No Saddam link with al-Qaeda, US Senate report says (Roundup)

By Tony Czuczka Sep 9, 2006, 0:17 GMT

Washington - Saddam Hussein had no significant links with al-Qaeda before the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, a US Senate investigation concluded Friday.

The Senate intelligence committee's report also found no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion. Both findings again debunked the key reasons that US President George W Bush gave before going to war in Iraq.

Bush has acknowledged that prewar intelligence was faulty, but insists that the continuing fighting in Iraq is now the 'central front' in the war on terrorism.

The new probe, which expands on a 2004 report by the panel, cited numerous examples in which US intelligence misjudged the prewar situation in Iraq or was misled by sources who provided information later exposed as false.

Drawing in part on CIA intelligence and interrogations of former regime officials captured after the invasion, the report broadly dismissed the notion that Saddam had contact with the al-Qaeda terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden.

'No postwar information suggests that the Iraqi regime attempted to facilitate a relationship with bin Laden,' the 148-page report said. Instead, 'Saddam issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qaeda,' it said.

There was 'no credible information' that Iraq was involved in or had advance knowledge of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or any other al-Qaeda strike, the report said.

In particular, it discounted a Czech intelligence report that September 11 suicide pilot Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague sometime in 2001.

The new probe also said there was no evidence before the war that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons, had biological or chemical arms or had built mobile chemical weapons labs.

Released less than two months before US congressional elections, the report could provide fodder for the opposition Democrats, who hope to capitalize on slumping public support of the war in Iraq.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the senior Democrat on the intelligence panel, charged that the Bush administration 'pursued a deceptive strategy before the war' despite doubts among intelligence officials about Iraq's capabilities and intentions.

The government 'ignored warnings prior to the war about the veracity of the information it trumpeted publicly,' Rockefeller said.

Republicans accused the opposition of trying to rewrite history, a reference to the many Democrats in Congress who joined Republicans in authorizing the Iraq war.

White House spokesman Tony Snow called the Senate report 'nothing new' and said Democrats and Republicans had access to the same information on Iraq before the war.

'Both sides were looking at the same intelligence and coming to the same conclusions,' he told reporters.