Bush told in 2001 Iraq and Al Qaeda unconnected

[Balta1701]

Murray Waas, a particularly good writer at the The National Journal has filed a fairly interesting report on a PDB (president's daily briefing) given to President Bush and others on Sept. 21st, 2001, which basically stated that as far as the intelligence communities were concerned, there was no connection at all between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

 

Thus far, the Administration has refused to provide this PDB to Congress, and didn't even acknowledge its existence until last summer. Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, are reportedly going to make an effort to force the White House to provide the PDB to Congress when the next session begins.

 

If this PDB does include what this article says it does include...it would be particularly key in that it would throw a huge wrench into any argument that the Congress had the same information as the White House when the Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq in 2002.

 

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

 

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

 

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

 

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

 

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

 

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

 

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

 

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.

 

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.....

 

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

 

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

 

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

 

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

 

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

 

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

 

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

Edited November 23, 2005 by Balta1701

[kapkomet]

This is really, really old. And furthermore, I've heard SEVERAL times, by GWB AND his administration, that they know that the two are not DIRECTLY related.

[FlaSoxxJim]

This is really, really old.  And furthermore, I've heard SEVERAL times, by GWB AND his administration, that they know that the two are not DIRECTLY related.

I think you are missing the pregnant point, which goes back to exactly what you said – this news is REALLY OLD. Four-plus years old. If you are George Bush, that is.

 

This is information that Bush had TEN DAYS after 9/11. Not now, four years later, but back while Ground Zero was still smoldering. The Administration immediately fell all over themselves to figure out how to parlay the 9/11 tragedy into an Iraq invasion, despite knowing full well that there was no credible Iraq/Al Quaida link.

 

More importantly, having this knowledge did not in any way stop GWB from inferring an Iraq/Al Quaida connection. OBL/Saddam connection at every possible opportunity.

 

And none of it was accompanied with a big "*" stating that "The credible intel strongly suggests otherwise."

[kapkomet]

I think you are missing the pregnant point, which goes back to exactly what you said – this news is REALLY OLD.  Four-plus years old.  If you are George Bush, that is.

 

This is information that Bush had TEN DAYS after 9/11.  Not now, four years later, but back while Ground Zero was still smoldering.  The Administration immediately fell all over themselves to figure out how to parlay the 9/11 tragedy into an Iraq invasion, despite knowing full well that there was no credible Iraq/Al Quaida link.

 

More importantly, having this knowledge did not in any way stop GWB from inferring an Iraq/Al Quaida connection. OBL/Saddam connection at every possible opportunity.

 

And none of it was accompanied with a big "*" stating that "The credible intel strongly suggests otherwise."

**INFERRING... really?

 

In SEVERAL speeches, again, they have said over and over and over and over that there is ****NO**** DIRECT connection between 9/11 and Iraq. But he HAS said that Iraq is a part of the larger war on terror. There's a huge distinction between the two. You're looking for a silver bullet here, and there's not one here.

[FlaSoxxJim]

**INFERRING... really?

 

In SEVERAL speeches, again, they have said over and over and over and over that there is ****NO**** DIRECT connection between 9/11 and Iraq.  But he HAS said that Iraq is a part of the larger war on terror.  There's a huge distinction between the two.  You're looking for a silver bullet here, and there's not one here.

In no way do I think this is any kind of silver bullet. I think it's a timely reminder story given that so much currently hangs on whether Congress did in fact have the infirmation they needed in order to truly make an informed decision. This is one more case documenting that they clearly did not.

 

There are no silver bullets, just many many chinks in the armor until hopefully things that need to come to light can.

 

And of course it's a double-edged sword for the dissenters who are forced by that reality to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks because the White House has been very successful at stonewalling on th big issues. Then we get the snide 'that's right, it's ALL Bush's fault' comments.

[kapkomet]

In no way do I think this is any kind of silver bullet.  I think it's a timely reminder story given that  so much currently hangs on whether Congress did in fact have the infirmation they needed in order to truly make an informed decision.  This is one more case documenting that they clearly did not.

 

There are no silver bullets, just many many chinks in the armor until hopefully things that need to come to light can.

 

And of course it's a double-edged sword for the dissenters who are forced by that reality to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks because the White House has been very successful at stonewalling on th big issues.  Then we get the snide 'that's right, it's ALL Bush's fault' comments.

Yea, because, again, we see a blizzard of stuff every day about how his policies are wrong, or lies, or whatever negative light happens to be spotlighted today.

 

On the flip side, on AM blowtorches, the guy's s***ting golden bricks, and obviously, that's wrong too.

 

It is not as cut and dried as it is made out to be. That's all I'm trying to say, again. Ya'll sick of it yet?

[Rex Kickass]

So what youre saying is that isn't red or blue, but purple?

[kapkomet]

So what youre saying is that isn't red or blue, but purple?

 

Something like that.