Washington,
D.C., 12 April 2004 - President Bush on Saturday, 10 April 2004,
became the first sitting president ever to release publicly even a
portion of his Daily Brief from the CIA. The page-and-a-half section
of the President's Daily Brief from
6 August 2001, headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,"
had generated the most contentious questioning in last week's testimony
by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before
the commission investigating the September 11th attacks. Dr. Rice
continued to insist that the Brief did not amount to a real warning,
while several commissioners seemed to think otherwise.
These contrasting interpretations dominated the weekend's news. For
example, President Bush commented on Sunday that the "PDB said
nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about
somebody who hated America - well, we knew that. … The question
was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what."
(Note A1) Meanwhile, the Sunday news analysis in
The New York Times began with the following summary: "In
a single 17-sentence document, the intelligence briefing delivered
to President Bush in August 2001 spells out the who, hints at the
what and points towards the where of the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington that followed 36 days later." (Note
A2)
The American people can decide for themselves about the warning quotient,
now that the text of the Brief is public. Even with the text, we don't
really know what the President knew and when he knew it. According
to the CIA and the 9/11 commission, there were 40 other mentions of
Al Qaeda or Bin Laden in the President's Daily Briefs before 9/11.
Most of those presumably came during what Dr. Rice called "the
threat spike" of June and July 2001. The August 6 Brief came
on the downside of that spike, so the other PDB reports may be more
(or less) alarming. Until these are released - and Saturday's release
shows it can be done with minor deletions to protect sources - neither
the American public nor the 9/11 commission can move on to the next
question: "What did the President do and when did he do it?"
Or, perhaps most important, how do we fix our vulnerabilities, rather
than just hide them?
But the release of the Brief raises a number of questions not addressed
so far in the press coverage. One is the contrast between the now-released
text and what various White House officials said about it over the
past two years. A second revolves around renewed claims by the White
House and the CIA that this release sets no precedent for release
of similar or future information. A third points to the larger question
of whether the sustained secrecy around this Brief really made our
country more secure, or less so. For the moment, this updated posting
includes the following:
- The White House
briefing of 10 April 2004 on the release of the PDB.
In the kind of stylized exchange that typifies Washington, the two
briefers were identified only as "senior administration officials."
Actually, they were Jim Wilkinson, the National Security Council
spokesperson, and John Bellinger, the National Security Council
general counsel. Interestingly, when Mr. Wilkinson agreed to check
on what President Bush said when he received the PDB (p. 4), Mr.
Bellinger interrupted to say "we will not take that question,
because that's not the sort of thing that we would discuss, is the
interaction between the President and his briefer." Earlier
in this very briefing, however, Mr. Wilkinson had spent two paragraphs
discussing the PDB interaction, giving President Bush the credit
for having asked the questions that prompted the preparation of
this particular PDB.
- The original White
House briefing on 16 May 2002 by then-spokesman Ari
Fleischer, about the PDB. CBS Evening News had broken the story
on the evening of 15 May 2002 that President Bush had received a
briefing only weeks before September 11th mentioning the possibility
of hijacking by Bin Laden. The White House responded both in Mr.
Fleischer's morning briefing, and in a special briefing by national
security adviser Condoleeza Rice later on 16 May. Mr. Fleischer
left the impression in this briefing that the PDB came about because
the President had "asked for a compilation" of the "spike-up
of information early on in the summer."
- The
White House briefing on 16 May 2002 by Dr. Rice. Dr.
Rice did not mention that the title of the PDB section was "Bin
Ladin Determined To Strike in US," and described the PDB as
"very non-specific," "nothing really new here,"
"an analytic piece about methods that they had available to
them," "an analytic piece that tried to bring together
several threads - in 1997, they talked about this; in 1998- they
talked about that; it's been known that maybe they want to try and
release the blind Sheikh…"
- The
White House briefing on 17 May 2002 by Mr. Fleischer,
in which he said, "The President was aware that bin Laden,
of course, as previous administrations it's been well-known that
bin Laden was determined to strike the United States. In fact, the
label on the President's -- the PDB was, 'bin Laden determined to
strike the United States.'" Within two days, the missing preposition
from the title ("Strike in US") was supplied on the front
page of the Washington Post. (Note A3)
- The
White House briefing on 21 May 2002 by Mr. Fleischer.
The third question was whether the White House would share the PDB
with the Congress (it did not), in answer to which Mr. Fleischer
described the PDB as "the most highly sensitized classified
document in the government."
