Saddam's terror link undercut

WASHINGTON - Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein rejected pleas for assistance from Osama bin Laden and tried to capture terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when he was in Iraq, said a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday, casting further doubt on the White House's rationale for the invasion.

President Bush and other officials repeatedly cited Saddam's alleged ties to terrorists before the March 2003 invasion as one reason to take military action against Iraq.

"Postwar findings indicate that [Saddam] was distrustful of Al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from Al-Qaida to provide material or operational support," the 150-page report said.

The document was released with a second report that said false information provided by the exile group Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi, was widely distributed in prewar intelligence reports and used to support intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism.

Intelligence officials repeatedly warned that the INC was unreliable, but White House and Pentagon officials apparently ignored the warnings, the Senate report said.

The reports are part of a five-report study that the Intelligence Committee has undertaken to examine the administration's use of intelligence before the invasion.

The study has left the committee badly divided. Three reports remain classified, including one comparing prewar statements by administration officials with intelligence available at the time. Democrats have accused Republicans of delaying the reports until after the November congressional elections.

On Friday, Democrats charged that the reports showed that the White House had manipulated intelligence to make the case for war.

"The administration ignored warnings prior to the war about the veracity of the intelligence it trumpeted publicly to support its case that Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of the United States," said panel vice chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

Republicans dismissed the charge and said the reports added little to what is already known.

"The long-known fact is that the prewar intelligence was wrong. That flawed intelligence was used by policymakers, both in the administration and in Congress, as one of numerous justifications to go to war in Iraq," said committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan.

In the run-up to the war, Bush and his advisers repeatedly sought to link Saddam and Al-Qaida, though they did not accuse the dictator of a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"You can't distinguish between Al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," the president said on Sept. 25, 2002.

On the same day, Condoleezza Rice, then the White House national security adviser, said, "High-ranking detainees have said that Iraq provided some training to Al-Qaida in chemical weapons development."

The detainee Rice referred to was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an Al-Qaida operative who was captured in Pakistan in November 2001 and, U.S. intelligence officials said, was tortured by Egyptian authorities after his transfer to that country.

The Senate report says that in February 2002, months before Rice spoke, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Al-Libi "was likely intentionally misleading his briefers."

Postwar information on Saddam's relations with Islamic extremists came from numerous sources, the report suggests, including seized documents and interrogations of Saddam himself, former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi.

The report, quoting from an FBI debriefing of Hijazi, said that when an Iraqi operative met Bin Laden in Sudan in 1995, the Al-Qaida leader asked that Saddam allow him to open an office in Iraq, give him Chinese-made sea mines and military training, and broadcast his speeches.

"According to Hijazi, Saddam immediately refused," the FBI debriefing said.

Regarding Al-Zarqawi, the Senate report cites information that has surfaced since the war indicating that Saddam "attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture" him and that the Iraqi regime "did not have a relationship with, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."

Al-Zarqawi, who operated from a part of northern Iraq that Saddam didn't control, was a key part of Bush's case for war. After the invasion, Al-Zarqawi became the head of Al-Qaida in Iraq. He was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June.

The report also confirms a report by McClatchy News Service that former CIA Director R. James Woolsey helped get an INC defector attention from the U.S. government by referring him to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Linton Wells.

The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, suggested that he had knowledge of dozens of sites related to weapons of mass destruction, but none of them was ever found, and Al-Haideri, who was taken to Iraq in early 2004, could not identify the facilities that he claimed he knew about.

Warren Strobel and Margaret Talev can be reached at wstrobel@mccltchydc.com and mtalev@mcclatchydc.com.