When to call a smoking gun a smoking gun

While President Bush was taking an unprecedented month-long vacation at his ranch in Texas, his August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing was entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S.” According to Sunday’s New York Times, the report cited evidence of active Al Qaeda cells within the U.S., “as well as reports that members of the terrorist organization had conducted recent surveillance of a federal building in Manhattan and could be preparing to stage hijackings. The briefing cited threats logged as recently as May 2001.”

In response, the administration did nothing, according to both Condi Rice in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission last week and the president himself on Sunday. That seems to me to be enough, given what happened a month later, to make the case that this administration had been adequately warned, prior to 9/11, that something terrible could occur, and it didn’t take the threat seriously. Despite the administration’s many statements along the lines of “who would ever have thought they would hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings?” their briefings included specific mention of that very possibility.

So what’s their excuse? Rice and the president claim that the August 6 PDB contained no new intelligence, and that they were already hard at work addressing the threat described. Yet there is very little evidence that suggests this administration was treating terrorist threats as a major foreign policy priority in the summer of 2001, again, despite ample warnings by former Clinton administration officials, including Richard Clarke, who stayed on in the Bush White House.

Their next line of defense is pointing fingers at the FBI. Bush said on Sunday that he was under the impression the FBI was looking into domestic threats.

Now ask youself, if you were president and you received a PDB with the warning contained in the August 6, 2001 briefing, wouldn’t you damn sure tell your people to go out and make doubly sure everyone was on the case – the CIA, FBI, transportation officials, and so on? How hard would that have been? And if Condi Rice and Dick Cheney responded that the PDB didn’t really contain anything we didn’t already know, wouldn’t you tell them to go out and check on it anyway? You're the president, dude. You can DO things like that.

But Dubya doesn’t operate that way. He is a lazy, disengaged president who just didn’t bother. Now he’d like to pass the buck.

I used to think it was highly unlikely that 9/11 could have been prevented. I'm not so sure anymore. Had the August 6 PDB led to a re-check on what everyone was doing, maybe the Transportation department would have gotten wind of it and would have strengthened airport security. Maybe the FBI would have rounded up the flight school guys who weren't interested in learning take-offs and landings. And maybe Al Qaeda would have concluded that we were onto them and it wasn't worth the risk.