The System was Blinking Red

A few weeks before 9/11 attacks on United States, President Bush received from the Director of CIA an intelligence memo, known as The President’s Daily Brief (PDB for short). The August 6^th PDB summarizes the most important elements of intelligence available to the nation on that particular day. The intelligence headline for the day was : “Bin Laden determined to attack inside U.S.”

We all know what happened a few weeks later.

So the natural question was what was the follow-up by the White House with respect to that warning. At the Congressional Hearings, investigating the failures of US Intelligence, the then National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice claimed that the aforementioned PDB does not contained an “actionable intelligence,” meaning that it contained no new threat information. In fact, she used the phrase “historical information” in her characterization of the that particular PDB.

Subsequent exchanges between the Senators on the Committee and Condoleeza Rice was partly a political theater and partly a semantical exercise. Fred Kaplan of online Slate magazine described the exchanges as follows:

“Rice insisted this title meant nothing. The document consisted of merely “historical information” about al-Qaida—various plans and attacks of the past. “This was not a ‘threat report,’ “ she said. It “did not warn of any coming attack inside the United States.” Later in the hearing, she restated the point: “The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would like to attack the United States.” [ Italics in the original http://www.slate.com/id/2098499 ]

Furthermore, Rice’s recollection was that no one had briefed the WH about “planes as missiles”, although she cannot be sure whether there is a scenario of the sort secreted in the bowels of the bureaucracy. She said “”No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon” – I’m paraphrasing now – “into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile.” To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.