Never before was a Presidential Daily Briefing of a sitting president released to the public — until Saturday. The memo of Aug. 6, 2001, for some, illustrates how much the president already knew. For others, it illustrates how much the president did not know. These perceptions shape the view of the proceedings of the Sept. 11 commission and the Bush administration’s attitudes toward al-Qaida.

The briefing reiterates some of the things that also could be found in the news. The idea that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack Americans — even on their home soil — was already known. “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” borders on the obvious.

The real problem is believing that this briefing spelled out Sept. 11. It doesn’t. It alludes to a possible “how” and maybe a “what.” There’s no mention of a specific “who,” “where” or “when.” The closest the memo comes to mentioning possible attacks are in the third-to-last and second-to-last paragraphs:

“We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ Umar Abd al-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

“Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

Notice the phrase “not able to corroborate” — nothing solid. Hijackings were a possibility, but specifically in tandem with a hostage situation. Bombings of federal buildings, echoing Oklahoma City, were a possibility. Hijacking planes and then using them as bombs were, as far as this memo is concerned, not a possibility.

The brief is long on recaps and short on specifics. James Thompson, a Republican on the Sept. 11 commission, was right when he said about the memo, “There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun.”

However, that has not stopped some Democrats from jumping at the chance to turn this into a Watergate-esque coverup scandal. The picture is trying to be painted that Bush knew enough to do something meaningful and did nothing, which is not the case.

“What could a president have done under those circumstances? Shut down the United States? Grounded all aircraft? Gone into a panic mode?” asked Richard Perle, a former Pentagon adviser and assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration, in an Associated Press article Monday. Nearly anything done before the attacks, at least in public, may have led to charges of overreaction done by reliance on vague possibilities.

In Bush’s press conference Tuesday, a New York Times reporter asked if Bush felt personal responsibility for Sept. 11. Bush responded to this by stating what should be obvious: The person responsible is Osama bin Laden. Bush did not make the plans or order the hijackers to do what they did.

The investigation needs to be directed at the intelligence aspects. The commission needs to find out what was done, what was prevented from being done and what should be (or has been) changed to prevent similar situations from happening in the future — without devolving into a blame game.

Take the example used by the AP on Monday. The CIA had linked two men who would eventually hijack the plane that flew into the Pentagon to al-Qaida. A wall between intelligence and criminal agents, according to an FBI agent, “prevented New York agents involved in an al-Qaida criminal investigation from trying to track the two men down because officials at the FBI National Security Law Unit decided it had to remain as an intelligence case.”

What the president and intelligence agencies had in the summer of 2001 were a bunch of pieces in a 1,000-piece puzzle. However, those pieces were strewn about in different rooms — with the inability to move them, and a bunch were missing. Looking at the rooms of pieces from above today, it’s easy to say “It’s so obvious! How did they not see the attack and know exactly what to do?”

Had the president’s August briefing said “Men from al-Qaida are going to board domestic flights at three separate airports on the East Coast, hijack them, and use them as airborne missiles to destroy high-profile targets in New York and Washington in the next 40 days,” that would have been something. But it didn’t.

Reading between the lines with the benefit of hindsight is easy. Looking at vague possibilities and scattered reports of activity under investigation by an administration that was “not on a war footing,” reports that only jump out after the fact, is another matter entirely.