Posted
April 8, 2004
Washington, D.C., April 8 - The most contentious moments
of today's nationally televised hearing of the commission investigating
the September 11th terrorist attacks focused on the controversial
secret intelligence briefing received by President Bush on August
6, 2001 - a top-level document called the President's Daily Brief.
Commission members Bob Kerrey, Richard
Ben-Veniste and Timothy Roemer each asked national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice to declassify the document, and each
time she ducked the direct question, telling Mr. Roemer that "I
think you know the sensitivity of presidential decision memoranda."
The White House resisted the commission for months on the question
of their access to the Briefs, (Note 1) but after
public pressure from the commission and victims' families, relented
somewhat. Prior to today's hearing, three commission members and its
staff director got to see the originals of President's Daily Briefs
from the Bush and Clinton years relating to terrorism. They then wrote
up a summary for their peers. (Note 2) But the direct
quotes from the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief read into the
record today, both by commission members and by Dr. Rice, point to
an underlying reality - that the Brief could be declassified and released
publicly simply by blacking out the sources-and-methods information.
[See my article in Slate
magazine, posted 22 March 2004, "Who's Afraid of the PDB?"]
Perhaps the White House will take this simple step, just as it reversed
its previous absolute refusal to allow Dr. Rice to testify in public.
Standing in the way of this common sense approach, however, are myths
and misinformation about the President's Daily Brief - put forward
by the White House, CIA, and even the 9-11 commission's own chairman
- that, in Mark Twain's phrase, have gone twice around the world while
the truth was putting on its shoes.
For example, each of the following italicized statements is a myth,
and below the myth in plain type is the reason why.
The chair of the 9/11 commission, former New Jersey governor
Thomas Kean, said that "[t]hese are documents that only two or
three people would normally have access to. To make those available
to an outside group is something that no other president has done
in our history." (Note 3)
Actually, ten President's Daily Briefs are in the public domain,
officially declassified by the U.S. government. (Note
4) The CIA established the PDB under that name in 1964, and PDBs
from the Johnson administration began to be declassified in 1985,
during the tenure of President Reagan. The ten declassified PDBs contain
such extraordinarily sensitive items as this one on Egypt: "Nasir,
in a speech to the nation on Saturday, outlined a 'program of action'
to bring about political reform. We doubt that it will amount to much."
That's the whole item. Another supersensitive entry concerns the head
of state of Indonesia: "Despite Sukarno's long-standing kidney
ailment, for which he delays proper treatment, he has seemed quite
chipper lately." Three lines of the item are blacked out since
they refer to the sources of intelligence, perhaps Indonesian assets
of the CIA, or communications intercepts, or maybe just the British
ambassador. One of the PDBs is even published in the latest volume
of the distinguished State Department documentary series, Foreign
Relations of the United States.
At the top of the 5 June 1967 PDB published by the State Department
one can read the official line that these historical PDBs were "improperly
declassified and released. The declassification and release of this
information in no way impacts or controls the declassification status
of the remainder of this PDB, other PDBs, or the PDB as a series."
(Note 5)
This statement is not true, and it violates the law that says the
Foreign Relations series has to be accurate and comprehensive. The
actual texts of the released PDBs reveal that there was nothing improper
about their declassification. There is nothing damaging to U.S. national
security in these documents. The secret behind the State Department's
straddle - publishing a PDB while disclaiming its own action - is
that the CIA is really to blame. The PDBs began to be released under
the normal historical declassification program (in 1985, 1989 and
1993) until the CIA noticed and decided to invoke the final recommendation
of its notorious 1991 Task Force on Openness. The task force report
(classified secret at first, until embarrassment and the Freedom of
Information Act forced its release) enumerated a number of goals from
greater openness, including building support for the CIA budget, of
course, but the final goal on the list - one that any declassifier
had to keep in mind - was to "preserve the mystique." The
CIA's hard line on the PDBs is one of the many decisions in the 1990s
that turned CIA's openness program into a "public relations snow
job," according to the distinguished historian George Herring,
who served on the CIA historical advisory panel for six years until
his advocacy for greater openness, including for release of the PDBs,
led the CIA to replace him with more compliant scholars. (Note
6)
The then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer called the PDB "the
most highly sensitized classified document in the government."
