PDB Shows CIA Tried to Get Bush's Attention Prior to 9/11

The White House has declassified and released the August 6th, 2001 President's Daily Briefing, which is entitled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." What is important about this document is not, as Condi Rice suggested, whether or not it offers "historical" information. What is important about the PDB is that the CIA was pretty clearly trying to get Bush's attention and explain to him that something needed to be done. As the Washington Post story on the PDB puts it:

As one former administration official who has read the PDB said last week, "The agency doesn't write a headline like that if it doesn't want to get attention." In this case, the former official said, "the CIA did not believe Bush policymakers were taking the threat to the U.S. seriously."

The PDB puts Rice's testimony in a very different light, and undercuts her claim that everything that could reasonably have been done before 9/11 was done. Indeed, it suggests that both Rice and the President were altogether too passive. The issue at the hearings was whether Rice should have "shaken the tree" to get various lower level agencies to cooperate and put together information that might have alerted the White House to an imminent attack. What seems clear from the PDB is that the CIA was trying to "shake the tree" in the opposite direction; it was trying to get the President to move on an issue that it regarded as of great importance.

The President seems to have been negligent at just the wrong moment. He and Rice owe the nation a long overdue apology.