.
This was the context in which Bush received his PDB telling him that bin Laden was “determined to strike in U.S.”
Remember, Bush’s line has been that he “never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America.”
In this context, Bush “had occasionally asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States,” the report said. Or, as one U.S. senior official more intimately involved in the summer reporting paraphrased the president’s question to the CIA: “This guy going to strike here?”
A partial answer was contained in the very first sentence of the Aug. 6 President’s Daily Brief: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US.”
The document ended with two paragraphs of circumstantial evidence that al Qaeda operatives might already be in the United States preparing “for hijackings or other types of attacks” and said that the FBI and the CIA were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May “saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.”
And with that news, Bush left for the longest vacation ever taken by a sitting president.
The defense against the asleep-at-the-wheel charge has all but evaporated. So, Mr. Rove, what else do you have for us?