LINK TO 8/6/01 PDB: ""Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

FoxNews ^ | April 10, 2004 | White House Staff

[RobFromGa]

Q: Why was this PDB prepared?

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.

[CyberAnt]

Fox brought up the fact there was NO ACTIONABLE ITEM on the PDB - and they concluded it was just as Condi had said it was.

And .. for the dims to make their stories stick - the commission has to charge Condi with perjury - and I really don't think they can make that stick.

[Big Horn]

This report would be worthless if you were 100% sure of the attack. Some of the 9/11 commission should resign. They failed you could get a better investigation with grade school kids.

[Squantos]

Ya forgot ASAP !............:o)

[ghostie]

I would really love to get ahold of the actual .pdf file. The reason: there are documented reports of classified documents being released in an electronic format where one is still able to read the classified portions, if you know how to do it.

[Law is not justice but process]

Wow, what a great find! How in the world did Woodward get a classified intelligence memo?

[Jean S]

Here it is.

[ArmstedFragg]

We should have rounded up and interned every "Muslim-American youth."

Actually, the lefties probably would have preferred to round up every "clandestine source".

[Liberty Valance]

Drudge still hasn't updated the latest release. Just one more reason to come to FR for the latest.....

[CyberAnt]

Thanks, I've saved this little statement and I'm going to all the online media and harass them with it - ROTFLOL! Whoa .. this is going to be fun!!

[Quicksilver]

It was one of those unsourced WH briefings, like Clarke gave that Jim Angle had a recording of.

[LADY J]

"Wonder when the widows will awaken to the truth and realize that our president was doing his best to protect this country from the harm done the previous eight years of appeasing, pandering, and philandering."

Unlikely that will happen! They are Kool-Aid drinkers and they are loving the 'face time' they are getting.

[ApplegateRanch]

This PDB does not indicate anything that a casual observer of the Middle East did not already know.

All they will see...and HEAR...is Osama, AQ, inside US, airplanes, explosives.

It will never get through to them that:
"They" were not primarily Pakis
"They" did not enter via Canada
"They" didn't use 'explosives'
The Twins were NOT 'Federal buildings' nor an 'embassy'
That NOTHING was substantiated
That the FBI was doing everything reasonably expected
That the President doesn't do the day-to-day running of agencies

[Liberty Valance]

Was it worth it to let the Jihadis see how fragmented our intelligence about them really was pre-9/11? Our glorious 9/11 commission needs to STFU!

[GiveEmDubya]

ABC Online, Australia - 8 hours ago President George W Bush was made aware that Al Qaeda was planning specific attacks within the US more than a month before the September 11, 2001 attacks ...

I guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word "specific" is.

When I saw the word "specific", that really got me PO'd. It seems the only "specific" information was given about attacks that had already happened!

The details in the PDB were sketchy at best as to what, if anything, was to happen. It's like a blind man swatting at a fly--you know it's there, but you can't tell what it's doing. We had a feeling something was cooking with Bin Laden, but with no rock-solid clues, what exactly could have been done?

[Law is not justice but process]

Woodward is a helluva reporter. Wish he was on our side.

[rhombus]

What happened to Mansoor Ijaz? Is he still poking around in Packistan?

[CyberAnt]

I only want to slightly disagree with a couple of things.

While the media does a great job of saying the country is evenly divided .. that's not quite correct. And .. those who are the rabid Bush-haters who would not read the PDB and accept what the partisan media says - are only about 35-37%.

And .. while the dems continually say that the Bush admin has taken away their civil liberties - they also seem to think the FBI should have broken laws in order to have done more about the "suspicious activity".

[WhiteyAppleseed]

http://www.forensic-intelligence.org/

The link above has an interesting letter that was sent to the commission regarding a guy named Scarpa.

A footnote from the letter: Scarpa’s intelligence anticipates “shoe bomber” Richard Reed, the authorization for the 9/11 attacks given by Yousef's uncle, Kahlid Shaikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atta’s and Al Qaeda’s English connections, the single-use passports employed to board the airplanes hijacked on 9/11, and the videotaped death in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

[reformedliberal]

And as an added, bonus attraction: one more incident along w/the 9 (and counting) separate investigations of GWB or the Cabinet officers to be strung together into some sort of *pattern of behavior* and used as an attempt to impeach the POTUS.

They know they are going to lose.
They desperately want to impeach another President.
They intend to spend the entire second term filling the public archives w/articles that impugn this Presidency.

JMO, but I can connect dots.

[RobFromGa]

Here's what should have happened after this PDB was received if President Bush was doing his job on August 7, 2001 (according to the Democrats).

In a parallel universe called 'what if.'
Kathleen Parker (back to web version) | Send

April 10, 2004

NEW YORK - President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States.

Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on "Larry King Live," said the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against Bush.

Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest and illegal search and seizure.

Kerry's campaign mantra - "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" - clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's Sept. 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9-10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry.

The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?

The main target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime, as well as al-Qaida training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al-Qaida, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors.

Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al-Qaida continues to flourish.

Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden's operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction from Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Even though Saddam continues to send money to the families of Palestinian terrorists and is believed to have programs for developing WMD, Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program.

In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program is just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al-Qaida was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.

In a Jan. 25 memo to Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al-Qaida and a response to the USS Cole.

At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big."

With no other details on the "big," and weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9-11.

Under questioning by the "9-10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bipartisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the United States to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world.

Last week, Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging the American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in America. President Kerry was the clear response to that call.

In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which the new president is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Tower One.