Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 03:01, 28 March 2006

This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings. Please discuss this issue on the article's talk page.

This article is about issues concerning allegations of pre-invasion links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. For the the al-Qaeda presence involved in the Iraqi insurgency, see the article for the group called "Al-Qaeda in Iraq"

In 2003, President George W. Bush's administration alleged that Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda might conspire to launch terrorist attacks on America, and used this allegation, among others, to build a case for war.

The U.S. government is currently releasing documents that shed new light on this topic. The new documents are called the Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents. So far, the documents suggests Saddam and Osama were willing to work together. Eight months after an offer of operational partnership, U.S. forces in the region were attacked by al-Qaeda operatives. Another document is a statement by Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative, about al-Qaeda's capability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the U.S. It is not not known for certain if the recipients of the letter were Iraqi officials. 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey has said these documents will further enlighten us on the relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. These new documents suggest the conclusion of the Intelligence Community that no "operational" ties existed may need to be reassessed.

Critics of the Bush Administration have made serious charges against the U.S. government, including the claim Bush was intentionally bulding a case for war with Iraq without regard to the facts. This claim was also discussed again after May 1, 2005 the The Sunday Times (a British broadsheet newspaper) published the Downing Street Memo which features the remark attributed to Richard Dearlove (then head of British foreign intelligence service MI-6) that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein from power, which was taken by critics to show that US intelligence on Iraq prior to the war was deliberately falsified, rather than simply mistaken. The support of the American public and by extension, authorization of the Congress was needed to invade Iraq. Prior to 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror, some believed that Saddam Hussein's regime had links to al-Qaeda. Reports of contacts and cooperation between the two were published in various newspapers, magazines and televised news reports , but no concrete evidence that Iraq conspired with al-Qaeda to commit terrorist attacks has ever materialized.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that there was no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks. This was also the conclusion of various U.S. government agencies that investigated the issue, including the CIA, DIA, FBI, and NSA. The Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq also reviewed the intelligence community's conclusions and found that they were justifiable.

In addition, Bush received on 21 September 2001 a classified Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), indicating the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks. Furthermore, there was no evidence of any collaborative relationship between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda. Despite all of this information, polls have shown that many Americans continue to persist in the false belief that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda, although the number who continue to do so has been slowly declining. This discrepancy has been attributed to the way in which the U.S. mainstream media presented facts and opinion regarding the "war on terror."

On March 21, 2006, Bush sought to distance himself from the allegation of any link. He said: "First, just if I might correct a misperception, I don’t think we ever said – at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." Opponents of his Iraq policy charged that his statement was inconsistent with his letter to Congress of March 21, 2003.

Questions about the plausibility of the link

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Osama bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia by sending "jihadist" warriors from Afghanistan to repel Saddam's forces. After the Gulf War, bin Laden continued to criticize Saddam's Ba'ath regime, emphasizing that Saddam could not be trusted, and at one point calling him a "socialist motherfucker." Bin Laden told his biographer that "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother."

Additionally, Bin Laden supported anti-Saddam terrorist forces in northern Iraq, although in later years there are indications that Saddam eventually tolerated their presence as a counterweight to the Kurds. Those forces, however, mostly operated in areas not under Saddam's control (see below).

Osama bin Laden's expressed hostility to Saddam's regime, critical assessment of evidence from the Iraqi National Congress (the source of most of the claims of cooperation between the two) as well as the paucity of evidence for the alleged links, particularly for any substantial collaboration, have led most journalists and intelligence analysts not associated with or supporters of the Bush administration to dismiss the claimed links.

Robert Pape's exhaustive study of suicide terrorism found that "al-Qaeda's transnational suicide terrorists have come overwhelmingly from America's closest allies in the Muslim world and not at all from the Muslim regimes that the U.S. State Department considers 'state sponsors of terrorism'." Pape notes that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from Iraq. Daniel Byman's study of state sponsorship of terrorism similarly did not list Iraq as a significant state sponsor, and called the al-Qaeda connection "a rationale that before the war was strained and after it seems an ever-weaker reed." The conclusion of counterterrorism experts such as Rohan Gunaratna, Bruce Hoffman, Jason Burke, and Daniel Benjamin has been that there is no evidence that suggests any collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That was also the conclusion of specific investigations by the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the 9/11 Commission, among others. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed the CIA's investigation and concluded that the CIA's conclusion that there was no evidence of collaboration was justified.

