President Bush held the third press conference of his administration on Tuesday, April 13, 2004. It lasted approximately one hour.

If you did not catch this conference live, C-SPAN offers it on demand via streaming RealVideo. If this direct link does not work for you, paste the following into your RealOne player:

rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/archive/iraq/iraq041304_bush.rm

President Bush Press Conference - 13 April 2004

Karl Rove can't seem to get [his] arms around this simple fact: The current communications strategy is not working.

Bush's Crisis

"Stop spilling our blood so we can stop spilling your blood," the message added. "This is a difficult but easy equation."

Is this strategy?

Would Turkey have to expel its own army in order to qualify for the truce?

Tape Said to Be From bin Laden Offers 'Truce' to Europe

Critics may ask whether, with all the mounting evidence of its incapacity, it should be allowed to continue in its present form at all.

Google. (Google?) Google!

The Failed FBI

The NSA is looking to hire 7,500 workers over the next five years -- 1,500 by September, and another 1,500 in each of the next four years -- "to meet the increasing needs of the ever-changing intelligence community."

Nick: didn't you say you'd become interested in language lately?

Take Simson's advice: Apply, apply, apply.

Can You Hear It Now? Listen Closely for Job Opportunities ...

Asked by Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, Paul Bremer began his answer with "That's a good question."

It would seem that the decision by most news organizations not to publish the "fact sheet" alongside the PDB was a political-editorial decision. Instead, they simply dissected the fact sheet in their own editorial. Hello, kettle? This is pot calling.

Not to be outspun, the White House has posted the fact sheet at

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040410-5.html

but you'll find no link to the PDB itself. Interestingly, "-3" and "-4" in the 4/10 series are apparently reserved for future use, and "-6", although not listed in the index, serves up a lengthy (42 minute) Saturday evening background briefing on the PDB release. Instead they link only to the 7-minute Easter Sunday "Remarks to the Travel Pool."

The Silent President

Bob Kerrey offers his thoughts in the Sunday New York Times.

Anyone who was in Congress, as I was during the critical years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, must accept some of the blame for the catastrophe. It was a collective failure.

It has been difficult for all of us to understand and accept the idea that a non-state actor like Osama bin Laden, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, could be a more serious strategic threat to us than the nation-states we grew up fearing.

Time is not on our side in Iraq. We do not need a little more of the same thing. We need a lot more of something completely different.

Fighting the Wrong War

Decius wrote:
] ... the 1993 WTC bombing -- did they make organizational
] changes then to address the fact that they didn't predict
] that? Also, the embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole. Why
] didn't they foresee these things? Were they repairing that
] problem?

A couple of thoughts.

First, 'predict' is the wrong idea. No one should expect the government to be clairvoyant. Tenet had it right when he recently explained why we didn't prevent 9/11: "We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was. We didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data notwithstanding enormous efforts to do so."

] These, of course, are questions for the Clinton
] Administration ... Also, there are questions that we should
] have been asking then, and not now, when we were busy fussing
] about interns.

Second, with regard to intelligence, it's largely the same administration. Bush kept Tenet, and Rice kept Clarke. The CSG remained intact throughout the period in question. As Stratfor noted recently, the Bush policies were the Clinton policies.

If anyone is to blame for the intern fiasco, it's the Congress. One can be sure that Clinton would have preferred to focus on foreign affairs, and he tried his best to do so, working all-out on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement right up until the end. Clinton didn't press Tenet to go all-out against al Qaeda because doing so would have precluded a Middle East peace deal. We ended up with a new intifada anyway, but invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in 1999 would have just brought it about that much sooner.

Third, there were efforts to transform the military and intelligence communities for the 21st century -- many of them, in fact. One, for example, was the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Rumsfeld. It issued a report in January 2001. Bob Kerrey and Porter Goss co-chaired a commission on the NRO in 2000. The NIMA commission published its report in April 2001. The Hart-Rudman commission on National Security in the 21st Century issued a highly critical report in early 2001 that made many strong recommendations, including an increased focus on homeland security to protect against terrorist attacks (among other dangers). So, even if Congress was distracted by a dress or sidetracked by the definition of "is", they still did their part along the way.

To claim that we did not do enough before 9/11 is true but unmoving. Could we have ever done enough? Who among us would say, "eh, that's good enough" at some intermediate point? But to claim that no one was doing anything is to dismiss or ignore the facts.

RE: Text of Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001

Al-Sadr is, in fact, al-Sistani's pawn. Perhaps more precisely, al-Sadr is al-Sistani's ace in the hole.

Gaming Out Iraq

Despite intense media coverage of this document, almost no one seems to be providing the full text. Agonist to the rescue! Minor transcription errors suggest the text has been retyped from a document sent by facsimile to media outlets. This would explain why so few are as yet offering the full text.

[UPDATE: Reuters is now providing the full text (but not the accompanying Fact Sheet) at

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4797260

if you'd prefer. MSNBC is providing a copy at

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4710772/

as well. You'll find the fact sheet at

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040410-5.html

as an "official" copy.]

(Intro by Reuters) At the demand of the 9/11 commission, the White House made public on Saturday a classified intelligence document from a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that told President Bush of al Qaeda plans to attack the United States with explosives or hijack airplanes.

The page and a half memo is entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States."

The copy of the PDB that has been released is a copy of the PDB prepared for the President, except that three redactions have been made to protect the names of foreign governments that provided information to CIA.

Text of Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001