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By Root 844 0

intelligence service than we do; because an eyewitness claimed to have seen the meeting; because Atta had had clandestine meetings in Prague before; and because the Iraqi intelligence officer wrote in his diary for that day, “Hamburg student,” which Atta was, and described himself as in his visa application. But the CIA and 9/11 Commission concluded that Atta was not in Prague on April 9 because, although no eyewitnesses saw him in the United States between April 4 and April 11, someone used his cell phone in Florida on April 6, 9, and 10.52

So conservatives dropped it, with Bush and Cheney never mentioning it again—and indeed, being taunted for having ever believed it.

Many conservatives believed Clinton’s granting pardons in exchange for donations to his presidential library or payments to his brother-in-law was a crime, but then found out they were wrong: The president has unrestricted power to grant pardons, except in the case of impeachments. So conservatives stopped calling it a crime.

Contrast that with liberals. Even having the New York Times acknowledge that: (1) Plame recommended her husband for the Niger trip, (2) Armitage told the press about her involvement, and (3) it was not a crime for Armitage to reveal her name—all that was not enough to get liberals to stop claiming that the leak of “secret agent” Valerie Plame’s name was a crime and that someone in the Bush White House had committed it.

Liberals can’t learn.

Wasn’t welfare reform such a triumphant success that Bill Clinton started claiming credit for it? In 2009, the Democratic “stimulus” bill largely repealed welfare reform. Didn’t we already prove that putting criminals behind bars would reduce the crime rate? Liberals are right back releasing criminals again. Haven’t concealed carry laws disproved the critics’ hysterical predictions and instead been magnificently successful at reducing crime? In 2009, the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress rejected a bill to allow “portability” of state concealed carry permits. (Everything must be national, except laws about guns.)

Ravens can learn to snatch fishermen’s untended lines to get fish. Worms learn not to eat harmful bacteria (as opposed to the tasty nutritious bacteria they normally feed on). Fruit fly larvae can learn to detect the scent of predators. But liberals cannot learn that the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” had not a speck of what we call “useful information.”

I described the August 6 PDB in painstaking detail in my 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. The memo read like a fifth-grader’s book report that was left to the last minute and based on quickly cobbled-together information from Google. The only “warnings” of future acts by al Qaeda were completely wrong. Thus, the PDB contained blindingly obvious facts such as “Bin Ladin [sic] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.,” while warning that bin Laden supporters might be planning an attack in the US “with explosives” and that they might be preparing to attack “federal buildings in New York.”

The 9/11 attack did not involve explosives. It did not target a single federal building in New York.

With liberals continuing to cite the August 6 PDB as if it had laid out the 9/11 plot in blinding detail, in frustration I even printed the full memo in the paperback version of Godless.

And still liberals cite the August 6 PDB as proof of Bush’s incompetence.

On December 3, 2008, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann ominously announced, “The title of the August 6th, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S’: It could have included copies of the terrorist itineraries and the message from the future. If a president did not act on it or perhaps did not even read it, it still wouldn’t have made any difference.”

In fact, if Bush had directed all members of the executive branch to drop everything and jump on the “warnings” in the August 6 PDB, bomb-sniffing dogs would have been wandering through our major cities and police lookouts would