While it is doubtful that Saddam was involved in September 11, members of his government did have contacts with al-Qaeda over the years; however, many of the links, as will be seen below, are not considered by experts and analysts as convincing evidence of a collaborative relationship. Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard A. Clarke writes, "he simple fact is that lots of people, particularly in the Middle East, pass along many rumors and they end up being recorded and filed by U.S. intelligence agencies in raw reports. That does not make them 'intelligence'. Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports. Did al-Qaeda agents ever talk to Iraqi agents? I would be startled if they had not. I would also be startled if American, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Jordanian agents had somehow failed to talk to al-Qaeda or Iraqi agents. Talking to each other is what intelligence agents do, often under assumed identities or 'false flags,' looking for information or possible defectors."

Background

After the Gulf War, as Iraq experienced internal unrest, Saddam turned to religion perhaps to bolster his government (for example, adding the words "God is Great" in Arabic to the Iraqi flag, and referring to God in his speeches).

Some sources allege that several meetings between top Iraqi operatives and bin Laden took place, but these claims have been disputed by many other sources, including most of the original intelligence agencies that investigated these sources in the first place. Many in the intelligence community are skeptical about whether such meetings, if they took place at all, ever resulted in any meaningful relationship. Many of the claims of actual collaboration seem to have originated with people associated with the Iraqi National Congress whose credibility has been impeached and who has been accused of manipulating the evidence in order to lure the United States into war on false pretenses. In addition, many of the raw intelligence reports came to the awareness of the public through the leaking of a memo sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence , the conclusions of which have been disputed by intelligence agencies including the CIA.

Some have suggested that an understanding was reached between Iraq and al-Qaeda, namely that al-Qaeda would not act against Saddam in exchange for Iraqi support, primarily in the form of training. Some reports claim that six of the 9/11 hijackers, including their leader Mohamed Atta al-Sayed, met with Iraqi intelligence operatives on several separate occasions, but the evidence that any of these meetings actually took place is sketchy. A training camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, was claimed by a number of defectors to have been used to train international terrorists (assumed to be al-Qaeda members) in hijacking techniques using a real airplane as a prop. The defectors were inconsistent about a number of details. The camp has been discovered by U.S. Marines, but intelligence analysts do not believe it was used by al-Qaeda. Some believe it was actually used for counterterrorism training, while others believe it was used to train foreign terrorists but not al-Qaeda members.

Robert S. Leiken noted that a lot of the claims connecting Saddam and al-Qaeda - and specifically Saddam and the 9/11 attacks - were based on the controversial theories of Laurie Mylroie which had been thoroughly vetted and dismissed by the CIA and FBI. He notes in Frontpage Magazine, "she also believes Saddam perpetrated 9-11 in spite of the fact that the joint FBI-INS-police PENTBOM investigation, the FBI program of voluntary interviews and numerous other post-9-11 inquiries, together comprising probably the most comprehensive criminal investigation in history—chasing down 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people -- has turned up no evidence of Iraq's involvement; nor has the extensive search of post-Saddam Iraq by the Kay and Duelfer commission and US troops combing through Saddam’s computers."

For discussion of links between Iraq and other terrorist organizations, see 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

Timeline

Much of the evidence of alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda is based on speculation about meetings that may have taken place between Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda members. What took place at those meetings is unclear, but often the mere act of meeting has been taken as evidence of substantial collaboration. As terrorism analyst Evan Kohlman points out, "While there have been a number of promising intelligence leads hinting at possible meetings between al-Qaeda members and elements of the former Baghdad regime, nothing has been yet shown demonstrating that these potential contacts were historically any more significant than the same level of communication maintained between Osama bin Laden and ruling elements in a number of Iraq's Persian Gulf neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Kuwait."

