9-11 panel finds no al Qaeda link with Saddam
WASHINGTON – The panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks disputed Wednesday one of President Bush’s key reasons for invading Iraq, saying there’s “no credible evidence” that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league against the United States.
The bipartisan commission’s findings substantiated earlier assessments by the CIA, other U.S. intelligence agencies, former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay and U.N. terrorism experts.
In making its case for war, Bush and his senior lieutenants asserted that Saddam maintained close ties with al Qaeda and had to be ousted before he armed the Islamic extremist network with chemical or biological weapons for an attack on America.
Vice President Dick Cheney was the most ardent promoter of such a scenario, insisting as late as Monday in a speech in Florida that Iraq “had long-established ties with al Qaeda.”
Invasion advocates outside the government were even more categorical, contending that Iraq was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks.
But the commission, which was given extensive access to U.S. intelligence reports and other information, said, “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”
The commission also said that two senior operatives of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden who are now in U.S. custody “have adamantly denied that any ties existed between” al Qaeda and Saddam’s regime.
Furthermore, it said that a purported meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence official and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta never took place.
The panel said that while bin Laden was living in Sudan in the early 1990s, Sudanese officials arranged contacts between al Qaeda and Iraqi operatives, and that a senior Iraqi intelligence official met bin Laden in the northern African nation in 1994.
Iraq, however, apparently didn’t respond to bin Laden’s requests for training camps and weapons, it said.
Contacts continued after bin Laden settled in Afghanistan in 1996, “but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship,” said the panel.
Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the administration stands by its charges about Iraq and al Qaeda. He said the allegations referred to nearly a decade of contacts between Saddam’s regime and the terrorist network.
The administration’s contentions of Iraqi-al-Qaeda cooperation were based partly on information provided by Iraqi defectors supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, a former exiled opposition group.
U.S. intelligence officials subsequently determined that the defectors’ information was marginal at best, and that some was exaggerated and fabricated.
The INC is led by Ahmad Chalabi, who lobbied for years for the U.S.-led ouster of Saddam and who’s now under investigation for allegedly providing highly classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.