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Tue 11 Mar, 2008 03:05 pm
Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2008
WASHINGTON ?- An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn't due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.
President Bush and his aides used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.
As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims," he said.
The new study, entitled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents", was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a "painful" declassification review.
It was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.
Spokesmen for the Joint Forces Command declined to comment until the report is released. One of the report's authors, Kevin Woods, also declined to comment.
The issue of al Qaida in Iraq already has played a role in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, mocked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, recently for saying that he'd keep some U.S. troops in Iraq if al Qaida established a base there.
"I have some news. Al Qaida is in Iraq," McCain told supporters. Obama retorted that, "There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade." (In fact, al Qaida in Iraq didn't emerge until 2004, a year after the invasion.)
The new study appears destined to be used by both critics and supporters of Bush's decision to invade Iraq to advance their own familiar arguments.
While the documents reveal no Saddam-al Qaida links, they do show that Saddam and his underlings were willing to use terrorism against enemies of the regime and had ties to regional and global terrorist groups, the officials said.
However, the U.S. intelligence official, who's read the full report, played down the prospect of any major new revelations, saying, "I don't think there's any surprises there."
Saddam, whose regime was relentlessly secular, was wary of Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaida, although like many other Arab leaders, he gave some financial support to Palestinian groups that sponsored terrorism against Israel.
According to the State Department's annual report on global terrorism for 2002 ?- the last before the Iraq invasion ?- Saddam supported the militant Islamic group Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical, Syrian-based terrorist group.
Saddam also hosted Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, although the Abu Nidal Organization was more active when he lived in Libya and he was murdered in Baghdad in August 2002, possibly on Saddam's orders.
An earlier study based on the captured Iraqi documents, released by the Joint Forces Command in March 2006, found that a militia Saddam formed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the Fedayeen Saddam, planned assassinations and bombings against his enemies. Those included Iraqi exiles and opponents in Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite communities.
Other documents indicate that the Fedayeen Saddam opened paramilitary training camps that, starting in 1998, hosted "Arab volunteers" from outside of Iraq. What happened to the non-Iraqi volunteers is unknown, however, according to the earlier study.
The new Pentagon study isn't the first to refute earlier administration contentions about Saddam and al Qaida.
A September 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam was "distrustful of al Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaida to provide material or operational support."
The Senate report, citing an FBI debriefing of a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi, said that Saddam turned down a request for assistance by bin Laden which he made at a 1995 meeting in Sudan with an Iraqi operative.
ON THE WEB
Earlier report from the Iraqi Perspectives Project
And The funny idiot Saddam was butchtered without any decent interntational justice.
Rama Fuchs
Too bad they will not ever go punished for what so many of us knew were patent lies from the get-go.
Life is like that.
UNFORTUNATELY
Who the hell except those infected with patently unsupported Bushco lies ever thought he did?
The poor patheitic couch potatoes
had failed to understand that
Sadam was a bed fellow of the criminal corporates.
A decent civilized country had been tortured, butchered, raped for no logical reasons.
Let the couch- pototatoes repent, regret and retrace.
My heart is with the innocent citizens .
Perhaps you guys missed this key sentance before making your sweeping condemnations?
Quote:The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
No one had access to the Iraqi regime's archives and could therefore not have known. We could only go with the intelligence at the time. As ststed before, being wrong is not lying.
McGentrix wrote:Perhaps you guys missed this key sentance before making your sweeping condemnations?
Quote:The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
No one had access to the Iraqi regime's archives and could therefore not have known. We could only go with the intelligence at the time. As ststed before, being wrong is not lying.
Except that there was not evidence of a direct link at the time either. So it's a tad worse than just being wrong, it's drawing a conclusion where there is no evidence to support it, and using it as an argument to take our country to war and destroy another country.
McGentrix wrote:No one had access to the Iraqi regime's archives and could therefore not have known. We could only go with the intelligence at the time. As ststed before, being wrong is not lying.
Depends.
If you say
"in spite of a lack of evidence, we're convinced that Saddam is cooperating with Al Qaeda," you might be wrong, but not lying.
If you say
"we know for a fact that Saddam is cooperating with Al Qaeda" - in spite of the fact that no solid evidence exists that suggests that much - well, that's pretty much the definition of a lie.
The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
What about Cheney, who to this day maintains a link between the two?
