I'm just now getting around to reading the articles about the PDB. The Washington Post article says:

"Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S.

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A01


CRAWFORD, Tex., April 10 -- President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan...

The short article...also included information...that a caller to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives.

In a conference call Saturday with reporters, administration officials who insisted on anonymity said there was no evidence that either the call to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE or the surveillance of federal buildings in New York by Yemenis was related to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The officials said the photographing of the federal buildings was later judged to be "tourist activity," but they did not say whether that judgment was made before or after the attacks...

In her testimony to the 9/11 commission on Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "this was a historical memo. . . . It was not based on new threat information."

While the two-page document included information dating to 1997, it also contained information that the government suspected al Qaeda was actively preparing for an attack in the United States. While it gave no information about specific targets or dates, the briefing warned that U.S. intelligence believed bin Laden had serious plans to hit the United States...As one former administration official who has read the PDB said last week: "The agency doesn't write a headline like that if it doesn't want to get attention." In this case, the former official said, "the CIA did not believe Bush policymakers were taking the threat to the U.S. seriously.

There was other relevant information in the FBI bin Laden unit, including the now well-publicized Phoenix document from an agent in that city, written on July 10, 2001, which raised questions about a bin Laden supporter taking flying lessons and suggested a nationwide survey to see what else was going on.

On the call to the embassy in the UAE in May 2001, the White House officials said they responded within two days to get investigations started. But it was still unresolved on Aug. 6 when the item was provided to the president. On Saturday, officials said that the matter was still not resolved but that they were able to determine it did not relate to the Sept. 11 attacks."

Now, if the FBI and CIA had been doing their jobs, or at the very least, the National Security Advisor had been on their backs to get them to do their jobs, a national survey by the FBI would have matched the arrest of Moussaoui in a Minnesota flight school (and he had even been arrested and was being held by the FBI prior to 9/11!) to the Phoenix report, and the airplane hijackings might have been averted, just as the millenium plot was.


"

That's fine. That is their spin. Now I'd like to see some proof of their claims.