The following timeline lists allegations of meetings between al Qaeda members and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to the theory that Saddam conspired with al-Qaeda. It is important to note that not all of the specific claims about meetings can be substantiated with other evidence, and that many of the intelligence agencies and experts who have analyzed the evidence have concluded that no substantial links exist.

1988

• Osama bin Laden lectures in Pakistan, according to sworn testimony of al-Qaeda member Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali. During these lectures, bin Laden warns against Saddam Hussein and the Baath party, telling listeners to beware of the expansionist ambitions of the secular leader.

1990

• August 2 - Saddam Hussein's army invades Kuwait. In response to the perceived threat to Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden offers to bring an army of jihadist fighters against Saddam to protect the kingdom. The Saudi royal family's decision to seek protection from American troops rather than bin Laden's jihadists is considered a turning point in bin Laden's life; the presence of these troops in the Arabian peninsula after the end of the Gulf War became, for bin Laden, a key piece of evidence that America was at war with Islam. While bin Laden continued to oppose Saddam's Baathist government, he was vocal in criticizing the U.N. sanctions against Iraq and in making common cause with the Iraqi people.

1994

• Sudan -- Farouk Hijazi, then head of Iraqi Intelligence Service, meets with Osama bin Laden in Sudan (). Bin Laden told his aide that "he had no intention of accepting Saddam's offer because 'if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours.'" Hijazi, arrested in April 2003, acknowledged the meeting took place but said the two groups established no ties.

• Baghdad - Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the bombers in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, flees to Iraq where he moves in with a relative and receives a monthly stipend from the regime (). Iraq had actually made an offer to the Clinton Administration to trade Yasin in 1998, but the Clinton administration rejected the offer. The Iraqis made a similar offer to the Bush Administration in 2003 but this offer was also spurned. Neil Herman, who headed the FBI investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center attack, noted that despite Yasin's presence in Baghdad, there was no evidence of Iraqi support for the attack. "We looked at that rather extensively," he told CNN terrorism analyst Peter L. Bergen. "There were no ties to the Iraqi government." Bergen writes, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack." During the 9/11 Commission Hearings, former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was asked about whether Yasin going to Iraq established a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 1993 WTC attack. His response was unequivocating: "But the investigation, both the CIA investigation and the FBI investigation, made it very clear in '95 and '96 as they got more information, that the Iraqi government was in no way involved in the attack. And the fact that one of the 12 people involved in the attack was Iraqi hardly seems to me as evidence that the Iraqi government was involved in the attack. The attack was al-Qaida; not Iraq. The Iraqi government because, obviously, of the hostility between us and them, didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists. But the allegation that has been made that the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was done by the Iraqi government I think is absolutely without foundation."

1995

• September -- Sudan -- Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed, top explosives expert of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, allegedly meets with bin Laden in Sudan; a second meeting at which Mani-abd-al-Rashid-al-Tikriti, director of the IIS, is also present, supposedly takes place in July 1996 (, 9/11 Commission Report pg. 468 ). The 9/11 Commission final report concludes that the evidence did not support the alleged meetings, and notes that the information was received "third hand". The interrogation records show various possible dates for the first meeting. One dates the meeting in 1994 while another dates it in February 1995. The date of the second meeting is also in doubt, and there was no evidence that bin Laden had left Afghanistan at the time: "The information is puzzling, since bin Ladin left Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, and there is no evidence he ventured back there (or anywhere else) for a visit. In examining the source material, the reports note that the information was received 'third hand,' passed from the foreign government service that 'does not meet directly with the ultimate source of the information, but obtains the information from him through two unidentified intermediaries, one of whom merely delivers the information to the Service.'" The same source also claims al-Ahmed was seen near bin Laden's farm in December 1995.

