After the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 , there were several investigations of possible collaboration between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists who attacked the building . Neil Herman , who headed the FBI investigation into the attack , noted that despite Yasin 's presence in Baghdad , there was no evidence of Iraqi support for the attack . " We looked at that rather extensively , " he told CNN terrorism expert Peter Bergen . " There were no ties to the Iraqi government . " Bergen writes , " In sum , by the mid - '90s , the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York , the F.B.I. , the U.S. Attorney 's office in the Southern District of New York , the C.I.A. , the N.S.C. , and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack . " In 1998 , Daniel Benjamin , who headed the National Security Council 's counterterrorism division , led an exercise aimed at a critical analysis of the CIA 's contention that Iraq and al Qaeda would not team up . " This was a red-team effort , " he said . " We looked at this as an opportunity to disprove the conventional wisdom , and basically we came to the conclusion that the CIA had this one right . " Benjamin later told Boston Globe reporters , " No one disputes that there have been contacts over the years . In that part of the America-hating universe , contacts happen . But that 's still a long way from suggesting that they were really working together . " Ten days after the September 11 attacks , President Bush receives a classified President 's Daily Brief ( that had been prepared at his request ) indicating that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks and that there was " scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda . " The PDB writes off the few contacts that existed between Saddam 's government and al-Qaeda as attempts to monitor the group rather than attempts to work with them . According to the '' National Journal '' , " Much of the contents of the PDB were later incorporated , albeit in a slightly different form , into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda 's contacts with Iraq , but also Iraq 's support for international terrorism . " This PDB was one of the documents the Bush Administration refused to turn over to the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq , even on a classified basis , and refuses to discuss other than to acknowledge its existence
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations