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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 declassified page-and-a-half section of the
6 August 2001 President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin
Determined To Strike in US".
- The White
House Fact Sheet titled "The August 6, 2001 PDB"
released at the same time as the PDB section, in question-and-answer
format.
- 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
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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
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