Newsweek: Saddam's Links To 9/11? How the Pentagon Made Its Case

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4523156/

Where did Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration hard-liners get the information they used to make controversial comments linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and 9/11? One principal source was a slide show, classified "Top Secret/Codeword," prepared by an obscure Pentagon policy unit nicknamed "Team B." The office, originally composed of two analysts (one of whom, David Wurmser, now works as a Mideast adviser to Cheney), was assigned shortly after 9/11 to pore through raw intelligence reports looking for data CIA analysts might have missed, linking foreign governments to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. After two months of research, Team B came up with an elaborate presentation, more than two hours long, suggesting that Hizbullah and Al Qaeda jointly sponsored the 9/11 attacks with likely support from several governments, including Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia (whose royal family was allegedly implicated).

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The slide show was presented to top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in summer 2002. In August, Pentagon officials traveled to CIA headquarters to present the briefing to CIA Director George Tenet and aides; the slide that criticized CIA methods was omitted from this presentation. In September, a Pentagon briefer gave the presentation to White House national-security officials, including Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Steven Hadley. Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, sat in for part of the presentation. Officials close to the CIA now say the agency was "underwhelmed" by the presentation, many of whose key points—including the Atta meeting in Prague—have been widely discredited. Even some Pentagon officials acknowledge that the allegation about Saddam's training Arab terrorists is not supported by evidence.

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Black propaganda?

below normal?

Blatant lies?

A spokesman for the National Security Council said that the slide show had "no effect on Mr. Hadley's thinking. He receives his intelligence information from the CIA."

All of them.

the criticism of the CIA in one presentation is interesting. I think Rummy fosters inter agency tensions to further his own interests....duh, what an understatement.

"Team B" was the nickname for the group--which included many of today's prominent neocons--that was formed during the Reagan years when reichwingers thought the CIA was soft-pedalling the threat from the USSR. Sound familiar? They came out with a much scarier analysis of the Soviets' economic and military strength than what the CIA was saying, projecting dire cataclysms if we didn't act to stop 'em!

And of course they were dead wrong--the Soviet Empire was rotting from the head down and the inside out, and fell apart of its own contradictions and inefficiencies around the time Team B (which included one Richard Perlle, among other familiar faces) had predicted they'd have the US surrounded and helpless. Never anybody as wrong--and as unable to recognize it--as these guys.