What the President knew

Here's something Congress (and apparently no one else) has seen: a PDB that admits, 10 days after September 11th, that there was no connection between Saddam and the attacks or Al Qaeda in general:

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.

Not only does this lend credence to a manipulated intelligence claim, but it also shows how gung ho Bush was to go after Iraq. We had a clear enemy after 9/11 - Al Qaeda. And yet Bush was looking in the days that followed for reasons to go to Iraq instead.

You'd think this would be the sort of thing that Congress would want to investigate. And they do since they learned of it's existence in 2004, three years after it came into existence and almost a year after the war itself began. But the White House refuses to offer up the document even on a classified basis. So we may never know exactly what they knew and when they knew it, or why they chose to ignore it's contents and peddle claims they knew were dubious at best.