Free Republic

On Jamie Gorelick, the Washington press corps, which is normally energized by any effort by a Republican administration to suppress information, sees Attorney General John Ashcroft as the one who should be chided for releasing memos which show how U.S. Attorneys in 1995 were upset by how guidelines written by then-Deputy Attorney General Gorelick, preventing the CIA from informing domestic agencies about terrorists inside the U.S., went beyond what was legally required and hamstrung efforts to prevent terrorism. Gorelick is now on the 9-11 Commission. At the start of President Bush’s meeting with the commission on Thursday, he reportedly expressed...

The infamous CIA briefing for President Bush from August 6th, 2001, which Democrats intimated was a smoking gun revealing Bush inaction against terrorist threats, is rather a clear indictment of the Clinton Administration. Clinton took little action against terrorism, and prioritized national security in general far below Globalization (open borders) and diversity. The title of the briefing is “Bin Ladin (sic) Determined to Strike in US.” It credits mostly unclassified and foreign sources from 1997 and 1998 for insight revealing that al Qaeda wished to “bring the fighting to America.” Bin Laden also issued an unauthorized “Fatwa” (he is not...

<p>President Bush told the September 11 commission yesterday in a closed-door meeting that a memo saying Osama bin Laden wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the United States did not provide enough intelligence for his administration to stop the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.</p>

n the summer of 2001 the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, was running around with his hair on fire. When told that Mr. Tenet's hair was on fire, President Bush replied, "I'm tired of swatting flies." The president added that the only thing worse than swatting flies was shaking trees. "You can swat all the flies and shake all the trees you want, but it still won't be a silver bullet," the president said. As August wore on Mr. Tenet's hair blazed out of control. Mr. Bush received a President's Daily Brief, or P.D.B., entitled, "Fire in Tenet's Hair...

Well that was a blow-out, wasn't it? After much media speculation, the famous article from the President's Daily Brief (PDB) of 6 August 2001 was declassified this past Saturday. Many feared (and some hoped) it would show the President had received 'actionable intelligence' about the 9/11 attacks more than a month before they occurred. But just read the PDB. You don't have to be James Bond to see there is no actionable intelligence there at all. Not a shred. This needless declassification of a Top Secret document was the result of a stunt by Richard Ben-Veniste, a member - as...

The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing turned out to be a dud for liberal commentators seeking the elusive bombshell revelation that would demonstrate the Bush Administration's negligence prior to 9/11. Sure, the headline of the memo was tantalizing: "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The moment 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste perry-masoned that title out of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, you could just about hear the blood rushing to the collective loins of the New York Times op-ed page. The PDB mentions bin Laden's desire "to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of 'Blind Shaykh'...

On Saturday, the New York Times—adhering to the P.T. Barnum school of journalism—screamed on its front page that President Bush was warned “that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes.”To drive home the point that “Bush lied,” the Times informed readers, “The disclosure appears to contradict the White House’s repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was ‘historical’ in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.”The source for this most sensational of charges,...

The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing turned out to be a dud for liberal commentators seeking the elusive bombshell revelation that would demonstrate the Bush Administration's negligence prior to 9/11. Sure, the headline of the memo was tantalizing: "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The moment 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste perry-masoned that title out of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, you could just about hear the blood rushing to the collective loins of the New York Times op-ed page. The PDB mentions bin Laden's desire "to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of 'Blind Shaykh'...

Aug. 6, 2001 briefing on al-Qaida only latest in series of warnings about terror threat sent to White House... Developing...

The value of a Sept. 11 commission is that it can bring a better understanding as to what clues were missed and how the president and federal agencies could better protect the nation from future attacks. That would be the cooperative approach; the one that holds the American people pre-eminent. Unfortunately, politics is the supreme consideration right now. And so everything the commission discusses is pounced upon immediately by the president's detractors. Which brings us to the now famous memo to the president dated Aug. 6, 2001. It contains a lot of words and phrases that, in hindsight, strike familiar...

