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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...