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November 23, 2005

Bush knew early on that there was no Al Qaida/Iraq connection

For those of you blathering on about how Democrats had the same access to intelligence data that the White House had, I give you Murry Waas:

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.

Further....

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.

This is hardly an explosive document. The lack of a substantive Al Qaida/Hussein connection isn't exactly shocking news to those of us who have paid close attention. It's been widely reported that Bin Laden and Hussein hated each other.

If the Administration is working to keep the Senate from seeing this type of documentation, then what more potentially serious documents are they hiding?

Posted by Carla at November 23, 2005 02:14 PM