Remarks by the President to the Travel Pool:
THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?
Interesting that in the case of Bin Laden, the administration was content to wait for something to react to, but in Iraq, pre-emption was the preferred course: Saddam Hussein bluffed that he had weapons, and that was enough to launch an invasion. Bin Laden had no weapons but he was on the radar as a threat, with a motive — the release of Sheik Rahman, who plotted the 1993 WTC bombing — and the names of the two eventual target cities were in the briefing.