He was flown to Tikrit and persuaded under interrogation to pass on the location of his former boss.Major General Ray Odierno, head of the 4th Infantry Division with responsibility for the Tikrit area, told the BBC: “What he said was, ‘This is where Saddam is. The identity of the man who betrayed Saddam Hussein, giving the location of his bolthole to US Special Forces in December last year, was revealed last night. Had he been in possession of them, Mr Clarke said, “I like to think I would have connected the dots”. But that probably was wishful thinking ­ as wishful as Mr Bush’s belief that Saddam was involved with 11 September. Meanwhile requests for Ms Rice to appear before the federal commission have been turned down.Hindsight, famously, is perfect. Or as Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s last Secretary of State put it when she testified on Tuesday: “History happens forward, but is written backwards.”.

Calls for its release have been resisted.On 4 September ­ the day the new blueprint for action against al-Qa’ida was approved ­ Mr Clarke wrote to Ms Rice asking how she would feel if hundreds of Americans were killed in a terrorist attack A week later, the Eastern seaboard was attacked. By then, clues of what was about to happen had been gathered. The CIA knew that two al-Qa’ida terrorists, who would take part in the attacks, were in the country. The FBI had discovered strange goings-on at pilot schools, of Middle Eastern men wanting to learn how to fly airliners, but not to land or take off But the agencies would not share the information. The document contained the CIA’s latest assessment of the terrorist threat, including renewed intelligence that hijacked aircraft might be used in an attack. In June, a new presidential draft on ambitious covert action against al-Qa’ida was circulating But nothing happened The next, and penultimate, key date is 6 August 2001.

That day Mr Bush, on holiday at his Texas ranch, received his top-secret “President’s Daily Briefing”, or PDB. Wrongly, Mr Tenet concluded that any attacks had been postponed.Mr Clarke was so upset his advice was not being followed that he prepared to ask for a new post. In May, according to private testimony from Ms Rice, Mr Bush expressed frustration as George Tenet, the CIA director, warned again of terrorist threats in his daily briefing.By July, so nervous were intelligence specialists that two unidentified CIA officers dealing with al-Qa’ida contemplated resignation in order to go public with their fears But, by the end of July, the “chatter” had subsided. The preliminary report of the commission notes the “tension” felt by John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, between the understandable wish of a new administration to get its own take on an issue, and the urgency of the situation on the ground. The sudden spike in intercepted “chatter” suggesting one or more impending terrorist strikes went unheeded or was downplayed because of the assumption they would be abroad. He adds that during that first briefing on 25 January “her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term [al-Qa'ida] before”.Thus the increasingly dark forebodings of the intelligence community failed to resonate.