(Note 7)
Here is the mystique at work. Actually, there are thousands, and
perhaps even millions, of codeworded documents and compartments more
highly classified than the PDB itself. These include the very items
blacked out in the declassified Briefs from the Johnson years - most
likely describing the specific sources of the information. Mr. Fleischer
himself, only four days before this remark, had read out the headline
from a particularly interesting section of the August 6, 2001 President's
Daily Brief, titled "bin Laden determined to strike the United
States." Interestingly, today's 9-11 commission hearing featured
two misstatements about this headline. Mr. Ben-Veniste said that until
today, the headline was classified (Mr. Fleischer had actually read
it out in May 2002); and Dr. Rice gave the headline as including the
words "inside the U.S."
A Washington Post editorial asked," If a president's intelligence
briefing is not a legitimate secret, after all, what is?"
(Note 8)
Well, legitimate secrets include information like the specifications
of a weapon system, the identity of a spy who'd be shot, or the bottom
line of a negotiation in progress, but these real secrets make up
only a fraction of what is classified today, and rarely adorn the
PDB. During the Cold War, for example, the codeword GAMMA GUPY referred
to the National Security Agency ability to listen in on the radio-telephone
conversations of Soviet leaders while they were driving around Moscow
in their limos. (Note 9) A document that specifically
described that capacity would be far more sensitive than a President's
Daily Brief item that said Soviet leaders were bemoaning the grain
harvest failure and thinking about firing the Ukraine party secretary.
Vice President Cheney described the President's Daily Briefs
as "the family jewels." (Note 10)
This was an unintentionally ironic turn of phrase, since the original
use of the words "family jewels" in the CIA context referred
to the internal compilation of agency "horrors" put together
in the early 1970s after press reports of CIA assassination plots,
and use of psychotropic drugs on unsuspecting victims. The PDB is
about as far away from these operational matters as you can get. It
provides a tour d'horizon of world events, based on the CIA's best
information, spiced up with intercepted communications and spy photos.
According to the CIA's own history of its presidential briefings,
roughly 40 per cent of what the PDB covers is addressed in the newspapers.
(Note 11) According to Walter Pincus of the Washington
Post, President Clinton complained that "most days the PDB
contained material he had already read elsewhere." (Note
12) President Reagan's first national security adviser, Richard
Allen, wrote that the PDB "is, at best, a form of staccato information,
a news digest for the very privileged. But it is rarely predictive.
In fact, some would consider it pedestrian, even anodyne." (Note
13)
The former CIA general counsel, Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, who
admitted she was not on the distribution list, called the PDB "sacrosanct,"
saying, "It's something you never, ever share… It really
is advising your client, the president, in the most intimate way."
(Note 14)
The President is not the CIA's "client." Even the intelligence
community uses the term "customer" not "client,"
because the CIA is precluded from making policy recommendations to
the President. The first answer on the CIA website to "frequently
asked questions" says the CIA is an information provider, not
a policy maker. (Note 15) The PDB is an information
brief, the CIA's equivalent of Headline News, not deliberative or
pre-decisional or legal advice. Many presidential briefings at least
as sensitive and far more deliberative than the PDBs have reached
the public domain without damage to national security or to future
presidents' ability to get candid advice, ranging from declassified
copies of Henry Kissinger's morning briefing for President Nixon,
to verbatim quotes from briefings by CIA director William Webster
and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to President George
H.W. Bush that appear in the joint Bush-Scowcroft memoir, A World
Transformed. (Note 16)
Vice President Cheney said any public release of the PDBs would
make its CIA authors "spend more time worried about how the report's
going to look on the front page of the Washington Post or on Fox News
than they will making their best judgment and taking risk and giving
us the best advice they can…." (Note
17)
The idea that CIA analysts are trimmers, not straight-shooters, insults
the CIA's professionals and turns history on its head. CIA analysts
have a long and distinguished track record of bringing bad news to
the White House, from pessimistic estimates on the Vietnam war to
predicting the 1991 coup against Gorbachev to discounting the Niger
yellowcake allegation of 2002. The record shows that the people who
trim intelligence to fit official spin are the policymakers, not the
CIA - as when Vice President Cheney claimed in the run up to the Iraq
war that Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted" his nuclear
weapons. If more of the actual CIA analysis became public, policy
might well improve. In the case of Iraq, the public would have seen
the numerous dissents and caveats in the underlying classified estimate
- dissents and caveats largely stripped out of the publicized version,
and completely missing from the Vice President's speeches.
