<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.6000.16414" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT size=5>Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda
Discounted<BR></FONT></STRONG>Pentagon Report Says Contacts Were Limited<BR>
<P><FONT size=-1>By R. Jeffrey Smith<BR>Washington Post Staff Writer<BR>Friday,
April 6, 2007; A01<BR></FONT></P>
<P></P>
<P>Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein
and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly
cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a
declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.</P>
<P>The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F.
Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar
consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited
contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on
dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form
in February.</P>
<P>The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney,
appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that
al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the
direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.</P>
<P>"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about
Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged
history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would
"play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."</P>
<P>Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman <A
href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/l000261/"
target="">Carl M. Levin</A> (D-Mich.), who requested the report's
declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text
demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon
office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had
inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion
alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence
consensus disputed.</P>
<P>The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had
asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that
the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked
by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including
training, financing and logistics.</P>
<P>Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were
few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and
had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq
had forged with other terrorist groups.</P>
<P>"Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on
specific terrorist operations," that CIA report said, adding that discussions on
the issue were "necessarily speculative."</P>
<P>The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of
mass destruction were "episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other
channels," the inspector general's report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA
report describing the relationship as more closely resembling "two organizations
trying to feel out or exploit each other" rather than cooperating
operationally.</P>
<P>The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that "available reporting is
not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship" between the Iraqi regime
and al-Qaeda, it said.</P>
<P>But the contrary conclusions reached by Feith's office -- and leaked to the
conservative Weekly Standard magazine before the war -- were publicly praised by
Cheney as the best source of information on the topic, a circumstance the
Pentagon report cites in documenting the impact of what it described as
"inappropriate" work.</P>
<P>Feith has vigorously defended his work, accusing Gimble of "giving bad advice
based on incomplete fact-finding and poor logic," and charging that the acting
inspector general has been "cheered on by the chairmen of the Senate
intelligence and armed services committees." In January, Feith's successor at
the Pentagon, Eric S. Edelman, wrote a 52-page rebuttal to the inspector
general's report that disputed its analysis and its recommendations for Pentagon
reform.</P>
<P>Cheney's public statements before and after the war about the risks posed by
Iraq have closely tracked the briefing Feith's office presented to the vice
president's then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. That includes the
briefing's depiction of an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between an Iraqi
intelligence official and one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers as one of eight
"Known Iraq-Al Qaida Contacts."</P>
<P>The defense report states that at the time, "the intelligence community
disagreed with the briefing's assessment that the alleged meeting constituted a
'known contact' " -- a circumstance that the report said was known to Feith's
office. But his office had bluntly concluded in a July 2002 critique of a CIA
report on Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda that the CIA's interpretation of the
facts it cited "ought to be ignored."</P>
<P>The briefing to Libby was also presented with slight variations to
then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and
then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. It was prepared in part
by someone whom the defense report described as a "junior Naval Reservist"
intelligence analyst detailed to Feith's office from the DIA. The person is not
named in the report, but Edelman wrote that she was requested by Feith's
office.</P>
<P>The briefing, a copy of which was declassified and released yesterday by
Levin, goes so far as to state that "Fragmentary reporting points to possible
Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11 but also in previous al Qaida attacks." That
idea was dismissed in 2004 by a presidential commission investigating the Sept.
11 attacks, noting that "no credible evidence" existed to support it.</P>
<P>When a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's
counterterrorism task force obtained an early account of the conclusions by
Feith's office -- titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" -- the analyst
prepared a detailed rebuttal calling it of "no intelligence value" and taking
issue with 15 of 26 key conclusions, the report states. The analyst's rebuttal
was shared with intelligence officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but
evidently not with others.</P>
<P>Edelman complained in his own account of the incident that a senior Joint
Chiefs analyst -- in responding to a suggestion by the DIA analyst that the
"Making the Case" account be widely circulated -- told its author that "putting
it out there would be playing into the hands of people" such as then-Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and belittled the author for trying to
support "some agenda of people in the building."</P>
<P>But the inspector general's report, in a footnote, commented that it is
"noteworthy . . . that post-war debriefs of Sadaam Hussein, [former Iraqi
foreign minister] Tariq Aziz, [former Iraqi intelligence minister Mani
al-Rashid] al Tikriti, and [senior al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi, as
well as document exploitation by DIA all confirmed that the Intelligence
Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in all categories"
alleged by Feith's office.</P>
<P>From these sources, the report added, "the terms the Intelligence Community
used to describe the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida were validated,
[namely] 'no conclusive signs,' and 'direct cooperation . . . has not been
established.' "</P>
<P>Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq
before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an
unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda
adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied
himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.</P>
<P><I>Staff writer Dafna Linzer and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to
this report.</I></P></DIV></BODY></HTML>