After resisting for months, the White House finally released over the weekend an item from the August 6, 2001, “President’s Daily Brief.”The brief is prepared for the president by the intelligence community; the document released over the weekend had been classified and was marked on both pages “For the President Only.” The item titled “bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” begins by noting that “Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.'”

The entire flap over this memo strikes us as ridiculous in a classically inside-Washington way. The Republicans were being ridiculous by keeping the memo “classified.” The information was broadcast on national television. The only imaginable reason to keep it secret would be to hide from the public the fact that despite the CIA’s huge budget — also classified — the information that the agency comes up with often isn’t much better than what can be read in the press or watched on television.

The Democrats, for their part, are being ridiculous by portraying this memo as a sign that Mr. Bush somehow “knew” that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were on the way and yet failed to prevent them. Sure, Mr. Bush knew that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack America. So did the millions who watched the television interviews with him that CNN’s Peter Arnett conducted on March 20, 1997, and that John Miller of ABC News conducted on May 28, 1998. It’s possible that some Clinton administration officials saw those interviews. Maybe even some Democratic senators — such as the junior senator from Massachusetts — or those members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States who may have had their televisions tuned to ABC or CNN when Mr. bin Laden was vowing to bring the fight to America.

The Washington crowd seems determined to engage in endless recriminations over the failure to prevent the September 11 attacks, recriminations that will no doubt last until every sentient viewer of the ABC or CNN bin Laden programs is hauled before the commission for sworn testimony. Or until the November 2004 election, whichever comes first. The danger in all this is that it detracts from the job at hand, which is to marshal the political and military force to carry this fight to the enemy in Iraq and other lands where the terrorists are swarming. There was so little to the memo that people are going to start to ask whether distraction from the task at hand was the point of creating a controversy in the first place.