http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vppin093747412apr09,0,743956.columnJames P. Pinkerton, Newsday
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The Washington Post reported in May 2002 that Bush had received a President's Daily Brief on Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." But for most Americans, Thursday's 9/11 hearing provided their first occasion to learn what was in that document.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice began her testimony with a statement in which she minimized the possibility that anyone could have known what was happening. All intelligence prior to 9/11 was "not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack," she said. But then 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste pressed her about that PDB memo, still rated as "classified" by the government. Ben-Veniste was legally prohibited from mentioning even the title.
But he wasn't prohibited from asking Rice the title. And she obliged: "I believe the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.' " Ouch. Just moments after she had said intelligence was "not specific" about the place of attack, here's a presidential-level document warning, specifically, that Al-Qaida's target wasn't overseas, but rather the United States itself.
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Plenty of people in Washington had their "hair on fire" about the terrorism threat in summer 2001. But not Bush, apparently. On Aug. 4, he went off on a working vacation to his ranch in Texas. According to White House speechwriter turned memoirist David Frum, that summer Bush "did something I had never seen him do: he brooded." Yet the issue wasn't terrorism; it seems it was stem-cell research. On Aug. 9, Bush gave his first prime-time policy speech to the nation -- on the topic of embryos.
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In the meantime, here's a prediction: Bush won't dare show more 9/11 images in his campaign ads.
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