The Washington Post reports: CIA officials questioned in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 whether key intelligence cited by President George W. Bush’s administration as a reason for a military invasion was faulty, according to a newly declassified CIA letter released Thursday by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The letter was sent March 13 of this year from CIA Director John Brennan to Sen. Carl Levin, the outgoing committee chairman, and introduced on the Senate floor on Thursday. Brennan confirmed that CIA field operatives “expressed significant concern” whether Muhammad Atta, one of the airliner hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, could have met with a former Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, in Prague about five months earlier.

The so-called “Prague connection” was used by the Bush administration as a way of tying the 9/11 attacks to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The intelligence has been questioned for years, but the new CIA letter raises anew questions about why the Bush administration took the United States into the Iraq War despite concerns repeatedly being raised by U.S. intelligence officers about whether there was a tie between 9/11 and the Iraqi government. [Continue reading…]