Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida - one of the 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 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.

"We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida," a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House.

The administration's allegations that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction have been the subject of much greater public and political controversy than its suggestions that Iraq and al-Qaida were in league. They were based on the Iraqi leader's long history of duplicity regarding WMD, which appeared to be confirmed by spy satellite photographs, defectors and electronic eavesdropping.

But the evidence of Iraq's ties to al-Qaida was always sketchy, based largely on testimony of Iraqi defectors and prisoners, supplemented with limited reports from foreign agents and electronic eavesdropping.

Much of the evidence that's now available indicates that Iraq and al-Qaida had no close ties, despite repeated contacts between the two; that the terrorists who administration officials claimed were links between the two had no direct connection to either Saddam or bin Laden; and that a key meeting between an Iraqi intelligence officer and one of the leaders of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks probably never happened.

A Knight Ridder review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's ties to terrorism and what's now known about the classified intelligence has found that administration advocates of a pre-emptive invasion frequently hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to help make their case. On two occasions, they neglected to report information that painted a less sinister picture.

The article goes on to list the administration's "rhetorical links" which turn out to be, in reality, "leaps".

(Calling John Kerry, please pick up a copy of a Knight Ridder paper ASAP, please.)

Now, in this post-war environment where everyone is being skeptical (or, at least, pretending to be skeptical) of the pre-war claims, will the Post and the Times pick up on this story, or will the NIH syndrome win again?