{"id":1976,"date":"2006-09-10T12:11:48","date_gmt":"2006-09-10T18:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/nada\/dump-duhbya\/iraqs-alleged-al-qaeda-ties-were-disputed-before-war\/"},"modified":"2006-09-10T12:11:48","modified_gmt":"2006-09-10T18:11:48","slug":"iraqs-alleged-al-qaeda-ties-were-disputed-before-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/nada\/dump-duhbya\/iraqs-alleged-al-qaeda-ties-were-disputed-before-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraq’s Alleged Al-Qaeda Ties Were Disputed Before War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iraq’s Alleged Al-Qaeda Ties Were Disputed Before War<\/a>
\nLinks Were Cited to Justify U.S. Invasion, Report Says
\nBy Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer<\/p>\n

A declassified report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq.<\/p>\n

Far from aligning himself with al-Qaeda and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Hussein repeatedly rebuffed al-Qaeda’s overtures and tried to capture Zarqawi, the report said. Tariq Aziz, the detained former deputy prime minister, has told the FBI that Hussein “only expressed negative sentiments about [Osama] bin Laden.”<\/p>\n

The report also said exiles from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) tried to influence U.S. policy by providing, through defectors, false information on Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capabilities. After skeptical analysts warned that the group had been penetrated by hostile intelligence services, including Iran’s, a 2002 White House directive ordered that U.S. funding for the INC be continued. …<\/p>\n

As recently as Aug. 21, Bush suggested a link between Hussein and Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by U.S. forces this summer. But a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the report.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The president is still distorting. He’s still making statements which are false,” said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence committee member. …<\/p>\n

In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that “Iraq is unlikely to have provided bin Laden any useful [chemical and biological weapons] knowledge or assistance.” A year later, Bush said: “Iraq has also provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”<\/strong> …<\/p>\n

“It is such a blatant misleading of the United States, its people, to prepare them, to position them, to, in fact, make them enthusiastic or feel that it’s justified to go to war with Iraq,”<\/strong> said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee’s vice chairman. “That kind of public manipulation I don’t know has any precedent in American history.”<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iraq’s Alleged Al-Qaeda Ties Were Disputed Before War Links Were Cited to Justify U.S. Invasion, Report Says By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer A declassified report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush … Continue reading Iraq’s Alleged Al-Qaeda Ties Were Disputed Before War<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dump-duhbya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}