The smoking gun

This weeks issue of Newsweek contains a story about how the smoking gun has been found, and classified. The problem is the smoking gun is belching its first clouds of complicity in the Whitehouse.

You see the recent 800-page bi-partisan congressional report about 9-11 turned out to be too hot to handle. It contained the black and white evidence of how Bush received a PDB (Presidential daily briefing) outlining al Qaeda threats to hijack planes just a month before 9/11. And it details the links between Saudi Arabia and the al Qaeda operatives involved in the 9/11 hijackings.

The Bush Administration is now not only saying it cannot declassify the report, it is also trying to claim classified status for information it contains that has already published on the CIA web site. For instance it claims that the very existance of PDBs is classified information and that alone prevents publishing the congressional report.

Doh!

Doesn't GWB remember that his own father was the one giving daily briefings to Jimmy Carter in the 70's? Even the most simple minded search on PDBs brings up gads of stories about PDBs, plenty of which predate 9/11. I just fail to see how any sane person could claim that classification of this information is for any purpose other than to cover someone's ass? And we all know who that someone is and just where the smoke is blowing out of...