http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/8093422.htm
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 soldiers invaded Iraq, no
evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Saddam's links with
Al-Qaida, and several key parts of the Bush administration's case
either have 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 Islamist 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, U.S. 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.
[more]
--
Ray Fischer
rfischer@sonic.net
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