In early 2000, immediately following the millennium crisis, Clinton was scheduled to visit India. He insisted on visiting Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf as well -- despite the fact that both the Secret Service and the CIA had "warned in the strongest terms that visiting Pakistan would risk the President's life." Musharraf made promises that were never carried out, despite carrots and sticks brandished at him by American diplomats.

The contrast with the Bush administration could scarcely be clearer. On that score, the report's most relevant section is Chapter 8, "The System Was Blinking Red." And the most damning paragraphs of that report involve the notorious Presidential Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001. Under the bold headline, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," the briefing states the al-Qaida leader "would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 'bring the fighting to America.'"

Before examining the report's findings about the PDB, however, another usually ignored aspect of this story is worth noting in Chapter 6, where the drumbeat of warnings about an impending al-Qaida attack in spring 2001 first comes up. By then, Richard Clarke's hair was on fire, as was that of CIA director George Tenet. Enter Vice President Dick Cheney, whose important contributions during the months preceding the disaster merit a single paragraph:

"In May, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national preparedness," the report says on page 204. (Remember that the comprehensive, bipartisan Hart-Rudman report on those issues had been published and ignored by the new administration a few months earlier.) "The next few months were mainly spent organizing the effort and bringing an admiral from the Sixth Fleet back to Washington to manage it. The Vice President's task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred."

For reasons best known to the commissioners, they made little effort to learn why Cheney did so little for so long, or what his role was in dealing with the terrorist threat before that fateful September. That was the sole reference to the Cheney task force that I could find in the report, which contains no index.

While the report describes repeated chances to thwart the 9/11 plot, its authors were deeply reluctant to say that it could have been stopped. But the report adds a significant new detail to the tale of the famous briefing that the president received while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

What Bush and his national security advisor Condoleezza Rice dismissively termed a "historical document" -- before its stunning contents were declassified -- was dispatched to Texas with far more urgent intentions. So testified the two CIA analysts who authored it. The two analysts -- one of whom is identified in the report's voluminous footnotes only as "Barbara S." -- told the commission bluntly that they regarded the PDB as "an opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of a Bin Ladin attack in the United States remained both current and serious." While the Aug. 6 PDB was the 36th in a series dealing with al-Qaida or bin Laden, it was the first one given to the president in 2001 that was "devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States."

Unfortunately, the alarmed analysts were unable to pinpoint the time, date, place or method by which bin Laden's minions would wreak bloody havoc on us. Without such specific data, the president responded complacently to their warning. The commission's report says that he never discussed the threat of a domestic attack with any of his aides, including the attorney general -- although the PDB highlighted the news that the FBI was then conducting "approximately 70 full field operations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related."

The report records what President Bush told the commission about the Aug. 6 PDB during his closed interview, without additional comment. Perhaps none is required:

"He ... remembered thinking that it was heartening that 70 investigations were under way ... He said that if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That never happened."

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