• Salman Pak, Iraq - several Iraqi defectors report that hundreds of foreign terrorists were being trained in airplane hijacking techniques "without weapons" using a real airplane (variously reported as a Boeing 707 and a Tupolev 154) as a prop at the Salman Pak camp just south of Baghdad, between 1995 to 2000; the training was allegedly run by Hussein's Mukhabarat (). This story has been reported by the following defectors: Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami (former Iraqi army captain), "Abu Zeinab" al-Ghurairy (former Iraqi seargant who claimed to be a general), Khidir Hamza (scientist who was director of the Iraqi nuclear program, ), Abdul Rahman al-Shamari (a Mukhabarat agent in US custody), and "Abu Mohammed" (a former colonel in the Fedayeen, ). Khodada provided details of the layout of the camp, now confirmed as accurate, as early as 1998, and Abu Zeinab corroborated the story in 2000. The credibility of Khodada and Abu Zeinab is often questioned due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that has been accused of deliberately supplying false information to the US government in order to build support for regime change (). "The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war," said Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News. "The really damaging stories all came from those guys, not the CIA. They did a really sophisticated job of getting it out there." One of the defectors, al-Ghurairy, has been described as "a complete fake -- a low-ranking former soldier whom Ahmed Chalabi's aides had coached to deceive the media." Another defector who interviewed Mr. Ghurairy noted, ""He is an opportunist, cheap and manipulative. He has poetic interests and has a vivid imagination in making up stories." Inconsistencies in the stories of the defectors led U.S. officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. One senior U.S. official said that they had found "nothing to substantiate" the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak other than the testimony of several INC defectors (, ). Iraq Survey Group chief Charles Duelfer disagrees: "We always just called them the terrorist camps ... We reported them at the time, but they've obviously taken on new significance." () and "The Iraqis, he said, told UNSCOM it was used by 'police' for counter-terrorist training. "Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer explained.(). After the invasion of Iraq, the camp was captured by the Marines (, ) "after it was discussed by Egyptian and Sudanese fighters caught elsewhere in Iraq". Brigadier General Vincent Brooks described the capture: "The nature of the work being done by some of those people that we captured, their inferences to the type of training that they received, all of these things give us the impression that there was terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak." The independent Iraqi weekly Al-Yawm Al-Aakher interviewed a former Iraqi officer who also claimed that Salman Pak was being used to train foreign terrorists. No evidence has been disclosed about any intelligence finds at the camp after its capture, leading some to doubt that anything was found. According to Douglas MacCollam, a journalist for the Columbia Journalism Review, "the consensus view now is that the camp was what Iraq told UN weapons inspectors it was — a counterterrorism training camp for army commandos." ().

• (circa 1995) Iraq - Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi (an alias), an al-Qaeda operative, allegedly requests help in chemical weapons training from Saddam. This information is accepted as false. The request was supposedly approved and trainers from Unit 999, an Iraqi secret-police organization organized by Uday Hussein dispatched to camps in Afghanistan. (). The source of this information was captured al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who has since recanted, and whose credibility was impugned by both the CIA and the DIA. A DIA report in February 2002 concluded that al-Libi was most likely fabricating his entire story, "intentionally misleading the debriefers" by describing conspiracies "that he knows will retain their interest." A CIA report in January 2003 voiced similar concerns, also noting that al-Libi was "not in a position to know" the things he had told interrogators. These conclusions did not stop the Administration from relying heavily on Libi's information in statements to the public. The CIA recalled all of its intelligence reports that were based on Libi's testimony in February 2004. It was revealed in December 2005 that al-Libi lied about this, and other, information regarding Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in order to avoid harsh treatment by his Egyptian captors, to whom he had been transfered under the controversial American policy of extraordinary rendition.

1997

• Afghanistan - Armad Jan, Taliban minister, tells Karl Inderfurth, Assistant US Secretary of State, that the Taliban "had frustrated Iranian and Iraqi efforts to contact" bin Laden. But Inderfurth told UPI that "he did not believe the Taliban claim was credible at the time, and that he had no recollection of Taliban officials mentioning Iraqi or Iranian attempts to meet bin Laden." He said, "I never saw any evidence in anything I was doing where there were any Iraqi connections." ().

