The White House has released and orginally redacted version of the now famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (full text of briefing). Michael Rupper has pointed out that the 8/6/01 PBD is in many ways a distraction from the rest of what we do know, and the context in which that PDB occurred. Ruppert points to (and documents) some damning information. Two of these are telling. First, an NPR interviews with Congressperson Ike Skelton (D-MO) which is reported as
”'I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton—a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee—who said that just recently the Director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack—an imminent attack—on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.'The audio of this report is available from The Memory Hole
Second is a CBS report from 7/26/01 questioning why Ashcroft was not flying commercial: (Ashcroft Flying High or the CBS original at Ashcroft Flying High)
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,"…
The 8/06/01 PDB was framed by repeated warnings. Another example is from the transcripts of the 9/11 Congressional Report located at the The Memory Hole linked from the 9/11 page.
2. Finding: During the spring and summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community experienced a significant increase in information indicating that Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida intended to strike against U.S. interests in the very near future.Discussion: The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, reported at least 33 communications indicating a possible, imminent terrorist attack in 2001. Senior U.S. Government officials were advised by the Intelligence Community on June 28 and July 10, 2001, that the attacks were expected, among other things, to “have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties” and that “[a]ttack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”
Then there is a quote on page 8 of the report from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's testimony:
"We issued between January and September nine warnings, five of them global, because of the threat information we were receiving from the intelligence agencies in the summer, when [DCI] George Tenet was around town literally pounding on desks saying, something is happening, this is an unprecedented level of threat information. He didn’t know where it was going to happen, but he knew that it was coming."
So Tenet was "pounding desks" as well as Richard Clarke. Further if "five of the nine warnings" issued by the State Department were "global," then four of them were specific to the United States. Of course the US is also included as part of global warnings so the State Department issued nine warnings which included imminent threat of terrorist attacks, four of which were specific solely to the US between January and September of 2001.
Then from the Congressional report we learn (emphases mine):
This stream of reporting began as early as 1998 and continued during the time of heightened threat levels in 2001. For example, the Community received reporting in May 2001 that Bin Ladin supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States to conduct terrorist operations and, in late summer 2001, that an al-Qa’ida associate was considering mounting terrorist attacks within the United States.
The report also alludes to what we now know as the August 6, 2001 PDB on page nine (emphases mine):
Discussion: [While the credibility of the sources was sometimes questionable and the information often sketchy, the Inquiry confirmed that the Intelligence Community did receive intelligence reporting concerning the potential use of aircraft as weapons. For example, the Community received information in 1998 about a Bin Ladin operation that would involve flying an explosive- laden aircraft into a U.S. airport and, in summer 2001, about a plot to bomb a U.S. embassy from an airplane or crash an airplane into it. The FBI and CIA were also aware that convicted terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad and several others had discussed the possibility of crashing an airplane into CIA Headquarters as part of “the Bojinka Plot” in the Philippines, discussed later in this report. Some, but apparently not all, of these reports were disseminated within the Intelligence Community and to other agencies].
This is the tenor of information in which the 8/26/01 PDB occurred. This is why a PDB entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. should have raised alarms REGARDLESS of whether it had "specific" information or not. What I hear from the disavowal of the importance of the 8/06/01 PDB is that the White House had received continuous warnings from various components of the Intelligence Community, and this was just one more. If Tenet was "pounding desks," we can be sure that he was also shouting this message in "principal's meetings" - particularly during the summer of 2001. Obviously, the warnings were considered significant by the Department of Justice, as Ashcroft steered clear of commercial airlines.