He repeated it over and over before the war, which you are well aware of.
Cycloptichorn
Cycloptichorn wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
What about Cheney, who to this day maintains a link between the two?
He repeated it over and over before the war, which you are well aware of.
Cycloptichorn
If you say so, I accept it on your word, but if you look at the justifications Mr. Bush gave when trying to get support for the invasion beforehand, it was pretty clearly based on the fear WMD and/or programs. If one intends to make a correct argument, it should be based on correctly quoting people.
Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
Reading comprehension, Brandon. I was not talking about or quoting Bush, specifically.
But if you want to talk about a specific quote - here you go:
Quote:SEC. RUMSFELD: We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
See?
Saying
"there's contradictory information out there, but we're pretty sure that there are WMD hidden around Tikrit and Baghdad," you might be wrong, but not lying.
If you say
"we know where the weapons of mass destruction are - they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad" - in spite of the fact that there is evidence that suggests the opposite - then you're essentially telling a lie.
old europe wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
Reading comprehension, Brandon. I was not talking about or quoting Bush, specifically.
But if you want to talk about a specific quote - here you go:
Quote:SEC. RUMSFELD: We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
See?
Saying
"there's contradictory information out there, but we're pretty sure that there are WMD hidden around Tikrit and Baghdad," you might be wrong, but not lying.
If you say
"we know where the weapons of mass destruction are - they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad" - in spite of the fact that there is evidence that suggests the opposite - then you're essentially telling a lie.
My comments pertained only to the idea that the invasion was based on a Sadam - Al Qaeda link, which is untrue. That's the only issue I was talking about.
Brandon9000 wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
What about Cheney, who to this day maintains a link between the two?
He repeated it over and over before the war, which you are well aware of.
Cycloptichorn
If you say so, I accept it on your word, but if you look at the justifications Mr. Bush gave when trying to get support for the invasion beforehand, it was pretty clearly based on the fear WMD and/or programs. If one intends to make a correct argument, it should be based on correctly quoting people.
I'm okay with you saying that Bush didn't directly say this, but Cheney and the other Neocons in Washington - Bush's surrogates - most certainly did. And you know it!
Cycloptichorn
Cycloptichorn wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
What about Cheney, who to this day maintains a link between the two?
He repeated it over and over before the war, which you are well aware of.
Cycloptichorn
If you say so, I accept it on your word, but if you look at the justifications Mr. Bush gave when trying to get support for the invasion beforehand, it was pretty clearly based on the fear WMD and/or programs. If one intends to make a correct argument, it should be based on correctly quoting people.
I'm okay with you saying that Bush didn't directly say this, but Cheney and the other Neocons in Washington - Bush's surrogates - most certainly did. And you know it!
Cycloptichorn
But did they say it as a justification for invading beforehand? My recollection is that they did not - certainly not in any substantial way.
Brandon9000 wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:The president stated over and over again, incredibly clearly, that the justification for invasion was the apparent likelihood that Iraq had active WMD programs. Misquoting president Bush doesn't help your argument.
What about Cheney, who to this day maintains a link between the two?
He repeated it over and over before the war, which you are well aware of.
Cycloptichorn
If you say so, I accept it on your word, but if you look at the justifications Mr. Bush gave when trying to get support for the invasion beforehand, it was pretty clearly based on the fear WMD and/or programs. If one intends to make a correct argument, it should be based on correctly quoting people.
I'm okay with you saying that Bush didn't directly say this, but Cheney and the other Neocons in Washington - Bush's surrogates - most certainly did. And you know it!
Cycloptichorn
But did they say it as a justification for invading beforehand? My recollection is that they did not - certainly not in any substantial way.
Oh, they most certainly did. I'll look for some links today.
Cycloptichorn
Thank you OE, just what I was looking for
Cycloptichorn
That's what you were looking for?
Saddam aided and protected terrorists. Of that there is no doubt. You guys at least agree on that, right?
Abu Musab Zarqawi was part of al Qaeda, and he was in Iraq. Not a stretch to say he was not there without Saddam's knowledge.
Can you imagine what 19 hard-core terrorists like the ones on 9/11 had access to the WMD's Saddam was suspected to have had?
I don't see where the lie in that SotU is. I can see where you guys that don't like Bush see it, but it isn't really there.
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