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.But on his return to the United States, Cheney discussedhis trip on the Sunday talk shows, sounding more conciliatorytoward the Palestinians.Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israelhad imposed a travel ban on Arafat, and Cheney publicly askedthat it be lifted in order to allow Arafat to attend an Arab sum-mit in Lebanon.Cheney also promised the Palestinians a greaterrole in the Middle East peace process.The message to the UnitedStates allies in the region was unmistakable: we re listening.The months after 9/11 were marked by an unusual spirit inWashington, a rare feeling of bipartisan unity against a hated en-emy.That spring, though, politics had returned to Washington. Stephen F.Hayes374In May, the Republican National Committee sent contributors apicture of President Bush taken aboard Air Force One on Sep-tember 11.Democrats and even some Republicans were outragedat the use of the attacks for political purposes.The politicizationof the war on terror had begun in earnest.Then on May 15, 2002, a story on CBS Evening News pro-vided an opportunity for the Democrats to go after Bush on hisstrongest issue.They took it. The president s daily intelligencebrief delivered each morning by the director of Central Intelli-gence warned in the weeks before 9/11 that an attack by Osamabin Laden could involve the hijacking of U.S.aircraft, reportedDavid Martin.9Cheney had long regarded Martin as one of the best reporterson national security working in Washington; many others sharedhis opinion.He thought this story was misleading.But the dam-age had been done.Martin s report was followed by hundreds more, and by thefollowing day the revelation had triggered a full-scale politicalwar in Washington.Democrats accused the president and his topadvisers of failing to connect the dots before September 11.The Bush administration, they said, had not done enough to pre-vent the attacks.Hillary Clinton took the Senate floor, demand-ing answers.She waved a copy of the New York Post from thatmorning.The headline made an incredible charge: 9/11 Bomb-shell: Bush Knew! 10 I am simply here today on the floor of this hallowed cham-ber to seek answers to the questions being asked by my constitu-ents, questions raised by one of our newspapers in New York,with the headline: Bush Knew, she said. The president knewwhat? She insisted that she was not trying to place blame; herconstituents simply deserved answers to their many questions.11At a press conference the same day, the House minority leader,Dick Gephardt, invoked the Watergate-era formulation: Whatwe have to do now is find out what the president what theWhite House knew about the events leading up to 9/11, whenthey knew it, and most importantly, what was done about it. 12Cheney and his colleagues at the White House were angry. Cheney375The president s daily briefing (PDB) typically includes intelli-gence on a wide variety of subjects in numerous individual re-ports.In the briefing of August 6, most of the information onAl Qaeda s potential attacks was from 1999, and all of it lackedspecificity.Cheney thought the Democrats were using the reportin a dishonest and dishonorable way.In a speech in New York that same evening, he fired back: What I want to say to my Democratic friends in the Congress isthat they need to be very cautious not to seek political advantageby making incendiary suggestions, as were made by some today,that the White House had advance information that would haveprevented the tragic attacks of 9/11.Such commentary is thor-oughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders ina time of war. 13Members of Congress called for the White House to releasethe entire PDB, titled Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S. Although doing so would have likely quelled the controversy,Cheney counseled against it.That release wouldn t happen foranother two years.And when it did, the warning did not seem asstark as the Democrats had made it sound.Much of the information was old. A clandestine source saidin 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks. And the segment of the briefing that generated so many head-lines and so much speculation came with a seldom-quoted dis-claimer: We have not been able to corroborate some of the moresensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] ser-vice in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S.aircraftto gain the release of Blind Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman andother U.S.-held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates pat-terns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with prepa-rations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recentsurveillance of federal buildings in New York. It was hardly the kind of intelligence that could have beenused to prevent an attack.And it certainly did not indicate that theWhite House had been warned about 9/11
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