I didn't see Rice's testimony because I was busy with personal isues so I'm really just catching up on this PDB stuff. However, here are my thoughts in particular on the White House spin being reported by the AP (admittedly
cross-posted from my blog).
What else can you call this but an attempt to parse language to mean something other than what it means. A quick review of a few quotes from an AP article on the today's release of the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The article text is in bold.
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush was told a month before Sept. 11, 2001, that al Qaeda members were in the United States and the FBI had detected suspicious activity ``consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,'' according to a secret memo the White House released under pressure on Saturday.
White House officials were quick to say after the document's evening release that the Aug. 6, 2001, memo did not warn of the Sept. 11 attacks and that although it referred to the possibility of hijackings, it did not discuss the possible use of planes as weapons.
This is pure nonsense spin. What relevance from a security standpoint does the intended use of the aircraft after it is hijacked have? I mean, if the warning is hijackings then your goal is to prevent the hijackings, not to barter after they occur. And its not clear what you would do differently if the goal was to launch the aircraft into buildings as opposed to just a hostage taking except shoot the planes out of the sky. But from a security standpoint you would want to scramble jets in both cases and this is what was not effectively done - and if effectively done at least could have prevented the attack on the Pentagon which happened one hour after the first plane hit the WTC. In short, the White House is spinning the difference between the use of a plane after its hijacked as significant when any effort to prevent the terrorist attack would start with preventing the hijacking itself and would have involved scrambling fighter jets. Neither was effectively planned for by the Bush administration which is what they are covering up by spinning this obvious warning of impending terrorist attacks.
``There's nothing in here that we can show was tied to the 9/11 plot,'' a senior White House official told reporters.
Huh? There are numerous factors in the PDB that clearly insinuate that Al Quaeda operatives were active within the United States, were planning attacks that could involve Washington DC and New York, that suspicious activity had recently been documented, etc.. In fact, the entire document is in fact a warning of the September 11th attacks.
There is another aspect of this PDB which I believe is politically significant. And that is that the PDB clearly documents that Bin Laden takes years in planning strikes such as those on September 11th. This is something which directly undermines the notion (claimed by the Bushies) that somehow Bush has been successful because there have been no successful Al Quaeda strikes within the US since 2001. Since these attacks often take years in planning there is nothing to suggest that another attack is not proceeding as planned for some time in the future. This is why we must be vigilant and stay focused in our efforts to combat terrorism. And this is precisely why the war in Iraq is a dangerous distraction from that effort as Richard Clarke suggests.