Washington – The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle that Iraq had no past or current contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of his regime, according to a 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 intelligence supporting a contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and two GOP colleagues on the committee disclosed this information in the panel’s report on Iraq released last week.
They wrote in the report that the Cabinet-level Iraqi official in September 2002 “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 high- level source’s information, Bush told reporters, “Al-Qaeda hides. Saddam doesn’t, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger 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.”
According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence because “it did not provide anything new.”
But other information obtained at the same time from the same source that paralleled what administration officials were already saying was immediately passed on to “alert” the president and other senior policymakers, the three Republicans said.
A “highly restricted intelligence report” conveyed the source’s claim that although Iraq had no nuclear weapon, Hussein was covertly developing one and had stockpiled chemical weapons, they said.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimig liano said “the agency’s decisions to disseminate intelligence are not guided by political considerations.”
