corrente

They're starting to turn on each other...

MR. GORTON Did you make any changes reflecting that millennium after-action review [recommendations to disrupt the Qaeda network after a bomb plot] in your time as attorney general before 9/11?

A. [ASHCROFT]: This is a report which was not briefed to me or briefed to other individuals. It was a report which is a classified report.

Q. So you didn't know of its existence?

A. No. ... We — and these are the kinds of recommendations that were involved in the report, which was simply not made available —— ... The SEIB [Senior Executive Intelligence Briefing] available to me.

Q. On Aug. 7, 2001, a SEIB that reflected much of — although it was not identical to — much of the content of the Aug. 6 Presidential Daily Brief — came out. And I would like to ask you if you remember seeing a document headed Terrorism bin Laden Determined to Strike In The United States in the SEIB.

A. I do not remember seeing that. I was in, I believe I was in Chicago speaking at the American Bar Association meeting, I believe, at the time. So I do not have a recollection of seeing that.

Q. Did your staff regularly brief you on the intelligence when you returned?

A. I was briefed, and items of interest were noted for me from time to time by my staff.

Q. Would something like this, which is a memorandum that is going out to your colleagues — hundreds of your colleagues in the government — saying that bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States — been an item of significance that you would think would have been briefed to you?

A. These items had been briefed to me. They had been briefed to me by the F.B.I. They had been briefed to me by the C.I.A. The administration asked me to get briefings when appropriate in regard to these measures. I remember Ms. Rice, for example, early in July during the threat period and the heightened and elevated threat, asking me if I would receive a briefing from the C.I.A. because she thought it important. It's that kind of briefing that I received early. The C.I.A. — we have reconstructed it from the slides they used — talked a lot about the threat overseas. And we obviously were aware of the historical information that Osama bin Laden had issued statements years before, much of which is in the SEIB and was in the Aug. 6 P.D.B., which I have now read.

And but [sic] we inquired of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are there domestic threats that require — is there any evidence of domestic, of threat? And they both said no.
(via NY Times)

Contrast Bush:

BUSH: I was satisfied that some matters were being looked into.
(back)

Given what Ashcroft says about what he wasn't shown, how on earth could Bush have been "satisfied"?