In the same vein as the Vice President, but less colorfully,
President Bush said he opposed release of the PDBs because "[i]t's
important for the writers of the presidential daily brief to feel
comfortable that the documents will never be politicized and/or unnecessarily
exposed for public purview. I - and so, therefore, the kind of the
first statements out of this administration were very protective of
the presidential prerogatives of the past and to protect the right
for other presidents, future presidents, to have a good presidential
daily brief." (Note 18)
There's an equally plausible case to be made that the President is
protecting himself, not the CIA analysts or future presidents, from
scrutiny. The analysts, after all, provided President Bush with the
August 6, 2001 PDB including the warning that Bin Laden planned to
attack the U.S., and mentioned hijacked airplanes as one possibility
(apparently not as suicide missiles, but the more traditional skyjack
style). What did the President do with that warning? Did anything
happen? None of his senior aides were present at the August 6 briefing,
which took place at the ranch in Crawford, Texas. From a distance,
it looks as if the warning came but they all were on vacation.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice described the August
6, 2001 Brief as "very vague," "very non-specific,"
"mostly historical," and "nothing really new here."
(Note 19)
But what about that nasty headline declassified by Ari Fleischer
- "bin Laden determined to strike in U.S."? Dr. Rice can't
have it both ways, that the PDB is a "very vague" document
that still cannot be publicly released. The bipartisan Congressional
investigation of September 11th cut to the heart of the problem. Its
staff director, Eleanor Hill, reported to Congress that "According
to the DCI [George Tenet], the President's knowledge of intelligence
information relevant to this Inquiry remains classified even when
the substance of that intelligence information has been declassified."
(Note 20) This is the ultimate coverup line. In
other words, even if the information is public, whether the President
knew it is a fact that if released would damage national security?
In fact, keeping phony secrets like this does the real damage to our
security, as a declassified National Reconnaissance Office study remarked:
"[C]ontinued insistence on tight security for 'open' secrets
reduces overall credibility and erodes the integrity of security around
the technology and the operations which still need to be protected."
(Note 21)
Defending the 9/11 commission's arrangement with the White House
for limited access and summaries of the PDBs, commission director
Philip Zelikow said, "Neither we nor the White House are aware
of any precedent for this in the history of the republic."
(Note 22)
The declassified PDBs suggest a more appropriate precedent, in fact,
the same precedent that Professor Zelikow recommended during the April
2000 meeting of the State Department's historical advisory committee,
referring to the historical PDBs that CIA was refusing to release:
"[I]t should be possible to redact the PDB to make it releasable...
the CIA's interests could be protected with redactions… the
CIA's decision to withhold the entire PDB series from release [i]s
pernicious." (Note 23) Indeed.
The PDBs - even from August 2001 - could easily be declassified
by blacking out the sources and methods that are truly sensitive.
This fact leads to a frightening but also empowering thought: Most
of the time, Presidents really do not have much more or better substantive
information than the rest of us about national security, and when
they think they do, they're often wrong, as LBJ was about Vietnam,
or the first-term Ronald Reagan was about the Soviet military, or
George W. Bush was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But releasing the President's Daily Briefs would hold the CIA accountable
for its banalities as well as its triumphs and failures. Likewise,
releasing the Briefs would tell us what the President knew and when
he knew it. So don't hold your breath.
Documents
Note: The following documents are in PDF format.
You will need to download and install the free Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view.
Section
I: The 6 August 2001 President's Daily Brief
President's
Daily Brief, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" 6
August 2001 (2 pp.), declassified 10 April 2004.
White
House Fact Sheet, "The August 6, 2001 PDB," 10 April 2004
White
House Background Briefing by Senior Administration Official on Release
of 6 August 2001 President's Daily Brief, 10 April 2004
White
House Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza
Rice, 16 May 2002
White
House Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, 16 May 2002
White
House Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, 17 May 2002
White
House Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, 21 May 2002
Excerpts
from 8 April 2004 Testimony of Dr. Condoleezza Before the 9/11 Commission
Pertaining to The President's Daily Brief of 6 August 2001
Section
II: The President's Daily Brief -- Previous Declassifications
President's
Daily Brief, 7 August 1965 (4 pp.), declassified 15 July 1993
Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (Austin, Texas),
National Security File, Intelligence Briefings File, obtained by
Dr. William Burr.
