No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

More on the August 6, 2001 PDB

The Washington Post has more on the Presidential Daily Bulletin that was declassified and released last Saturday. Two key paragraphs in the story are:

Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, said in an appearance on CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer" that the PDB "is not a silver bullet" but that it should have prompted a more aggressive government response. "They didn't know 9/11 was going to happen, but I think the author of this memo was alerting the president to the possibility that the strike that we were all anticipating in the summer of 2001 might well occur within the United States," Ben-Veniste said.

and from George Bush:

President Bush said yesterday that a memo he received a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not contain enough specific threat information to prevent the hijackings and "said nothing about an attack on America."

In his most extensive public remarks about a briefing he received Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," Bush also said that he "was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into" by the FBI and the CIA that summer and that they would have reported any "actionable intelligence" to him.

"I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America -- at a time and a place, an attack," Bush told reporters after Easter services in Fort Hood, Tex. "Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where and with what?"

Bush agreed with a reporter who characterized the memo as containing "ongoing" and "current threat information." But he added that if the FBI or CIA "found something, they would have reported it to me. . . . We were doing precisely what the American people expects us to do: run down every lead, look at every scintilla of intelligence and follow up on it."

The PDB itself in .pdf format from Josh Marshall's archives here.

Both George Bush and Richard Ben-Veniste are speaking of the same document. The difference is the reaction that each expected to result from that document. Bush clearly views it as a document that is essentially a status report to let him know that the FBI or someone is on top of the issue. Ben-Veniste views it as an alert document provided to cause the President to take some action.

Clearly I am on the side of Ben-Veniste. Had this been a PDB on the subject of stem-cell research, something that Bush was heavily involved in at that time, it would have at a minimum caused Bush to ask for more information. That he took no action on the memo indicates that it was not a subject that he considered to be high-priority for him at that time.

This confirms what Richard Clarke has said, and clearly shows that what Condi Rice said to the 9/11 Commission was not true. The Bush White House did NOT consider possible terrorist attacks on the U.S. in the Homeland to be of as great an urgency for Presidential action as, for example, tax cuts or stem-cell research.
posted by Richard at 3:56 AM