- Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005 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.
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- The administration has refused to provide the
Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't
say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Continued at:
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/mparent7777/4651122.html
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