President's
Daily Brief, 13 May 1967, (1 p. excerpt), declassified 14 May 1993
President's
Daily Brief, 16 May 1967 (2 pp. excerpt), declassified 14 May 1993
President's
Daily Brief, 27 May 1967 (1 p. excerpt), declassified 14 May 1993
President's
Daily Brief, 5 June 1967 (3 pp. with "Late Items"), declassified
14 May 1993
Compare to FRUS version which omits Nigeria at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xix/28058.htm
President's
Daily Brief, 6 June 1967 (1 p. excerpt), declassified 14 May 1993
President's
Daily Brief, 7 June 1967 (1 p. excerpt), declassified 14 May 1993
President's
Daily Brief, 8 June 1967 (2 pp. excerpt), first page declassified
14 May 1993, "Late Item" page declassified 6 November
1985
President's
Daily Brief, 9 June 1967 (3 pp.), first two pages declassified 14
May 1993, "Late Item" page declassified 6 November 1985
Source
for the above 1967 PDB excerpts: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (Austin,
Texas), National Security Council History, Middle East Crisis, Appendix
A, obtained by Dr. William Burr.
President's
Daily Brief, 1 April 1968 (5 pp.), declassified 21 December 1989
Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (Austin, Texas),
National Security File, Intelligence Briefings File, obtained by
Dr. William Burr.
Section
III: Declassified CIA documents on Presidential Briefings
Chief,
D/Pub [R. Jack Smith] to AD/ORE [Theodore Babbitt], "Contents
of the CIA Daily Summary," 21 September 1950. [Source: Michael
Warner, ed., The CIA under Harry Truman (Washington, D.C.:
CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1994), pp. 337-338.]
G.
Fred Albrecht, A History of the Central Intelligence Bulletin,
12 May 1967, 100 pp., TOP SECRET TRINE. [Source: CIA Freedom of
Information Act release to Dr. William Burr]
John
L. Helgerson, Getting To Know the President: CIA Briefings of
Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992 (Washington, D.C.: CIA
Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996, 165 pp.) also at http://www.odci.gov/csi/books/briefing/
Richard
J. Kerr and Peter Dixon Davis, "Mornings in Pacific Palisades:
Ronald Reagan and the President's Daily Brief," Studies
in Intelligence, Winter 1998-1999 Unclassified Version
(CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence), pp. 51-56, also at http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter98-99/art04.html
Section
IV: Declassified Examples of Presidential Briefings
Henry
Kissinger to President Nixon, 13 February 1969
Source: Nixon Presidential Materials Project (College
Park, Maryland), National Security Council Files, Box 2, Folder:
President's Daily Briefs February 9-14, 1969 (1 of 2).
Henry
Kissinger to President Nixon, 22 August 1969
Source: Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National
Security Council Files, Box 10, Folder: President's Daily Briefs
August 10-31, 1969.
Daily
Brief, 9 September 1970 (1 p. excerpt with President Nixon's handwriting,
plus 1 p. memo from Henry Kissinger dated 12 September 1970), declassified
4 January 2002.
Source: Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National
Security Council Files, Box 1032, [Fortune] Cookies II [Chronology
of exchanges with PRC Feb. 1969 - April 1971].
Reference
to President's Daily Brief, 2 September 1983 (pp. 266-267 of From
the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and
How They Won the Cold War, by Robert M. Gates, former CIA director)
Reference
to President's Daily Brief, 17 August 1991 (pp. 266-267 of From
the Shadows)
Brent
Scowcroft and William Webster to President G.H.W. Bush, 2 August
1990 (pp. 314-317 of A World Transformed, by George Bush
and Brent Scowcroft)
Brent
Scowcroft to President G.H.W. Bush, 7 March 1991 (pp. 498-499 of
A World Transformed)
Reference
to President's Daily Brief, 12 September 2001 (pp. 39-40 of Bush
at War, by Bob Woodward)
Reference
to President's Daily Brief, 25 September 2001 (pp. 132-133 of Bush
at War)
Section
V: Declassified Examples of the CIA's Senior Executive Intelligence
Brief
[The
Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, formerly the National Intelligence
Daily, is a CIA-produced intelligence summary similar to the President's
Daily Brief.]
Senior
Executive Intelligence Brief, 2 September 1998 (3 pp.), declassified
May 2001.
Source:
Freedom of Information Act request, obtained by Michael Evans.
Senior
Executive Intelligence Brief, 30 December 1998 (4 pp.), declassified
August 2001.
Source: Freedom of Information Act request, obtained
by Michael Evans.
Senior
Executive Intelligence Brief, 24 October 2000 (3 pp.), declassified
March 2004.
Source: Freedom of Information Act request, obtained
by Dr. Robert Wampler.
Senior
Executive Intelligence Brief, 25 October 2000 (3 pp.), declassified
March 2004.
