quote:
Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.NARRATOR: Four days later, the president and his cabinet gathered at Camp David to formulate strategy in the war on terrorism. President Bush told cabinet members that if Saddam Hussein was to become a target, they needed to dig up evidence that he was cooperating with al Qaeda.
Within days, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz directed one of his deputies, Douglas Feith, to set up a special office inside the Pentagon that would examine the intelligence regarding Iraq's possible connection with al Qaeda.
It started as a small, secretive operation.
RICHARD PERLE: It was very simple. It was clear that no one had been looking for links of a kind that it was reasonable to consider might exist. We didn't know whether they existed, and the evidence might have been that they didn't exist. So some people were brought in to take a look. And within a very short period of time, they began to find links that nobody else had previously understood.
NARRATOR: When it came to Iraq, the special intelligence office didn't trust what the CIA or even their own Defense Intelligence Agency had to say. They did apparently listen to Ahmad Chalabi. According to one Pentagon source, he visited once every other month.
Transcript, FRONTLINE, Oct. 2003
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posted 09 February 2007 09:12 AM
