|
WASHINGTON,
D.C. – U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) issued today’s “Bush Administration’s
Misstatement of the Day” on Iraq and Al-Qaida.
Vice
President Cheney said on January 22, 2004:
“There's
overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi
government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship
there."
However,
a March 2, 2004, story by Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John
Walcott in Knight Ridder Newspapers concluded:
The
Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to
al-Qaida - one of the administration's central arguments for a pre-emptive
war - appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the
administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological
weapons.
Doubts
cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida
By
Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
Knight
Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON
- The Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had
ties to al-Qaida - one of the administration's central arguments for a
pre-emptive war - appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence
than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical
and biological weapons.
Nearly
a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned
up to verify allegations of Saddam's links with al-Qaida, and several key
parts of the administration's case have either proved false or seem increasingly
doubtful.
Senior
U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Saddam's secular
police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league.
At most, there were occasional meetings.
Moreover,
the U.S. intelligence community never concluded that those meetings produced
an operational relationship, American officials said. That verdict was
in a secret report by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence that was updated
in January 2003, on the eve of the war.
"We
could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida," a senior
U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity
because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing
to the White House.
The
administration's allegations that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction
have been the subject of much greater public and political controversy
than its suggestions that Iraq and al-Qaida were in league. They were based
on the Iraqi leader's long history of duplicity regarding WMD, which appeared
to be confirmed by spy satellite photographs, defectors and electronic
eavesdropping.
But
the evidence of Iraq's ties to al-Qaida was always sketchy, based largely
on testimony of Iraqi defectors and prisoners, supplemented with limited
reports from foreign agents and electronic eavesdropping.
Much
of the evidence that's now available indicates that Iraq and al-Qaida had
no close ties, despite repeated contacts between the two; that the terrorists
who administration officials claimed were links between the two had no
direct connection to either Saddam or bin Laden; and that a key meeting
between an Iraqi intelligence officer and one of the leaders of the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks probably never happened.
A
Knight Ridder review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's ties
to terrorism and what's now known about the classified intelligence has
found that administration advocates of a pre-emptive invasion frequently
hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to help make their case.
On two occasions, they neglected to report information that painted a less
sinister picture.
The
Bush administration has defended its prewar descriptions of Saddam and
is calling Iraq "the central front in the war on terrorism," as the president
told U.S. troops two weeks ago.
But
before the war and since, Bush and his aides made rhetorical links that
now appear to have been leaps:
-
Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio in January that there
was "overwhelming evidence" of a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaida.
Among the evidence he cited was Iraq's harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin,
a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Cheney
didn't mention that Iraq had offered to turn over Yasin to the FBI in 1998,
in return for a U.S. statement acknowledging that Iraq had no role in that
attack. The Clinton administration refused the offer, because it was unwilling
to reward Iraq for returning a fugitive.
-
Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence
officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered
him safe haven in Iraq.
They
left out the rest of the story, however. Bin Laden said he'd consider the
offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later
made available to the CIA, the al-Qaida leader told an aide afterward that
he had no intention of accepting Saddam's offer because "if we go there,
it would be his agenda, not ours."
-
The administration tied Saddam to a terrorism network run by Palestinian
Abu Musab al Zarqawi. That network may be behind the latest violence in
Iraq, which killed at least 143 people Tuesday.
But
U.S. officials say the evidence that Zarqawi had close operational ties
to al-Qaida appears increasingly doubtful.
Asked
for Cheney's views on Iraq and terrorism, vice presidential spokesman Kevin
Kellems referred Knight Ridder to the vice president's television interviews
Tuesday.
Cheney,
in an interview with CNN, said Zarqawi ran an "al-Qaida-affiliated" group.
He cited an intercepted letter that Zarqawi is believed to have written
to al-Qaida leaders, and a White House official who spoke only on the condition
of anonymity said the CIA has described Zarqawi as an al-Qaida "associate."
But
U.S. officials say the Zarqawi letter contained a plea for help that al-Qaida
rebuffed. Linguistic analysis of the letter indicates it was written from
one equal to another, not from a subordinate to a superior, suggesting
that Zarqawi considered himself an independent operator and not a part
of bin Laden's organization.
-
Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi
and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White
House issued.
The
U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.
-
The allegation that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met in Prague, Czech
Republic, with an Iraqi intelligence officer now is contradicted by FBI
evidence that Atta was taking flight training in Florida at the time. The
Iraqi, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani, is now in U.S. custody and has
told interrogators he never met Atta.
CIA
Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee last month
that there's no evidence to support the allegation.
-
Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell made much of occasional
contacts between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida, dating to the early 1990s
when bin Laden was based in the Sudan. But intelligence indicates that
nothing ever came of the contacts.
"Were
there meetings? Yes, of course there were meetings. But what resulted?
Nothing," said one senior U.S. official.
The
charges that Saddam was in league with bin Laden, and carefully worded
hints that he might even have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, may
have done more to marshal public and political support for a pre-emptive
invasion of Iraq than the claims that Iraq still had chemical and biological
weapons and was working to get nuclear ones.
A
postwar poll last July by PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 7 in 10 Americans
thought the Bush administration had implied that Saddam was involved in
the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush himself never made that claim, but Cheney has
kept the allegation alive.
Powell,
however, was so unpersuaded by the claims of Iraq-al-Qaida contacts that
he rebuffed efforts by Cheney's office, the Pentagon and the White House's
National Security Council to include a lengthy listing of them in his February
2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council. Instead, Powell limited himself
to a few sentences.
In
a major address on the Iraqi threat on Oct. 7, 2002, Bush outlined a series
of ties: "We know that Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a
common enemy: the United States of America." He went on to say that Iraq
and al-Qaida had high-level contacts over a decade, some al-Qaida leaders
who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq and "Iraq has trained al-Qaida members
in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
In
his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush raised the possibility
that Saddam "could provide one of his hidden weapons (of mass destruction)
to terrorists or help them develop their own."
Yet
Tenet had told Congress the previous October that Saddam would take that
"extreme step" only if he concluded that he couldn't deter a U.S.-led attack
on his country.
Concluded
the senior U.S. official: "Did Saddam tolerate terrorists? Yes. Was there
any evidence Saddam was involved with 9/11? No."
} |
|