About those 70 FBI Investigations . . .
Defenders of the Bush Administration are appealing to the August 6th PDB's mention of 70 FBI investigations into possible Al-Qaida terrorist cells to argue that Bush had every reason to believe that the necessary steps were being taken.
The decidedly non-partisan Jim Thompson, for example, said today on Good Morning America that "no reasonable American could hold the president responsible for the attack."
If I'm the president and I get a special briefing that I've asked for, and he asked for this, and said the FBI is conducting 70 field investigations about this, then I assume the FBI is on top of the job . . . The president is not an FBI agent.
However, it turns out that the PDB got that little detail wrong:
[T]he FBI Friday said that those investigations were not limited to al-Qaida and did not focus on al-Qaida cells. FBI spokesman Ed Coggswell said the bureau was trying to determine how the number 70 got into the report.
[snip]
Coggswell Friday said that those 70 investigations involved a number of international terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaida. He said that many were criminal investigations, which terrorism experts say are not likely to focus on preventing terrorist acts. And he said he would "not characterize" the targets of the investigations as cells, or groups acting in concert, as was the case with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
This is over and above the revelation during Rice's testimony that there was no evidence to support her claim that the FBI "tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists."
The media have focused on pre-9/11 communication problems between the CIA and the FBI. However, clearly there was also a communication problem between the FBI and the President.
Who's to blame here? It's difficult to tell, but the fact that the false claim about the FBI's 70 investigations came from a CIA briefing certainly raises suspicion. Justin Raimundo expands on this.
11:22:53 PM 
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