In the face of all of these threats, which were passed to Bush both from the Clinton administration, and then in increasing intensity from January 2001 forward, the decision was to piddle along thinking about a "strategy" until September 4, 2001. It is interesting in hearing and looking over Rice's Testimony before the 9/11, that she repeatedly stressed that terrorism was an important concern of the President, but that there were structural problems in the intelligence community (particularly between CIA and FBI) that were very hard to change. However, they were (apparently) able to overcome these issues (that take a long time to make) immediately in the wake 0f 9/11/01. I have highlight the stresses in the following block of testimony:
RICE: Well, thank you. We did have a structural problem, and structural problems take some time to address. We did have a national security policy directive asking the CIA, through the foreign intelligence board, headed by Brent Scowcroft, to review its intelligence activities, the way that it gathered intelligence. And that was a study that was to be completed. The vice president was, a little later in, I think, in May, tasked by the president to put together a group to look at all of the recommendations that had been made about domestic preparedness and all of the questions associated with that; to take the Gilmore report and the Hart-Rudman report and so forth and to try to make recommendations about what might have been done. We were in office 233 days. And the kinds of structural changes that have been needed by this country for some time did not get made in that period of time. I'm told that after the millennium plot was discovered, that there was an after-action report done and that some steps were taken. To my recollection, that was not briefed to us during the transition period or during the threat spike. But clearly, what needed to be done was that we needed systems in place that would bring all of this together. It is not enough to leave this to chance. If you look at this period, I think you see that everybody -- the director of the CIA -- Louis Freeh had left, but the key counterterrorism person was a part of Dick Clarke's group. And with meeting with him and, I'm sure, shaking the trees and doing all of the things that you would want people to do, we were being given reports all the time that they were doing everything they could. But there was a systemic problem in getting that kind of shared intelligence.RICE: The way that we went about this was to have individual cases where you were trying to build a criminal case, individual offices with responsibility for those cases. Much was not coming to the FBI in a way that it could then engage the policymakers. So these were big structural reforms. We did some things to try and get the CIA reforming. We did some things to try and get a better sense of how to put all of this together. But structural reform is hard, and in seven months we didn't have time to make the changes that were necessary. We made them almost immediately after September 11th.
If you look through the testimony an see how many times Rice reiterated the difficulties, not having enough time, etc, one gets the sense that change was impossible even though the President was aware and concerned. So why could these "difficult" structural changes occur "immediately"? Well, the reality is that they haven't, but the Administration certainly wants us to think that they have.
If Rice writes off the 8/06/01 PDB as "historical" and nothing to raise immediate alarm, then it is certainly appropriate to look at her interpretation in the light of the context in which it occurred. It is clear to me, that even if they didn't have specific information that four planes were going to be hijacked on the East coast of the United States on the morning of September 11th, and that two of those planes were to be used as missiles to attack the WTC, another for the Pentagon, and another for the White House, that they damn well knew that it was possible. They had the warnings of highjackings and explosives. They even had knowledge that planes might be used as bombs themselves. They knew the array of targets (including the WTC and the Pentagon). They knew that "something big" was imminent. They knew enough for some Administration officials to swear off commercial flights. They knew that al-Qaeda cells were present in the US. They knew and their purported "action" was to engage in planning (at leisure) and organizational restructuring.
They also knew when those planes were highjacked. They knew the trajectories of the planes. They had to suspect with a high degree of certainty, that this was the "something big" they had been warned about for the previous seven months. And they did ... nothing. Scrambled intercept fighter jets were called back to base. They watched it happen. They sat there and watched their little screens. Yep, plane one hit the WTC. Yep, there's another one into the WTC. Whoops, that one went down somewhere. Yep, that one hit the Pentagon.
Heck, much of the nation watched the whole thing unfold in real time in front of our very eyes. The people didn't have the tools or ability to react. The Administration clearly did. Instead, Bush decided to follow through on a photo opportunity at a Florida grade school after the first plane had hit the WTC and it was known that other planes had broken off communications and were off course (5-Minute Video of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11 - with text introduction by the Memory Hole). While sitting there listening to the children in the classroom a Emma T. Booker Elementary School, he already knew that one plane had hit the World Trade Center. We know he knew because Andrew Card told him during the reading "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
So not only did the Administration not act to attempt to prevent the events of September 11, 2001, they did not act once they knew that the attacks were in process. Could they have prevented the events of September 11th entirely? We'll never know. Could they have lessened the impact of those events? In my opinion that is almost certain. The various commissions (Congressional and Bipartisan) have focused their attention on what the Administration knew and could have responded to prior to September 11th. Why is no one asking why they didn't respond ON September 11th. That is more inexplicable to me than what they might have figured out before hand. When I look at the total lack of response both to the threats, and to the actual attack, the picture I see is damning.
So one little PDB taken out of the context of the information that was available is pointless, and it I would agree with Michael Ruppert that it is being spun as a distraction. The argument rages of whether that particular document was the necessary warning. In looking at the PDB, I can't say that as a stand-alone document that it is. However, looked within the context of everything else (including Tenet and Clarke yelling themselves blue in the face trying to get a response), it certainly is a clear and imminent warning. The fact that no document has turned up about the specific plan is unimportant. My guess is that such information hardly ever is that specific. To claim that such specificity was the prerequisite for averting the disaster of September 11th is an insult to us all. If that is what they needed, then they don't deserve to be in power.
Posted by rowan at April 11, 2004 07:15 AM | TrackBack | Printable Version | [eMail this article!] |