President’s Daily Brief documents, newly declassified by CIA, reveal intel preferences

[Geee]

Washingrton Times:

The CIA’s release last week of more than 19,000 pages of declassified material has provided a window into one of Washington’s most secretive documents, the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, which intelligence officials say has evolved since its creation in the early 1960s.

“It has grown in length and sophistication, adding features like graphics and imagery. It is more comprehensive now, and the analysis is far more rigorous,” CIA Director John O. Brennan said as he and other intelligence community leaders declassified large portions of some 2,500 PDBs from 1961 through 1969.

 

The mass release was unprecedented because the closely guarded documents — produced daily for every president since John F. Kennedy — have been made public on only the rarest of occasions.

The highest-profile example is from 2004, when President George W. Bush yielded to pressure from critics and declassified part of a PDB that intelligence officials had given him just weeks before 9/11, highlighting Osama bin Laden’s desire to “conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.”

Political fallout from the thousands of PDBs released last week won’t be nearly as intense because the documents are a half-century old and largely rooted in an era in which U.S. intelligence officials were consumed not by global jihadi terrorism but by the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union’s aim to spread communism.