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B. September and October 2001 Papers

(U) Shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Director of Central Intelligence's (DCI) Counterterrorism Center (CTC) and the CIA Near East and South Asia office (NESA)³⁷ collaborated on a paper on Iraqi links to the September 11th attacks. This was the CIA's first attempt to summarize the Iraqi regime's ties to 9/11. The paper was disseminated to President's Daily Brief (PDB) principals on September 21, 2001. The Committee was not informed about the existence of this paper until June 2004. According to the CIA, the paper took a "Q&A" approach to the issue of Iraq's possible links to the September 11th attacks.

(U) Soon afterward, the NESA drafted a paper that broadened the scope of the issue by looking at Iraq's overall ties to terrorism. The Committee requested a copy of this October 2001 document, but representatives of the DCI declined to provide it, stating:

. . . we are declining to provide a copy of the paper. It was drafted in response to a request from a Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) recipient, and the final paper was disseminated only to the PDB readership. Accordingly, it is not available for further dissemination.³⁸

footnotes

³⁷"The Near East and South Asia (NESA) is the CIA Directorate of Intelligence (DI) office responsible for analyzing events in the Near East, including Iraq.

³⁸ The President's Daily Brief (PDB) has not been provided to Congress in the past by the executive branch. Committee staff notes, however, that the National Commission on Terrorist Acts Upon the United States (known as the 9-11 Commission) reached an agreement with the White House for access to the PDB and other intelligence items. The declination to provide the October 2001 CIA paper is an expansion of the historic practice to include other documents beyond the PDB. The CIA has provided the Committee items included in the PDB as long as they were also published separately as finished intelligence or in other finished products.