Text 6408, 120 rader
Skriven 2008-03-11 03:26:10 av Ross Sauer (1:123/1011)
Ärende: Another Bush lie exposed...
===================================
Looks like the latest Bush *LIE* has been debunked, as have all the others
about Saddam.

Iraq Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida

By Warren P. Strobel

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.

@ McClatchy Newspapers 

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