The smoking gun?

Murray Waas was on The Majority Report last night talking about his article in National Journal which reveals what would in a sane society be the smoking gun proving that the Bush Administration went to war not on bad intelligence, but on lies:

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.

Of course they have -- because they are the most damning piece of evidence yet.

Obviously National Journal is not a source most people are going to read, but the MSM has now picked up the story, and it will be interesting to see if it gains any traction.

Yahoo! News:

US President George W. Bush was reportedly informed 10 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks that US intelligence had no proof of links between Iraq and that act of terror.

ADVERTISEMENT

Citing government documents as well as past and present Bush administration officials, The National Journal said the president was briefed on September 21, 2001 that evidence of cooperation between Iraq and the Al-Qaeda terror network was insufficient.

Bush was also informed that there was some credible information about contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that showed that the Iraqi dictator had tried to establish surveillance over the group, according to the report.

Saddam Hussein believed the radical Islamic network represented a threat for his secular regime.

Imagine that....yes, there WERE in all likelihood contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda -- but only because Hussein was adhering to the "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" philosophy.