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April 15, 2004
The President is Not Available Just Now, Can I Take a Message?

Everyone should read this piece by Fred Kaplan in Slate.

He explains that the big revelation from George Tenet's testimony before the 9/11 Commission: that Tenet knew that Zacarias Moussaoui, a known Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons to fly a 747. Tenet had been briefed on this on August 23 or 24, 2001.

The question from Commissioner Tim Roemer was an obvious one: Did you tell the president?

Tenet replied:

"I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation."

"You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied.

There is also evidence that Bush's story that the August 6 PDB was provided by the CIA at his request. He said this again during his press conference the other night.

The story on this has changed. On March 19, Tenet told the commission that the brief had been prepared at the CIA analyst's initiative. Then he changed his mind.

As Kaplan points out, it quite important to know who initiated the PDB. If the president asked for it, then he knew there was, to use his words, a "gathering threat," and was concerned, but then he did nothing about the report's conclusions. If he didn't request it, then not only is he lying about that now, but he appears to have been clueless about the terrorist threat during that summer.

Finally, this paragraph is a jaw-dropper:

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB -- let alone the Moussaoui finding -- should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title -- "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US" -- was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)

Though spending 40% of your presidency on vacation seems a bit ridiculous to me, I'm willing to allow that it is possible to get lots done while not in Washington, D.C. The problem here is that he wasn't working from the "Western White House" as the media likes to call it, he was NOT working. He was really on vacation. Like, "Hold my calls" vacation.

Maybe someone should explain to him what, exactly, his job is. You don't get vacations. Get back to work.

Posted by ahecht at April 15, 2004 11:27 AM
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