THE RELEASE THIS weekend of the much-discussed Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief on al Qaeda was both welcome and anticlimactic. Both the title and the contents of the 17-sentence memorandum were essentially known even before national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony last week. The congressional inquiry into the events of Sept. 11, 2001, for example, reported that "a closely held intelligence report" included references to "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," as well as a warning in May 2001 that a group of Osama bin Laden supporters "was planning...

WASHINGTON - Just one day after President Bush received a pre-Sept. 11 briefing on al-Qaida's effort to strike on U.S. soil, senior government executives received a similarly titled memo that excluded information about current threats and investigations, say federal officials who have read both documents. The Aug. 7, 2001 memo, known as the senior executive intelligence brief or SEIB, didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al-Qaida activity that Bush had been told of a day earlier in a memo entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," the officials said Monday. The senior executives' memo also did not...

The Media Knew, Too The release of a vague PBD is no smoking gun. The August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing has been released with much media fanfare. Butwhy? Most of the PDB had already been leaked to the press over the course of the last two years. Moreover, far from being specific, the PDB was wrong in several critical respects. The hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They were not recruited from the ranks of young Muslim Americans. The hijackers did not use explosives. The 9/11 terrorists used cardboard cutters and nail clippers to seize control of...

The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, as Dr. Rice stated, is extremely vague and actually tells us very little we didn’t already know. Condoleezza Rice’s testimony in front of the September 11 Commission dropped a number of bombshells and provided new insights for the public to see how President Bush intended on tackling the issue of terrorism prior to 9/11. Of these bombshells was the account by Rice that President Bush’s first priority was to eliminate al Qaeda, and the entire decimation of Dick Clarke’s false -- or at least, grossly inaccurate -- accusations that the President was doing...

CRAWFORD, Texas - On the defensive, President Bush said Monday there was no warning in a pre-Sept. 11 intelligence memo that "something is about to happen in America" before the nation's worst terrorism attack. He said U.S. intelligence services may be due for reforms. "There was nothing in there that said, you know, `There is an imminent attack,'" Bush told reporters. "That wasn't what the report said. The report was kind of a history of Osama's (bin Laden's) intentions." Democrats have suggested there was more to the memo, the center of an election-year skirmish over the president's anti-terrorism policies before...

The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said. The document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America," in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to knowledgeable sources. Bush had specifically asked for an intelligence analysis of possible al Qaeda attacks within the...

The August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing has been released with much media fanfare. But why? Most of the PDB had already been leaked to the press over the course of the last two years. Moreover, far from being specific, the PDB was wrong in several critical respects. The hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They were not recruited from the ranks of young Muslim Americans. The hijackers did not use explosives. The 9/11 terrorists used cardboard cutters and nail clippers to seize control of the aircraft. Consequently, even if the president had issued an order stopping every...

<p>April 12, 2004 -- President Bush yesterday said there was no "actionable intelligence" in the CIA memo on al Qaeda that he got a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. "Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack," Bush said in his first public comments since the Aug. 6, 2001, memo was released Saturday.</p>

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - President Bush said Sunday he was satisfied before Sept. 11, 2001, that federal agents were on top of the terrorist threat when he read a briefing memo on Osama bin Laden's intention to strike inside the United States. "I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence," Bush said during a visit to Fort Hood, Texas. In his first comments since Saturday's release of the presidential daily brief, Bush said that when he read the memo of Aug. 6, 2001, "I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into." Bush said...

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush and Democrats clashed Sunday over whether a newly released intelligence memo from 2001 about terrorist threats in the United States should have triggered stronger pre-emptive efforts before Sept. 11, 2001. Bush told reporters with him in Texas that the Aug. 6, 2001, memo about Osama bin Laden's desire to attack the United States "was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack." Democrats said that even without such detail, a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." should have prompted an exhaustive probe that...

The classified briefing that President Bush received 36 days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks reported that the Al Qaeda terrorist network had maintained an active presence in the United States for years, was suspected of recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York and could be preparing for domestic hijackings. But the briefing did not point to any specific time or place of attack and did not warn that planes could be used as missiles. After releasing the "President's Daily Brief" on Saturday evening, White House officials said that none of the information given to the president at his...