Source: Freedom of Information Act request, obtained
by Dr.
Robert Wampler.
Senior
Executive Intelligence Brief, 4 November 2000 (4 pp.), declassified
March 2004.
Source: Freedom of Information Act request, obtained
by Dr.
Robert Wampler.
Notes
A1. Joseph Curl, "Bush defends memo stance
- 'No indication' of 9/11 attacks," The Washington Times,
12 April 2004, front page.
A2. Douglas Jehl, "A Warning, but Clear? White
House Tries to Make the Point That New Details Add Up to Old News,"
The New York Times, 11 April 2004, p. A13.
A3. Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen, "Aug. Memo
Focused On Attacks in U.S.", The Washington Post, 19
May 2002, p. A1. Mr. Woodward's book, Bush At War (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2002, 376 pp.) had quoted from two other PDB's
but did not mention the 6 August 2001 PDB.
1. See Philip Shenon, "9/11 Panel Threatens
to Issue Subpoena for Bush's Briefings," The New York Times,
10 February 2004, p. A16.
2. Dan Eggen, "9/11 Panel to Have Rare Glimpse
of Presidential Briefings," The Washington Post, 16
November 2003, p. A9.
3. Philip Shenon, "9/11 Commission Could Subpoena
Oval Office Files," The New York Times, 26 October 2003,
front page.
4. I am indebted to Dr. William Burr, director of
the Nuclear Documentation Project of the National Security Archive,
for locating the ten declassified PDBs, for providing the analogous
material from the Nixon White House, and for astute commentary on
the overall issue of the PDBs.
5. Posted on the State Department web site at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xix/28058.htm
6. George C. Herring, "My Years with the CIA,"
Speech at a January 1997 meeting of the American Historical Association,
available on the web at http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/herring.html.
The CIA advisory panel no longer even makes public its recommendations,
thus giving up the only leverage it could possibly bring to bear against
CIA secrecy. See http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/ciahrp9.html
7. Ari Fleischer, White House Press Briefing, 21 May
2002., at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020521-9.html
, and 17 May 2002, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020517-6.html
8. To the credit of the Post, after posing this
question, the editorial went on to say, "If Mr. Bush did not
mean to share the country's most sensitive secrets with the commissioners,
he should not have signed the bill in the first place." Editorial,
"Turn It Over," The Washington Post, 31 October
2003, p. A24.
9. Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence
Community, 4th Edition (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1999,),
p. 428.
10. Vice President Richard Cheney, interview on Fox
News, 19 May 2002.
11. John
L. Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of
Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992 (Washington, D.C.: CIA Center
for the Study of Intelligence, 1996, 165 pp.), p. 163.
12. Walter Pincus, "Under Bush, the Briefing
Gets Briefer," The Washington Post, 24 May 2002, p.
A33.
13. Richard V. Allen, "An Intelligent Think
to Do," The New York Times, 14 November 2003, p. A29.
14. Quoted in Dan Eggen, "9/11 Panel to Have
Rare Glimpse of Presidential Briefings," The Washington Post,
16 November 2003, p. A9.
15. See www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/faq.html
16. For direct quotes from CIA director William
Webster's 2 August 1990 briefing on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, see
p. 315.; and for a direct quote from national security adviser
Brent Scowcroft's 7 March 1991 briefing memo on the Soviet Union,
see p. 499, both
in George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 590 pp.).
17. Cheney interview, Fox News, 19 May 2002.
18. President George W. Bush, Press conference,
Rose Garden, 28 October 2003.
19. Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Press briefing, White
House, 16 May 2002. See also Rice quote in Pincus, "Under Bush,
the Briefing Gets Briefer," The Washington Post, 24
May 2002, p. A33, describing the 6 August 2001 PDB as saying, "Here's
what we know historically about al Qaeda's determination to attack
the United States."
20. Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement,
Part 1, 18 September 2002, on the web at http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/091802hill.html
21. National Reconnaissance Office, Report on the
Review of Security Requirements of the National Reconnaissance Program,
24 June 1974, TOP SECRET [DELETED] TALENT-KEYHOLE, p. 9. Declassified
pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request by Dr. Jeffrey T.
Richelson.
22. Quoted in Dan Eggen, "9/11 Panel to Have
Rare Glimpse of Presidential Briefings," The Washington Post,
16 November 2003, p. A9.
23. The minutes of the State Department historical
advisory committee meeting are available on the invaluable web site
of the Secrecy and Government Project of the Federation of American
Scientists, at http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac0400.html
