No link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda: Pentagon report

WASHINGTON: Interrogations of Saddam Hussein and seized documents confirmed the former Iraqi regime had no links with Al-Qaeda, a Pentagon report said on Friday, contradicting the US case for the 2003 invasion.   

A two-page resume of the report was published in February, but on Friday the Pentagon declassified the whole 120-page document.   

According to the inspector general of the US Defense Department, information obtained after Saddam's fall confirmed the prewar position of the Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon intelligence that the Iraqi government had had no substantial contacts with Al-Qaeda.   

This position was shored up by interrogations of Saddam, the former Iraqi president and other top officials captured by the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, the report said.   

It contradicts a strong argument for the invasion made by the administration of President George W. Bush that Baghdad had a working relationship with Al-Qaeda.   

The network, based in Afghanisation and led by Osama bin Laden, was behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in which almost 3,000 people were killed.   

The report noted that the office of then-undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, one of the foremost advocates for invading Iraq after the 2001 attacks, had ignored the CIA's position.   

He characterized the supposed Al-Qaeda-Iraq relationship as "mature" and "symbiotic" in a September 2002 briefing to the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.   

The Feith briefing alleged that the two cooperated in 10 areas, including training, financing and logistics. But the new report says the US intelligence community had concluded at the time there were "no conclusive signs" of links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and that "direct cooperation ... has not been established" between the two.   

Prior to the war there was little public dispute inside the United States over the Bush administration's assertions linking Iraq and bin Laden's group.   

But since the invasion, a number of intelligence officials have alleged the White House and its backers ignored their intelligence and "cherry picked" information to support their arguments for a war.   

In a radio interview on Wednesday, Cheney insisted on a prewar link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, saying the group was working in Iraq "before we even arrived on the scene."   

"As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq," Cheney told conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.