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• Thursday, January 8, 2009 07:57 AM

  @libertyson

  "9/11 not his fault? Well no. But any criminal court would CERTAINLY charge Condolezza Rice if not George W. Bush for criminal negligence in an instant for ignoring a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" and then use, as a series of reasons it was: a) at the bottom of the stack of memos, b) not the MOST important memo then-National Security Advisor Rice received and c) simply didn't seem that urgent."

  The memo was not ignored. In fact, if you bothered to read the last paragraph of that PDB, you'll notice that action was being taken concerning al Qaeda.

  Having said that, the August 6, 2001 PDB was largely a rehash of a December 4, 1998 PDB. Action on that PDB was ended before February 1999.

  How important was the August 6, 2001 PDB. Here is how Richard Clarke characterized it:

  "I really can’t recall it. I think its importance has been overblown. What happens in the presidential daily briefing is that the president asks questions of the briefer, which is usually Tenet on Monday through Friday. And the briefer then takes notes of the questions and goes back to CIA to get papers written to respond to the questions.

  "In response to the drumbeat day after day of intelligence that there was going to be an al-Qaida attack, the president apparently said, 'Tell me what al-Qaida could do.' And in response to that the CIA went off and wrote a paper that listed everything possible that al-Qaida could do. It didn’t say we have intelligence that tells us the attack will be here or there, the attack method will be this or that. It was rather a laundry list of possible things they could do."

  Those comments were first published right here at Salon.com.

  http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/03/24/clarke/index2.html

  And, as I mentioned above, Clarke wrote in his book that there was no "proof or specificity" conncerning an imminent al Qaeda attack. Richard Ben-Veniste also acknowledged this when he questioned Rice before the 9/11 Commission:

  RICE: Certainly not. There was nothing reassuring. But I can also tell you that there was nothing in this memo that suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C. There was nothing in this memo as to time, place, how or where. This was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me.

  BEN-VENISTE: We agree that there were no specifics. Let me move on, if I may.

  —Groenhagen Read Groenhagen's other letters
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