Posted on 04/12/2004 9:40:50 PM PDT by Indy Pendance
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 attacks in the United States with explosives" -- the guts of the three sentences that detail an ongoing threat from al Qaeda. Nonetheless, given the document's focus on the prospect of a domestic attack and the attention it received, the administration made the right decision in moving to declassify the PDB and give the public a chance to judge for itself.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I thought Brit was talking about the NY Times
"Reading the memo in its entirety, it's hard to see it, as some of President Bush's opponents contend, as a smoking gun that proves the administration was asleep at the switch before Sept. 11. To suggest that Mr. Bush, having received the memo, should have rushed back to the White House from Crawford, Tex., is unfair and unrealistic. Only with the benefit of hindsight does the document acquire that level of foreboding and urgency -- and in any event the plans were so far underway at that stage that even a presidential red alert might have made no difference"
In other words, this memo is a tempest in a teapot.
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