Bush Knew 10 Days After 9/11 There Was No Link Between Iraq and Al Qaeda

George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and other high-ranking members of the Bush administration were informed on September 21, 2001, in the President's Daily Briefing, that the CIA had found no credible connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and no evidence that Iraq was involved or played any part at all in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the Bush administration did not pass this information on to Congress, and to this day refuses to let the Senate Intelligence Committee see it.

That is the essence of an article by Murray Waas published yesterday in the National Journal.

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.

Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time... urges us to stay focused on the central issue, which Waas's piece only confirms:

I'm afraid that people may still miss the crucial point about this. It's not that Bush and the others lied and distorted all of this in their propaganda campaign to justify the war on Iraq. That's terrible, despicable and contemptible, and every other strongly negative word you can think of. But anyone who has examined the record honestly for the last few years knows all that. The evidence is overwhelming.

That's not the critical point -- and it's not the critical point with regard to what might still happen in connection with Iran or Syria. So I will repeat the point, in big, bold letters:

THE INTELLIGENCE, WHATEVER IT WAS, DIDN'T MATTER. THE DECISION TO GO TO WAR WAS ONE OF POLICY, BASED ON OTHER REASONS ENTIRELY. THE INTELLIGENCE, AND ALL THE MISUSES OF INTELLIGENCE, WERE ONLY THE COVER USED TO JUSTIFY THE WAR TO THE PUBLIC. THE INTELLIGENCE DIDN'T MATTER. IT WAS IRRELEVANT TO THE REASONS UNDERLYING THEIR DECISION.

I explained my reasons for saying this at length yesterday. I repeat: it's not that they lied, as terrible as that is. They only used the lies to convince us that the war was legitimate.

They wanted the war for other reasons. They wanted it long before 9/11, which was only the pretext they used. And they would have their war, no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT.

Over at Think Progress, Faiz points us toward a memo written earlier this week by former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham and American Progress President and CEO John Podesta. The memo is a response to Dick Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute; it effectively debunks Cheney's lies about the unanimity of support for invading Iraq and Congress's access to the same intelligence the White House saw.

And finally, Kevin Drum provides seven specific examples of how the Bush administration kept, from Congress and the public, intelligence that was not "on message" with regard to justifying an invasion of Iraq