Saturday, April 10, 2004
Text of the Bush PDB: It's money
Is here in HTML, via The Agonist, and in proprietary PDF, via CNN.
And you know, the funny thing is, there's no money sentence. That is, there's no sentence that says: "AQ is going to hijack four airplanes on 2004-09-11 and fly them into the WTC, the Pentagon, and the White House." So, no "actionable intelligence," right? File and forget, and get on with the vacation....
But not so fast. The entire PDB is money.
Remember the old Sherlock Holmes story?
So, what are the curious incidents in the PDB? In fact, there are two:
1 There are no action points in the memo. There is no plan. We know that the intelligence people "had their hair on fire" over the summer about AQ chatter. (Read Clarke's book, or see here.) And here's a memo all about AQ, and there's no plan for dealing with AQ. In a CYA town like DC, that's almost unheard of. And if the memo doesn't have any CYA in it, that means there was no pressure from Bush to do anything. Otherwise, the action points would have been there. Bush's passivity here is almost surreal. (Bush's defenders keep sliming Clinton for an inadequate response on the AQ-attacked USS Cole. All the more reason for action points in this PDB!
2. There was no followup. The widows keep asking for it, and noone can show it, for the good reason that there wasn't any. Here again, Bush is almost surreally passive.
NOTE For background, back here and here.
And you know, the funny thing is, there's no money sentence. That is, there's no sentence that says: "AQ is going to hijack four airplanes on 2004-09-11 and fly them into the WTC, the Pentagon, and the White House." So, no "actionable intelligence," right? File and forget, and get on with the vacation....
But not so fast. The entire PDB is money.
Remember the old Sherlock Holmes story?
HOLMES:... And the curious incident of the dog in the night.
WATSON: The dog did nothing in the night.
HOLMES: That was the curious incident.
So, what are the curious incidents in the PDB? In fact, there are two:
1 There are no action points in the memo. There is no plan. We know that the intelligence people "had their hair on fire" over the summer about AQ chatter. (Read Clarke's book, or see here.) And here's a memo all about AQ, and there's no plan for dealing with AQ. In a CYA town like DC, that's almost unheard of. And if the memo doesn't have any CYA in it, that means there was no pressure from Bush to do anything. Otherwise, the action points would have been there. Bush's passivity here is almost surreal. (Bush's defenders keep sliming Clinton for an inadequate response on the AQ-attacked USS Cole. All the more reason for action points in this PDB!
2. There was no followup. The widows keep asking for it, and noone can show it, for the good reason that there wasn't any. Here again, Bush is almost surreally passive.
NOTE For background, back here and here.
