A corner of the front page of the August 6, 2001 PDB

The President's Daily Briefing (PDB) is a top secret document produced each morning by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the President of the United States. Responsibility for producing the PDB will be transferred to the Director of National Intelligence upon John Negroponte's confirmation to that post [1]. It is intended to provide the president with new international intelligence warranting attention, and analysis of sensitive international situations. The CIA produced the first PDB in 1964, though it had of course produced briefs for the president before.

George Tenet considered the PDB so sensitive that in July 2000 he took the position with the National Archives and Records Administration that none of them could be released for publication "no matter how old or historically significant it may be" [2].

During a briefing on May 21, 2002, Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary, characterized the PDB as "the most highly sensitized classified document in the government" [3].

The PDB came under increased public awareness during testimony in front of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was convened in 2004 to analyze the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States of America. On April 8, 2004, after testimony by Condoleezza Rice, the Commission renewed calls for the declassification of a PDB from August 6, 2001, entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US. Two days later, the White House complied, and released the document with minimal redactions.

External links

• CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates
• National Security Archive at George Washington University
• August 6, 2001 PDB from CNN, PDF file
• Osama bin Laden Determined To Strike in US, Plain text