President Bush said Sunday that an intelligence memo he read shortly before September 11, 2001, contained no actionable intelligence" that would have helped him to try to prevent the 9/11 attacks. "The (August 6, 2001 memo) was no indication of a terrorist threat," Bush said. But a member of the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks said ... the memo -- the president's daily briefing, or PDB -- should have alerted Bush to the strong possibility of such an attack. Richard Ben-Veniste [said] the memo and other reports and incidents made up a "substantial body of information" about Osama bin Laden's possible plans. The briefing was headlined, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US." "The CIA was reminding the president -- with the headline ... 'don't just look overseas for the possibility of this spectacular event that everyone was predicting,' " Ben-Veniste told reporters. Ben-Veniste also took issue with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the committee ... that the White House had no inkling al Qaeda would use planes as missiles. He said he would "be surprised if Dr. Rice didn't know" about a no-fly zone in place over Genoa, Italy, for the spring 2001 G8 meeting, spurred by fears terrorists could crash planes "into the buildings where the leaders were meeting."
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