Anyway, below is the salient part of Ari's briefing today.
Did anybody see "Crossfire" tonight? I'm concerned this is all going to be laid on Bush when Clinton was the one who first heard of Bojoinka in 1995. Carville asked whether Bush should lay out everything he knew beforehand to the public immediately, or let it come out in dribs and drabs, as it has. (Couldn't help wondering whether he's trying to get Mary some help.) But I vote for the former.
It will be interesting to see what happens if there are congerssional hearings, as all the democrats now seem to want. It may come back to haunt them.
In the meantime, I hope people will write to Congress and journalism organizations asking the feds for full disclosure as soon as possible. It can only help.
*********************
Q Two on this point. You say information about the threat of hijacking goes back many years. It has been a recurring theme from time to time. Was this August report the first time that this President received an intelligence briefing that linked the prospect of a hijacking to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda?
MR. FLEISCHER: John, I cannot speak and will not speak about everything the President hears in his intelligence briefings, since I'm not in the room when he has his CIA briefing in the morning. But the general knowledge of hijackings has, as I indicated, long been a concern to the government, including this one.
Q So this information is conveyed to the President by the CIA in early August. And you say the concept then was that it was vague and general, and that the idea that this would be a traditional hijacking. Was there no discussion of the previous arrests in the Philippines, information shared with the United States government about people who said, perhaps not reliable, but who said that there was a plan to hijack a plane and fly it into the CIA briefing? Any discussion about arrests in France, where people said there was a plan to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower?
MR. FLEISCHER: What you're asking about is the so-called dots, and whether or not it was possible for anybody in the government to connect all those dots. And the simple answer to that is, as a result of September 11th, our government learned a lot of things. There were a lot of lessons to be learned, and a lot of changes were made as we evolved from a nation at peacetime to a nation at war.
And as we became a nation at war, the President made a series of changes involving how he receives his information, and involving how we protect the United States. I want to walk you through a couple of those changes that were the result of our nation being attacked.
Q I understand the changes, but was there not enough threshold evidence to think of the threat of using a plane as a bomb?
MR. FLEISCHER: Again, the question is, how does the government connect the dots. And the answer to that question is the series of steps that the President took as a result of the lessons learned from the attack. And those actions were, one, the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, led by Governor Ridge, to pull information together from the various agencies.
The President changed the morning briefings, so the morning briefings, for the first time, began with both the FBI Director and the CIA Director present to share information fully with the President. The FBI reorganized -- the FBI reorganized to an entity that was set up not only now to catch criminals, and find evidence and prosecute them in a court of law, but to prevent the United States from being attacked. A major change that could only result -- as a result of, unfortunately, an attack on our country.
The very fact that we have gone to war is a change. And finally, a recognition by the Congress that the tools available to the intelligence community and to the FBI were not sufficient. And that's why the Congress, to its credit, passed the Patriot Act, giving the administration and the intelligence community and the FBI greater resources to fight terrorism. Those were a series of changes that we made together with the Congress.
Q Are you suggesting that before these changes there was no way to connect those dots, Ari?
MR. FLEISCHER: Goyal?
I hate to even appear to give Dems political ammunition in their unfair accusations, but the administration has to square these facts for their own good. Facing the reality of Bojinka will establish whether the administration knew but intenionally dismissed the info or whether their intelligence services hid it from them and they were naive.
We are not done yet.