I'm still pissed about the PDB.

[Hissyspit]

Rove/Plame, the Downing Street Minutes, sure. All atrocious.
I'm still horrified and angered by the August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing.

The weekend that the President and the National Security Advisor had access to this information, I was on vacation with my girlfriend, a British citizen, so I took here to New York City on a Sunday, and the first place we went to was the World Trade Center to try and get Broadway tickets. As we looked at the buildings and the memorial to the 1991 victims, I said to her "I don't understand why they don' think they will try it again. They won't use truck bombs because it didn't work the first time." I then proceeded to picture the buildings falling over or having planes crashed into them.
I did this as an art professor, on vacation.

MEANWHILE...
Condoleeza Rice, who said, "no one could have foreseen that, (in fact she said it several times) "I don't think anybody could have predicted… that they would try to use an airplane as a missile. Had this president known a plane would be used as a missile, he would have acted on it."
WAS THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR. George W. Bush, who just stated last month that "My greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people,"(as I've stated before, that's not exactly true, his first responsiblity is to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States) WAS PRESIDENT. Other right-wingers were saying that bin Laden was simply a boogie man constructed by the Clinton administration.

These people are still in charge of my country. Why do they hate America so much that they don't resign and let more competent and reasonable people take over?

Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004
Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a ...(redacted portion) ... service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an ... (redacted portion) ... service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa'ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (redacted portion) ... service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.