DR. RICE: Good afternoon. I'm going to give you a chronology of the events that occurred during the spring and summer of 2001. But I want to start with a little definitional work. When we talk about threats, they come in many varieties. Very often we have uncorroborated information; sometimes we have corroborated but very general information. But I can tell you that it is almost never the case that we have information that is specific as to time, place, or method of attack. In the period starting in December 2000, the intelligence community started reporting increase in traffic concerning...

A handful of Sept. 11 widows are outraged that President Bush didn't act on the August 6, 2001 briefing he got from the CIA. "Everything is in [the briefing memo] but the date 9/11," complained Lori Van Auken whose husband died in the Twin Towers, in comments to the New York Daily News. "You have the who, what, where, why and how. The only thing you don't have is the when." Actually, as far as the "who" goes, none of the hijackers' names appear in the Bush CIA briefing memo. And the "what"? Nowhere does the memo warn that hijackers...

WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) - The FBI this week will be pressed to explain why 70 separate investigations did not uncover the Sept. 11 hijacked airliner plot, members of the commission investigating the attacks said on Sunday. Former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, seizing on the revelation that so many probes were under way weeks before the deadly attacks, also said former President Bill Clinton told the panel he was frustrated by his inability to give the FBI direct orders. "The greatest surprise to me was that President Clinton said how limited the White House is in dealing with the FBI,"...

(2004-04-11) -- A presidential briefing, dated August 6, 2001, and released by the White House yesterday, shows that in 1998 George W. Bush did nothing to respond to the threat of terror attacks from Usama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. In fact, when correlated with last week's testimony before the 9/11 Commission by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, it seems clear that the Bush administration had virtually no plan to act on top-secret intelligence gathered during the Clinton administration until after George W. Bush took office in 2001. "The August 6 PDB (President's Daily Brief) clearly shows that the White...

Press Release Source: Newsweek NEWSWEEK: Ashcroft Never Saw August 2001 'PDB' Warning of Al Qaeda AttackSunday April 11, 10:18 am ET Pickard To Testify That He Alerted All 56 FBI Offices About Al Qaeda Activity; Whistleblower Rowley Says She Never Saw Any Warning NEW YORK, April 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Attorney General John Ashcroft never saw the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) warning of an Al Qaeda attack inside the United States because President George W. Bush, with his penchant for secrecy, had restricted the distribution of the PDB to just seven national security officials, Newsweek reports in the...

<p>The CIA's Aug. 6, 2001 memo for President Bush should pose serious new credibility problems for the nation's spy agency, not for Bush.</p> <p>Democrats such as 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste have sought to paint the memo as a CIA warning that Bush ignored a month before the terror attacks - but it turns out to be nothing of the sort.</p>

CRAWFORD, Tex., April 10 -- President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan.The information was included in a written Aug. 6, 2001, briefing to Bush that was declassified Saturday night by the White House in response to a request from the independent commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks. The short article, titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," also included information that the FBI had "70 full field investigations"...

My own preference would be to see the actial document. Druge has a page of it up, but I'd like the rest, and not the redactions from the partisan press, which don't give the feel of the piece. Does anyone know where it's posted, maybe a PDF file?

The text of a declassified presidential daily intelligence briefing from Aug. 6, 2001, was made public Saturday by the White House. Portions marked ``x'' were blacked out before release. Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America." After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35744-2002May17?language=printer Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S. Lack of Fresh Information Frustrated Bush By Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, May 19, 2002; Page A01 <-----------------------!!!!! The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said. The document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America," in part as retaliation...

................ Titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," the briefing told Bush that the FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related," and that the CIA and FBI were investigating a tip that Osama bin Laden's supporters were planning attacks in the United States. The memo also said the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." The document, a little more than a page long, summarized a series of indicators that bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader, was trying...

CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that Al Qaeda (search) 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 (search) 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 ever publicly releasing the highly...

Developing on Drudge: MEMO FALLOUT: 'Maybe I'm lost in a fog, but how much more information could you get?' asks Dem strategist James Carville. 'Of course, it was a warning'...

