No Saddam-al Qaida link
Not exactly a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention, but further confirmation is always welcome.
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.
. . .
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.
Using that bogus intelligence and harping on the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida has already cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars and several thousand lives, but has yet to result in the dismissal or resignation of a single person responsible for pandering it.
No, the US only asks people to leave office for personal indiscretions. And with Eliot's Mess, (thank-you, Stephen Colbert), dominating the news cycle, this latest revelation of the Bush administration's lying the nation into war is likely to be buried and forgotten along with all the rest.
