Of course, most of us have heard these reports, via such sources as the 9/11 commission, Richard Clarke and his account in “Against All Enemies” and Bob Graham, Bob Woodward, and others. But Gore tells it here in a powerfully condensed form, and I thought it worthy of another quote. Read the whole article though. Really good.
We know from the 9/11 commission that within hours of the attack, Secretary Rumsfeld was attempting to find a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We know the sworn testimony of the President’s White House head of counter-terrorism Richard Clarke that on September 12 th – the day after the attack: “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this…I said, ‘Mr. President…There’s no connection. He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection…We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts…They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’ …I don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t– wouldn’t like the answer.”
He did not ask about Osama bin Laden. He did not ask about al Qaeda. He did not ask about Saudi Arabia or any country other than Iraq. When Clarke responded to his question by saying that Iraq was not responsible for the attack and that al Qaeda was, the President persisted in focusing on Iraq, and again, asked Clarke to spend his time looking for information linking Saddam Hussein to the attack.
Again, this is not hindsight. This is how the President was thinking at the time he was planning America’s response to the attack. This was not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence, causing a mistaken linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda, this was something else; a willful choice to make the linkage, whether evidence existed or not.
Earlier this month, Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all of the intelligence available to President Bush on the alleged connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, finally admitted, under repeated questioning from reporters, “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”
This is not negligence, this is deception.