Happy Easter to those who celebrate. The Bush administration released the August 6th memo, a mistake in my opinion. The memo just says that bin-Laden, along with abu-Zubayda and others were preparing to use explosives in an attack in the US. It mentions nothing about planes being used as missiles. How does the Inquirer headline the article? About as you'd expect:

Memo Informed Bush of Terrorists

They have changed it on their site.

More here, here, and the NY Post has a great analysis here.

The CIA's Aug. 6, 2001 memo for President Bush should pose serious new credibility problems for the nation's spy agency, not for Bush.

Democrats such as 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste have sought to paint the memo as a CIA warning that Bush ignored a month before the terror attacks - but it turns out to be nothing of the sort.

Far from sounding the alarm about an imminent risk that al Qaeda would hijack airplanes, the CIA pooh-poohed the idea as a "sensational" claim that couldn't be verified.

"We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [foreign intelligence] service in 1998 saying that [Osama] bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheik" [Omar Abdel-Rahman] and other U.S. extremists," the CIA wrote.

That foreign intelligence report came in while Bill Clinton was president, but three years later the CIA had found nothing to back it up and thus seemed to downplay it - the very opposite of issuing a red-alert to Bush.

In cataloging potential risks from al Qaeda at Bush's request, the CIA made no mention at all of the threat that planes could be turned into flying bombs, although we now know that idea wasn't a total novelty.

Partisan politics, as practiced by the Democrats, has sunk to a new low. That is definitely saying something.