What Did He Know?

What did he know? As the criticism of the Iraqi war has increased, cries that the nation was misled have become louder permeating almost every conversation about the war. At the center of the rebuttal has been Bush's denial that he had any information that wasn't passed on to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

That last vestiage of excuse was banished today as a new report surfaces. 10 days after 9-11, Bush was informed in a top secret intelligence briefing that Saddam had NO CONNECTION with Al Qaida or September 11th. Yet he, Cheney and Rove continually misled the public by insisting Saddam was a threat, had ties to terrorists and even used Saddam and 9-11 interchangably so as to link them together in people's minds.

It's time for impeachment to begin. If a president can be impeached over sex surely one will be held accountable for deliberately misleading a nation to war.

10 days after 9-11, Bush KNEW there was no connection between Saddam and the attack by Al Qaida.

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1122nj1.htm
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal© National Journal Group Inc.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.

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 QaedaThe 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.

Take the time to read the article at the website. It is quite damning.