CIA LEARNED IN '02 THAT BIN LADEN HAD - NO - IRAQ TIES (Walter Pincus)

[kpete]

CIA Learned in '02 That Bin Laden Had No Iraq Ties, Report Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A14

The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and two GOP colleagues on the committee disclosed this information for the first time in the panel's report on Iraq released last week. They wrote in the "additional views" section of the report that the Cabinet-level Iraqi official "said that Iraq has no past, current, or anticipated future contact with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda" and that the official "added that bin Laden was in fact a longtime enemy of Iraq."

On Sept. 25, 2002, just days after the CIA received the source's information, President Bush told reporters: "Al-Qaeda hides. Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world. . . . You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401545.html

[malaise]

1. Please tell Cheney

Condi and Bush.

[leftchick]

2. Friday page A14?????

damn! If only it was a blue dress. :puke:

[Jackpine Radical]

4. A blue dress isn't enough.

You need a blue dress & a Democrat if ya wanna hit the front page.

[blm]

6. If it was "Clinton made me chip my nailpolish" it would be Page One.

Bush's crimes against Congress and the Constitution and the Military - Page A14.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. They just can't acknowledge Bushco flat-out lied about it, can they?

Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.

[lisainmilo]

5. Did Saddam and Al-Qaeda opposed each other?

I am trying to find info on this.

[leveymg]

7. Seems connected to Plame's outing. Read this by Pincus:

As Pincus' sources at CIA makes clear, a section of that report should have been distributed within CIA to Plames's unit that was probing Iraq WMDs, and the other to the CIA counter-terrorism unit that dealt with Iraq. From information previously released, the counterterrorism unit seems likely to have included the former Chief of Station in Islamabad, Richard Grenier. As we learned a few months ago,Scooter Libby talked to Grenier about Plame's work at CIA before he outed her.

Pincus reports at the concluding section of article today:

Former senior CIA officials said it was unclear what happened to the Hussein-bin Laden information, although two former aides to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said they could not remember if they received the original information. "Nothing was withheld from the White House," one former aide said, although there was "a lot of debate inside the agency about the Saddam-al-Qaeda relationship" because it was the focus of repeated questions from administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The high-level Iraqi official, who was not identified in the Senate report, was Naji Sabri, then foreign minister. A senior CIA officer, after months of trying, was able to question him through a trusted agency intermediary when Sabri was in New York City around Sept. 19, 2002.

According to former intelligence officials, the CIA case officer filed two separate reports describing his questioning of Sabri. One, involving the Iraq weapons program, would go to analysts interested in that subject, the officer believed; the second, about Hussein and bin Laden, would go to the CIA counterterrorism center. The officer, however, passed his material on to senior agency officials in New York and was not aware of how it was eventually distributed.

The implication here is that Plame was embroiled in the controversy within CIA over whether this report containing Sabri's information that Iraq had no WMD program should be included in an official finding to be disseminated throughout the U.S. intelligence community. The obvious party who blocked that dissemination was Libby, acting on behalf of the Vice President.

I'll bet this is the news what's about to come out.

[blm]

8. We pretty much expected there were more layers to the story - and that

her role as a WMD analyst was an additional and key factor.