<p>CNN) -- The White House has released part of a key intelligence report on Osama Bin Laden that says the head of al Qaeda had been determined to conduct terror attacks in the United States since 1997. CNN's Carol Lin talked to senior political analyst Bill Schneider about the implications of the memo's contents.</p>

The White House has released a classified intelligence document that warned a month before the September 11 attacks of a possible al-Qaida strike inside the United States.The document titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike Inside the United States" was de-classified on Saturday amid an escalating row over whether the Bush administration had received any prior warnings about the attacks and if they had been ignored. National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted in her public testimony to the 9/11 commission last week that the document relating to the 6 August, 2001 presidential briefing contained mostly historical information and did not warn...

Fact Sheet The August 6, 2001 Pdb · the August 6, 2001 Pdb Item Entitled "bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" was prepared in response to questions asked by the President about the possibility of attacks by al-Qaida inside the United States. The PDB article did not warn of the 9-11 attacks. Although the PDB referred to the possibility of hijackings, it did not discuss the possible use of planes as weapons. The PDB was based largely on background information about past terrorist attacks conducted by al-Qaida and general threats from the late 1990s. The only recent information concerning...

<p>Q: Why was this PDB prepared?</p> <p>DCI Tenet has already described the genesis of this PDB item in a letter to the 9-11 Commission dated March 26, 2004. This PDB item was prepared in response to questions President Bush asked his PDB briefer. The President had seen previous intelligence reports about possible al-Qa'ida threats to U.S. targets outside the United States. The President had asked whether any of the information pointed to a possible attack inside the United States. When this PDB item was presented to the President on August 6, 2001, his PDB briefer told him that it was prepared in response to the President's previous questions.</p>

Breaking now.....it will be released in a pdf file.

The classified briefing delivered to President Bush five weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks featured information about ongoing al Qaeda activities within the United States, including signs of a terror support network, indications of hijacking preparations and plans for domestic attacks using explosives, according to sources who have seen the document and a review of official accounts and media reports over the past two years. The information on current threats in the briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," stands in contrast to repeated assertions by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials as...

Highlights of the report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the US" include: -- Osama bin Laden was set on striking the US as early as 1997 through early 2001; -- At least 70 FBI investigations were underway in 2001 regarding possible al Qaeda cells/terrorist-related operations in the U.S. Sources aware of the PDB say much of the intelligence is uncorroborated, and none of it is related to the eventual September 11 terrorist plot.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaeda was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo. Condoleezza Rice told a Sept. 11 commission she didn't see any such al-Qaeda reports until after Sept. 11. By J. Scott Applewhite, AP The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 — a month before the Sept. 11 attacks — said there were various reports that Osama...

Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says By ERIC LICHTBLAUand DAVID E. SANGER Published: April 10, 2004 WASHINGTON, April 9 — President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday. The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence...

The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said. The document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America," in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to knowledgeable sources. Bush had specifically asked for an intelligence analysis of possible al Qaeda attacks within the...

Al-Qaida Allegedly Tried In 2001 To Send Operatives Into U.S. For Explosives Attack WASHINGTON -- The Associated Press has learned that President George W. Bush's August 2001 terrorism memo includes information indicating that three months earlier, al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack. The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, was delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 -- a month before 9/11. The AP has talked with sources familiar with the PDB. Several people who have seen the memo say there were various reports Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside...

President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo. The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 - a month before the Sept. 11 attacks - said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated...

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites)'s August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo. The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 — a month before the Sept. 11 attacks — said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration expects to release early next week an intelligence document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" that the Sept. 11 commission requested. White House officials were working Friday to declassify the document, a so-called presidential daily brief. PDBs are a compilation of information from law enforcement and intelligence agencies designed to keep the president updated on threats around the world. They normally are circulated exclusively among a select group of top administration officials. Members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States already have seen the Aug. 6,...

WASHINGTON - U.S. government agencies issued repeated warnings in the summer of 2001 about potential terrorist plots against the United States masterminded by Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), including a possible plan to hijack commercial aircraft, documents show. While there were no specific targets mentioned in the United States, there was intelligence indicating al-Qaida might attempt to crash a plane into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. And other reports said Islamic extremists might try to hijack a plane to gain release of comrades. The escalating seriousness was reflected in a series of warnings issued by the State Department,...