1998

• Baghdad - Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda second-in-command, allegedly meets Taha Yasin Ramadan, Iraqi vice-president (). The source of this unlikely claim appears to be Yossef Bodansky's controversial 1999 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (p. 322), which makes many similar unsourced claims. There are no footnotes in the book, and there has been no other independent confirmation of this claim, which was republished uncritically by William Safire in a column in October 2001.

• Washington - Daniel Benjamin, head of the National Security Council's counterterrorism division, heads an exercise aimed at a critical analysis of the CIA's contention that Iraq and al Qaeda would not team up. "This was a red-team effort," he said. "We looked at this as an opportunity to disprove the conventional wisdom, and basically we came to the conclusion that the CIA had this one right."

• February, Baghdad - the Mukhabarat arranges for an envoy from bin Laden to travel from Sudan to Baghdad to meet with Iraqi officials; the meeting is extended by a full week (). These talks, according to the Observer, "are thought to have ended disastrously for the Iraqis, as bin Laden rejected any kind of alliance, preferring to pursue his own policy of global jihad."().

• February 23, Afghanistan - Osama bin Laden issues a fatwa urging jihad against all Americans. "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it..." One of his reasons for the fatwa is the "Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people." Osama mentions aggression against Iraq four times in the fatwa.

• August, Khartoum, Sudan - President Clinton orders 80 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, including the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, which the Clinton Administration claimed was actually a chemical weapons plant operated by al-Qaeda. Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen would testify to the 9/11 Commission in 2004 that intelligence officials suspected "indirect links between the facility and bin Laden and the Iraqi chemical weapons program" and noted that "The direct physical evidence from the scene obtained at that time convinced the U.S. intelligence community that their suspicions were correct about the facility’s chemical weapons role and that there was a risk of chemical agents getting into the hands of al-Qaeda." Officials later acknowleged, however, "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980's." The U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research wrote a report in 1999 questioning the attack on the factory, suggesting that the connection to bin Laden was not accurate; James Risen reported in the New York Times: "Now, the analysts renewed their doubts and told Assistant Secretary of State Phyllis Oakley that the C.I.A.'s evidence on which the attack was based was inadequate. Ms. Oakley asked them to double-check; perhaps there was some intelligence they had not yet seen. The answer came back quickly: There was no additional evidence. Ms. Oakley called a meeting of key aides and a consensus emerged: Contrary to what the Administration was saying, the case tying Al Shifa to Mr. bin Laden or to chemical weapons was weak." The Chairman of El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries, who is critical of the Sudanese government, more recently told reporters, "I had inventories of every chemical and records of every employee's history. There were no such chemicals being made here." Sudan has since invited the U.S. to conduct chemical tests at the site for evidence to support its claim that the plant might have been a chemical weapons factory; so far, the U.S. has refused the invitation to investigate. Nevertheless, the U.S. has refused to officially apologize for the attacks, suggesting that some privately still suspect that chemical weapons activity existed there.

• August, Pakistan - Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard reported that this month, according to a "Summary of Evidence" released by the Pentagon in March 2005 concerning a detainee held at Guantanamo, it was alleged that this former infantryman of the Iraqi Army who became an al-Qaeda agent travelled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi intelligence "for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British Embassies with chemical mortars". The Associated Press report of the same document includes the caveat, "There is no indication the Iraqi's purported terror-related activities were on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government, other than the brief mention of him traveling to Pakistan with a member of the Iraqi intelligence.... The assertion that the was involved in a plot against embassies in Pakistan is not substantiated in the document."

• November 4, New York - The U.S Department of Justice files an indictment against Osama Bin Laden. This indictment repeats the disputed claim that "al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." Richard A. Clarke wrote a memo to Sandy Berger that the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory was "probably a direct result of the Iraq-Al Qaida agreement." (Page 128) By 2001, based on several reviews of the evidence prompted by the Bush Administration, Clarke came to change his view. To date, no evidence of such an "understanding" or "agreement" has ever materialized. Clarke notes in his book Against All Enemies that many of the contacts cited by supporters of the invasion as proof of Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperation "actually proved that al Qaeda and Iraq had not succeeded in establishing a modus vivendi,".

