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James Pinkerton claims in Newsday that the recently declassified President’s Daily Brief memo was damaging to Bush:
The Washington Post reported in May 2002 that Bush had received a President’s Daily Brief on Aug. 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But, of course, not everything that’s reported becomes widely known, or is necessarily true. And so for most Americans, yesterday’s 9/11 hearing provided their first occasion to learn, from the highest sources, just what was in that document.
...And we all know what happened the following month.
What we don’t know is the precise sequence of events that led to the government’s Pearl Harbor-like cluelessness on 9/11.
The memo was in August, and the Left claims Bush had the entire month of August and even a week in September 2001, to track down the 9-11 plot and halt it. Sure, that makes sense. Sometimes it seems like people can’t tell the difference between what works in a Hollywood movie, and what makes sense in the real world. In movies, a month is plenty of time to stop any sort of a plot. Even 24 hours is plenty of time. But in the real world, it’s a different story. In the real world, the CIA and the President are flooded night and day with threat assessments from any number of sources. If you declassified all the documents, you’d see lots of other threats that were possibly imminent. What does the Left think Bush should have done—shut down all airlines for the rest of the year just in case Al-Qaeda was going to do something using an airplane?
In any case, the Left has misunderstood the memo. Deborah Orin, in Newsday, gets it right:
The CIA’s Aug. 6, 2001 memo for President Bush should pose serious new credibility problems for the nation’s spy agency, not for Bush.
Democrats such as 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste have sought to paint the memo as a CIA warning that Bush ignored a month before the terror attacks – but it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Far from sounding the alarm about an imminent risk that al Qaeda would hijack airplanes, the CIA pooh-poohed the idea as a “sensational” claim that couldn’t be verified.
“We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [foreign intelligence] service in 1998 saying that [Osama] bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Sheik” [Omar Abdel-Rahman] and other U.S. extremists,” the CIA wrote.
That foreign intelligence report came in while Bill Clinton was president, but three years later the CIA had found nothing to back it up and thus seemed to downplay it – the very opposite of issuing a red-alert to Bush.
