Get on with it; I have some trails to clear this morning...

From this Washington Post article in March 2002:

Under President Bill Clinton, the PDB ran around 12 pages and often included detailed analyses as well as new information that Clinton generally read before the briefing. Indeed, in the early days, he often had little use for the follow-up oral briefings offered by the CIA -- a trait that exacerbated tensions between the White House and Langley.

Under Bush, the PDB has become shorter, a seven-to-10-page document containing "more targeted hard intelligence" items, with few longer than a page, according to a former senior intelligence official who was involved in the process. It is written with the understanding that the president is a "multi-modality learner" who processes information better through questions and answers while reading along, the former official said. Most days, Tenet reviews the PDB with the briefer as they drive from the director's Maryland home to the White House. On the way, Tenet often makes notes and looks over the backup material the briefer has brought. Tenet and often the deputy director for intelligence have already looked it over before going to bed the night before, though it is finished by staffers who go to work at midnight and monitor incoming intelligence throughout the night.

There you have it; the leader of the free world has to have his PDB spoon fed to him. Makes one wonder who was around to spoon feed him on the morning of August 6th. We know that Condi wasn't there. She couldn't recall whether she was even in contact with him that day. Note that it wasn't until after 9/11 that the PDB attendance was expanded to include practically the whole A team (Cheney, Card, Rice and Ashcroft) in addition to both the DCI and Director of the FBI.

I think that the key thing to look for next are answers to the question: What taskings were given the morning of August 6, 2001 from the ranch in Crawford, Tx? We know that the August 6th PDB was the result of a tasking from July:

One trigger for his request was information developed around mid-July when there was, Rice said, a "major threat spike" related to a possible attempt to kill the president using an aircraft at the Group of Eight meeting scheduled in Genoa, Italy.

Given that only the CIA briefer and Dubya were present for the August 6th briefing, would it be possible that Mr. Incurious upon finding that there was no evidence of any plan to assassinate him; that he simply dismissed the rest as "historical" and asked the briefer to "move on"?

Was there a tasking to the Director of the FBI to follow-up on the "70 current field investigations"? Was there any interest at all in learning more about

FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, ...

Who was notified of this? Who should have been notified? How recent was this information?

It amazes me that roughly 50% of the country remain blind to the facts before them. Would "shaking the trees" based on taskings from the Aug 6th PDB have thwarted the 9/11 attack? Possibly not. However, I would feel a whole lot safer if I had confidence that the President was paying attention to what's going on around him as opposed to someone who doesn't even read the paper(s) or watch CNN. I'd feel safer having a President who could tell that the contents of most of his PDBs were information he had already read or heard elsewhere as opposed to someone who needed his PDBs reduced to "more targetted hard intellegence items" of less than a page without the detailed analysis.