The Scum at the Top
Commentary on the Rats in Washington
Senate Finds No al-Qaida-Saddam Link
By Jim Abrams
Associated Press
© September 9, 2006
Saddam Hussein rejected
overtures from al-Qaida and believed Islamic
extremists were a threat to his regime, a
reverse portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama
bin Laden painted by the Bush White House, a
Senate panel has found.
The administration's version was based in part
on intelligence that White House officials knew
was flawed, according to Democrats on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, citing newly declassified
documents released by the panel.
The report, released Friday, discloses for the
first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that
prior to the war Saddam's government "did not
have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind
eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi or his associates.
As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference,
President Bush said people should "imagine a
world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with
the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction
and "who had relations with Zarqawi."
Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet,
saying that during a private meeting in July
Tenet told the panel that the White House
pressured him and that he agreed to back
up the administration's case for war despite
his own agents' doubts about the intelligence
it was based on.
"Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee
that the policymakers wanted him to 'say something
about not being inconsistent with what the president
had said,'" Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin,
D-Mich., told reporters Friday.
Tenet also told the committee that complying had
been "the wrong thing to do," according to Levin.
"Well, it was much more than that," Levin said.
"It was a shocking abdication of a CIA director's
duty not to act as a shill for any administration
or its policy."
Leaders of both parties accused each other of
seeking political gain on the eve of the fifth
anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Republicans said the document contained little
new information about prewar intelligence or
postwar findings on Iraq's weapons and connection
to terrorist groups.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts,
R-Kan., accused Democrats of trying to "use
the committee ... insisting that they were
deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein's regime."
"That is simply not true," Roberts added, "and I
believe the American people are smart enough to
recognize election-year politicking when they
see it."
The report speaks for itself, Democrats said.
The administration "exploited the deep sense
of insecurity among Americans in the immediate
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, leading a
large majority of Americans to believe - contrary
to the intelligence assessments at the time -
that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks," said
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the top Democrat
on the Intelligence Committee.
Still, Democrats were reluctant to say how
the administration officials involved should
be called to account.
Asked whether the wrongdoing amounted to
criminal conduct, Levin and Rockefeller
declined to answer. Rockefeller said later
he did not believe Bush should be impeached
over the matter.
According to the report, postwar findings
indicate that Saddam "was distrustful of
al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as
a threat to his regime." It quotes an FBI
report from June 2004 in which former Deputy
Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said in an interview
that "Saddam only expressed negative sentiments
about bin Laden."
Saddam himself is quoted in an FBI summary as
acknowledging that the Iraqi government had
met with bin Laden but denying that he had
colluded with the al-Qaida leader. Claiming
that Iraq opposed only U.S. policies, Saddam
said that "if he wanted to cooperate with the
enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with
North Korea or China," the report quotes the
FBI document.
The Democrats said that on Oct. 7, 2002,
the day Bush gave a speech speaking of that
link, the CIA had sent a declassified letter
to the committee saying it would be an "extreme
step" for Saddam to assist Islamist terrorists
in attacking the United States.
Levin and Rockefeller said Tenet in July
acknowledged to the committee that subsequently
issuing a statement that there was no
inconsistency between the president's
speech and the CIA viewpoint had been a
mistake.
They also charged Bush with continuing to cite
faulty intelligence in his argument for war as
recently as last month.
The report said that al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida
leader killed by a U.S. airstrike last June,
was in Baghdad from May 2002 until late November
2002. But "postwar information indicates that
Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to
locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the
regime did not have a relationship with,
harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."
In June 2004, Bush also defended Vice President
Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam had
"long-established ties" with al-Qaida.
"Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection
to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida," the
president said.
The report concludes that postwar findings do
not support a 2002 intelligence community
report that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear
program, possessed biological weapons or ever
developed mobile facilities for producing
biological warfare agents.
A second part of the report finds that false
information from the Iraqi National Congress,
an anti-Saddam group led by then-exile Ahmed
Chalabi, was used to support key intelligence
community assessments on Iraq.
On the Net:
Senate Intelligence Committee:
http://www.intelligence.senate.gov
Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All right
reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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January 15, 2007