The President's Daily Brief is a brief of important classified information on national security collected by various U.S. intelligence agencies given to the president and a select group of senior officials. On August 6, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a President's Daily Brief to President Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. President Bush's response of "All right. You've covered your ass." has been erroneously linked to this PDB. This response, however, came from a separate PDB linked to Bin Laden from several months earlier. During 2001, CIA analysts produced several reports warning of imminent attacks by Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Senior officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and staff from Donald Rumsfeld's office at the Department of Defense, questioned whether these reports might not be deception on the part of al-Qaeda, purposely designed to needlessly expend resources in response. After reevaluating the legitimate risks of these recent reports, CIA analysts produced a report titled "UBL Threats Are Real". It was after this report that the president gave that now-infamous response.
Release
The existence of the memo was kept secret, as with all PDBs, until it was leaked in 2002. CBS Evening News reported on the document on May 15. The PDB was declassified and approved for release to the 9/11 Commission on April 10, 2004, and reported in the 9/11 Commission Report on July 22, 2004. According to the National Security Archive, President Bush was the first sitting president to release a PDB to the public.
Analysis
In response to accusations that the Administration failed to act on the contents of the briefing, U.S. Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice and General Richard Myers emphasized that the CIA's PDB did not warn the President of a specific new threat but "contained historical information based on old reporting". President Bush later claimed that if he had "had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country." The North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted a training exercise in the two years prior to September 11, 2001, in which it simulated a civilian airliner being hijacked and used as a missile to crash into buildings in the United States, including the World Trade Center. In October 2000, the U.S. Department of Defense had conducted exercises rehearsing a plane crashing into the Pentagon. The National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise for September 11, 2001 simulating the crash of a jet into one of its own buildings in northern Virginia.
