Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

The cover page

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US was the President's Daily Brief prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency and given to U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday, August 6, 2001. The brief warned of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda 36 days before the September 11, 2001 attacks.^[1]

President's Daily Brief (2001)

The President's Daily Brief (PDB) is a brief of important classified information on national security collected by various U.S. intelligence agencies given to the president and a select group of senior officials. On August 6, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a President's Daily Brief to President Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.^[2][3]

Leak (2002)

The existence of the memo was secret until it was leaked in 2002.^[2] CBS Evening News reported on the document on May 15.^[1][4]

9/11 Commission Report (2004)

The PDB was declassified and approved for release to the 9/11 Commission on April 10, 2004, and reported in the 9/11 Commission Report on July 22, 2004.^[5] According to the National Security Archive, President Bush was the first sitting president to release a PDB to the public.^[1]

Analysis

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General Richard Myers have stated that contrary to repeated claims,^[6] the CIA's PDB did not warn the President of a specific new threat but "contained historical information based on old reporting".^[7]

Redactions

At the Eurocrypt conference of cryptographers in May 2004 in Interlaken, Switzerland, David Naccache, director of an information security lab at Gemplus S.A., and Claire Whelan, a computer science graduate student at Dublin City University, analyzed a redacted portion of the PDB:

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

Cryptographers determined with high confidence that the redacted word in the sentence was "Egyptian".^[8]

See also

• Phoenix Memo, July 10, 2001

Notes and references

1. Blanton, Thomas S. (2004-04-12). "The President's Daily Brief". National Security Archive.
2. Thompson, Paul (2004). The Terror Timeline. HarperCollins. p. 100. ISBN 0-06-078338-9.
3. "Condoleezza Rice asserts 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack' wasn't a warning. sickhorses.com" on YouTube
4. "911 Foreknowledge - Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." on YouTube
5. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004). "The System was Blinking Red". The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (PDF). U.S. Government Printing Office. ISBN 0-16-072304-3.
6. See for example, Jehl, Douglas (2004-04-11). "A Warning, but Clear? White House Tries to Make the Point That New Details Add Up to Old News". The New York Times. p. A13.
7. Myers, Richard (2009). Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security. Simon and Schuster. p. 186. ISBN 1-4165-6031-9. See: Felix, Antonia (2005). Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story. Newmarket Press. pp. 228–229. ISBN 1-55704-675-1. According to Felix, at the 9/11 Commission, "Condi stressed that the administration did not anticipate any strikes within the country, but was focused on terrorist activities in other parts of the world. Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste brought the subject back to the memo, however, to point out that its very title pointed to a domestic attack."

   BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the Aug. 6 P.D.B. warned against possible attacks in this country? [...]
   RICE: You said did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.

8. Markoff, John (2004-05-10). "Illuminating Blacked-Out Words". The New York Times.