In October 2002, President Bush delivered a speech which included the following:
We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. ...
Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror. ... Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction.
During the months preceding the March 2003 Iraq invasion, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice also gave several speeches citing "bulletproof evidence" of Saddam Hussein's al Qaeda connections.
McClatchy Newspapers today published a story which begins:
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.
Update (3/12/2008): ABC News has a story today that the Pentagon is trying to bury the study:
The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online. ... The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. ... [A] Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."
ABC News is providing the executive summary of the report in PDF format.
No comments:
Post a Comment