Q: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th [Presidential Daily Briefing] warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
A: I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States.”
Now, the …
Q: Thank you.
A: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste …
Q: I will get into the …
A: I would like to finish my point here.
Q: I didn’t know there was a point.
A: Given that—you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
Q: I asked you what the title was.
A: You said, did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States[italics Chatterbox’s].
—Exchange between Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9/11 commission and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, April 8, 2004.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [text deleted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar’ Abd-al Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.
—Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks. …
—The Presidential Daily Briefing for Aug. 6, 2001, made public by the White House on April 10, 2004.
Got a whopper? Send it to chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.
Whopper Archive:
March 15, 2004: John Kerry
Feb. 7, 2004: George Soros
Jan. 30, 2004: Howard Dean
Jan. 10, 2004: President Bush
Jan. 5, 2004: Laura Bush
(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2003, here to access the Whopper Archive for 2002, and here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)
