Why didn't key members of Bush Admin. receive info from the Aug 6th PDB?

By now, we have all seen the PDB. If you haven't I suggest that you check it out yourself. Don't just rely on the media reports, although they have been pretty accurate. You can find the PDB online at a number of places, including Fox News' website.

Anyhow, it has come up in testimony before the 9/11 Commission that a lot of pertinent information in the PDB was never passed along to key members of the cabinet, such as Attorney General Ashcroft or the FAA director. The PDB included such information as:

- Bin Laden wanted to strike inside the U.S.

- Terror cells existed inside the U.S. and were actively plotting strikes

- Al-Qaeda wanted to hijack civilian airliners, and there were preparations "consistent with hijackings" going on in the U.S.

- The FBI had 70 ongoing field investigations that it considered "bin Ladin related."

And there is more.

Now, if some key people had received this information and followed up on it, it seems very likely that the 9/11 plot could have been foiled before it came to tragic fruition. For example, if AG Ashcroft had been made aware of the info in the PDB, he might have followed up on those "70 ongoing full field investigations" by the FBI and he might have found out that Zacarias Moussaui had been arrested in Minnesota based on suspicion because of his enrollment in a flight school. Put this information together with the info in the PDB that al-Qaeda was planning hijackings and it seems likely that, at the very least, key people could have been made aware of the imminent threat.

But Ashcroft and other relevant officials say that they never got this information. In the Clinton administration the AG was apparently a recipient of the PDB, but this was not so in the Bush Administration. None the less, Ashcroft did receieve a SEIB (which I believe stands for Senior Executive Intelligence Briefing), which was basically an amended version of the PDB, as did a number of other cabinet members. But, and here is the key, the relevant information in the August 6th PDB was not included in the corresponding SEIB.

My question is: why do you think Aschroft and other officials in the administration who might have been in a position to act on the information contained in the August 6th PDB never actually received said information?

He was asking Tenet who put together the SEIB and decided to leave out that information. Tenet's deputy piped up and gave some long winded answer that pretty much amounted to "I don't know."

One is completely incompetent (Bush, Rice, Ashcroft), and the other just doesn't give a crap about anything other than pure, unadulterated greed (see Cheney).

Ashcroft should be thrown into his own, "Purely Evil" category.

Three groups:

Incompetent - Bush, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld
Greedy - Cheney, Bush
JPE (just plain evil) - Ashcroft, Rumsfeld

(Yes, some of them made it onto more than one list.)

I think it wasn't passed on because it didn't withstand the ideological litmus test. The big issues were Star Wars and Iraq, and this just didn't fit. Being asleep at the switch (not switching to the wrong track or knowingly failing to switch) was administration policy.

Acknowledging the al Qaeda threat would've been acknowledging Clinton was right to take action when he did and was indeed *NOT* "wagging the dog" as most Repugs screamed.