9-11 report suppressed. (Insider Report).

The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was once described as a place where yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. That the public at large had experienced yesterday's weather, and would know that the revised official account of yesterday's weather is false, made little difference: The Soviet state had the power to compel its subjects to accept -- at least, in public -- the government's version of the truth on any subject.

The Bush administration, eager to restrain politically dangerous discussion of prior knowledge of the 9-11 attacks, is trying to pull off the quasi-Stalinist feat of "classifying" inconvenient facts already in the public domain. At issue is an 800-page report compiled by the joint congressional committee investigating the intelligence failures that contributed to that catastrophe.

"Among the portions of the report the administration refuses to declassify are chapters dealing with two politically and diplomatically sensitive issues: the details of daily intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 and evidence pointing to Saudi government ties to Al Qaeda' reported Newsweek for June 2nd. "Bush officials have taken such a hard line, sources say, that they're refusing to permit the release of matters already in the public domain - including the existence of intelligence documents referred to on the CIA Web site."

One of those documents is "the PDB, the President's Daily Brief. The congressional report contains details of PDBs provided to Bush (and top national-security aides) prior to 9-11. The PDBs included warnings about possible attacks by Al Qaeda. (One PDB was given at the presidential ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 6, and dealt with the possibility that Al Qaeda might hijack airplanes.)"

Much of this supposedly classified information concerning advance warnings presented to President Bush has been discussed in THE NEW AMERICAN (see particularly our June 17, 2002 cover story, "Foreknowledge and Failure"). But an administration review committee headed by CIA Director George Tenet has refused to declassify anything even referring to the existence of PDBs.

"We're not playing politics," an intelligence official insisted to Newsweek. "Our concern is national security." Given that the issue is already in the public domain, the administration's true intention is to establish, In Stalin, an "official" truth about 9-11 intelligence failures.