The August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) warned of the potential for bin Laden to attack the U.S. “The document would later become famous, or infamous, but on this morning it seemed maddeningly unspecific, offering information that was sketchy and mostly three or four years old. Nothing on the first page cited current intelligence. …Only on the second page did the memo hint at what was really going on: ‘Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.’ That sentence cried out for elaboration. What suspicious activity? What surveillance? It said nothing more about that and hardly constituted ‘actionable intelligence,’ the phrase used by security officials to describe information specific enough to guide a specific response. [President] Bush was told the FBI was conducting seventy investigations throughout the United States related to bin Laden, although that was not completely accurate.”
– Peter Baker, Days of Fire, Page 113