The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [158]
The desperately slow progress of the Deputy Secretaries Committee, charged with deciding on a course of action against bin Laden, had been frustrating Clarke all year. In July, however, the deputies had finally decided on what to recommend to cabinet-level officials. “But the Principals’ calendar was full,” Clarke would recall, “and then they went away on vacation, many of them in August, so we couldn’t meet in August.”
PRESIDENT BUSH and Vice President Cheney were among those on vacation. Both, it was reported, planned to spend a good deal of time fishing. Bush was expected to spend the full month on his 1,583-acre ranch in Texas, not returning until Labor Day. “I’m sure,” said his press secretary, “he’ll have friends and family over to the ranch. He’ll do a little policy. He’ll keep up with events.” This would tie with the longest presidential vacation on record in modern times, enjoyed by Richard Nixon, and 55 percent of respondents to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll thought that “too much.”
For a president, however, there is no getting away from the CIA’s daily intelligence brief—the PDB. The one Bush received on August 6 was to haunt him for years to come. CBS News would be first to hint at what it contained, in a story almost a year after 9/11. Apparently thanks to a leak, national security correspondent David Martin was to reveal that Bush had been warned that month that “bin Laden’s terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes.”
Bombarded with questions the following day, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer would say the August 6 PDB had been a “very generalized” summary brought to the President in response to an earlier request. In a follow-up, he told reporters the PDB’s heading had read: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Condoleezza Rice, in her own separate briefing, made no reference to the title of the document. She went out of her way, however, to say the PDB had been “not a warning” but “an analytic report that talked about bin Laden’s methods of operation, talked about what he had done historically.” She characterized the document repeatedly as having been “historical,” that day and in the future.
Rice said there had indeed been two references to hijacking in the PDB, but only to “hijacking in the traditional sense … very vague.” No one, she thought, “could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon—that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.”
In spite of efforts to slough it off, though, the August 6 PDB became the story that would not go away, the center of a two-year struggle between the Bush administration and panels investigating 9/11. The White House line was that, as the “the most highly sensitized classified document in the government,” the daily briefs had to remain secret. The CIA, for its part, refused even to provide information on the way in which a PDB is prepared.
The nature of the daily briefs was in fact no mystery, for several of those delivered to earlier presidents had been released after they left office. A PDB consists of a series of short articles, enclosed in a leather binder, delivered to the President by his ubiquitous CIA briefer. It has been described as a “top-secret newspaper reporting on current developments around the world” and “a news digest for the very privileged.” A PDB may contain truly secret information, but can as often be less than sensational, even dull.
Congress’s Joint Inquiry was to press in vain for access to all relevant PDBs delivered to both Presidents