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

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.

According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence about the lack of a Hussein-bin Laden connection 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 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, according to the committee members.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said he could not provide additional information about the situation beyond what is in the Senate report, but he added that "the agency's decisions to disseminate intelligence are not guided by political considerations."

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