Clarke's Revenge?
A few posts ago, I noted how Richard Clarke has said that, in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush pulled him aside and asked him to see if Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks. Clarke told him that, no, we know it was Al Qaeda and Bush was insistent that he look at Saddam. Clarke said that he looked into it and reported back, no link between Saddam and 9/11. And he was told, wrong answer, try again. So he did and came up with the same result.
Well, look what the CIA told Bush on 9/21/01 about the Saddam/9/11 link:
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.
And I wonder who this "former high-level official" is (cough, Richard Clarke, cough):
"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."
In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president
said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties,
and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or
nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.
And keep this in mind as you hear Cheney make ridiculous accusations against those who have finally caught on to how the Administration manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war against Iraq:
Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice
President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported
evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:
"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all
so used to getting out of CIA."
So if the "crap" from the CIA showed that there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and we know that there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, where does that leave us, Mr. Cheney?
