Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida

[huckleberry]

This is a great article! It debunks all the bush administration claims.

By Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - President Bush's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida - one of his 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 troops 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 have either 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 Islamic 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, American 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 at
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8089075.htm