Truth - Al Franken [14]
CIA Director George Tenet was eating breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington that morning. When he heard about the first plane, he immediately asked, “Was it an attack? It sounds like an attack,” and then told his breakfast-mate, “This is bin Laden. His fingerprints are all over it.” Of course, Tenet had been trying to alert Bush to the terrorist threat for months. But I contend that anyone who had really absorbed the PDB (“hijacking,” “buildings in New York,” “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S.”) would have put two and two together and come up with “yikes!”
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Sure, Al. Very clever. But the PDB wasn’t such a big deal. After all, the 9/11 Commission—a source that you yourself have cited—says that ‘the president told us that the August 6 report was historical in nature.’ Condi Rice made the same point eight times in her own testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Why would Bush have remembered something that was merely historical in nature? It’s not like it was talking about a current and serious threat. That’s the kind of thing Presidents remember, not boring old historical briefs.”
Very clever, reader. You’re clearly smarter than the readers of Sean Hannity’s books. I welcome this battle of wits. But I’m afraid I’m still one step ahead of you. The 9/11 Commission directly debunked the Bush/Rice “historical” claim on page 260 of its report:
Two CIA analysts involved in preparing this briefing article believed it represented an opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of a bin Laden attack in the United States remained both current and serious.
If, in fact, the PDB was meant to reflect a “historical” threat, the title would have been “Bin Laden Used to Be Determined to Strike Inside U.S., But Not Anymore!” That would have been historical. That’s the kind of memo you know you don’t have to waste a lot of time following up on.
And why exactly would people bother to prepare historical memos for Bush anyway? It’s not like the previous day’s PDB had been titled “Battle of Trafalgar Ends Threat of Napoleonic Invasion of British Isles.”
Ah, you’re finally seeing things my way. About time. But let me drive this point home a little further, with a quote from former vice president Al Gore, from a speech delivered on Monday, October 18, 2004, at 12:30 P.M.:
In his famous phrase, George Tenet wrote, “The system was blinking red.” It was in this context that the President himself was presented with a CIA report with the headline, more alarming and more pointed than any I saw in eight years of daily CIA briefings: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”
So it’s pretty clear that either Bush didn’t read the PDB, or its extraordinary importance didn’t register. (Possibly, this was because he hadn’t read any other PDBs.)
Why does this matter? For one thing, if Bush had processed the PDB, at the very least we all would have been spared the collective embarrassment of watching our leader freeze at his greatest moment of crisis. If Bush had realized that the first WTC strike was a terrorist attack, he would never have entered the classroom. Why he remained in the classroom for five to seven minutes even after hearing about the second attack remains a mystery. Bush did tell the 9/11 Commission that he “felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.” But there’s no way he could better understand what was happening by reading The Pet Goat, unless, of course, The Pet Goat had been written by Nostradamus, or by whoever had written the August 6 PDB.
But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that he might have reacted back on August 6, and initiated the kind of government-wide alert that had thwarted the planned Millennium attacks. Back to Al Gore’s speech:
The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to George Bush were about the so-called Millennium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999 and less specific warnings about the Olympics in Atlanta in