• December, after President Clinton ordered a four day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, the Arabic language daily newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi speculated in an editorial that "President Saddam Hussein, whose country was subjected to a four-day air strike, will look for support in taking revenge on the United States and Britain by cooperating with Saudi oppositionist Osama bin Laden, whom the United States considers to be the most wanted person in the world."

• December 18 or December 21, Afghanistan - Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, allegedly meets with bin Laden in Afghanistan (, ). Corriere della Sera, a Milan newspaper, translated by the CIA, reads: “Saddam Hussayn and Usama bin Ladin have sealed a pact. Faruk Hidjazi, the former Director of the Iraqi Secret Services and now the country’s Ambassador to Turkey, held a secret meeting with the extremist leader on 21 December.” The newspaper had direct quotes from Hijazi without specifying the source of the quotes. (Page 328) Former CIA counterterrorism official Vince Cannistraro notes that bin Laden rejected Hijazi's overtures, concluding that he did not want to be "exploited" by Iraq's secular regime. Hijazi, arrested in April 2003, denied any such meeting took place.

1999

• January, Newsweek magazine reported Saddam Hussein is joining forces with al-Qaeda to launch joint terror counter-strikes against the US and Britain. An Arab intelligence officer, reported to know Saddam personally, told Newsweek: "very soon, you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity by the Iraqis." The planned attacks are said to be Saddam's revenge for the "continuing aggression" posed by the no fly zones that show the countries are still at war since Operation Desert Fox. The planned attacks never materialized, and at the time officials questioned the validity of the claim. The Newsweek article went on: "Saddam may think he's too good for such an association . Jerold Post, a political psychologist and government consultant who has profiled Saddam, says he thinks of himself as a world leader like Castro or Tito, not a thug. 'I'm skeptical that Saddam would resort to terrorism,' says a well informed administration official."

• January 31, Moscow newspaper Novosti reported that "hundreds of Afghan Arabs are undergoing sabotage training in Southern Iraq and are preparing for armed actions on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. They have declared as their goal a fight against the interests of the United States in the region." Cybercast News Service claims that it received documents from an unnamed government official that appear to substantiate this claim (see below, October 2004). The Weekly Standard claims that the Kuwaiti government detained some al Qaeda members on the border but notes that the Kuwaiti government would not respond to requests for more information about these alleged detainees.

• May, Iraq - Uday Hussein, according to documents summarized by the U.S. Joint Forces Command Iraqi Perspectives Project, ordered the Saddam Fedayeen to prepare for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas "; the special operation was referred to as "Blessed July," described by defense analyst Kevin Woods as "a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West." Woods claims that plans for Blessed July "were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion"; he also notes that the Fedayeen was racked by corruption. "In the years preceding the coalition invasion," he continues, "Iraq's leaders had become enamored of the belief that the spirit of the Fedayeen's 'Arab warriors' would allow them to overcome the Americans' advantages. In the end, however, the Fedayeen fighters proved totally unprepared for the kind of war they were asked to fight, and they died by the thousands." BBC Correspondent Paul Reynolds writes of the "Blessed July" plans, "What these targets might have been is not stated and the plans, like so many drawn up by the Iraqis, came to nothing, it seems."

• July, Iraq - Saddam Hussein allegedly cuts off all contact with al-Qaeda, according to Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, a former Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody.

• September, Baghdad - Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda second-in-command, allegedly visits Iraq under a pseudonym to attend the ninth Popular Islamic Congress, according to Iyad Allawi. Farouk Hijazi, the Iraqi ambassador who supposedly orchestrated the visit, is in U.S. custody and has denied meeting al-Qaeda members (see above, 18 December 1998).

2000

• -- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- Ahmad Hikmat Shakir al-Azzawi, an Iraqi national with connections to the Iraqi embassy and possibly a lieutenant-colonel in Saddam's Fedayyeen, supposedly helped arrange a top-level al-Qaeda meeting attended by Khalid al-Midhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem al-Hazmi, three of the 9/11 hijackers, and Tawfiz bin Atash, responsible for the USS Cole bombing () (see 2000 al-Qaeda Summit) The CIA has concluded that while Shakir al-Azzawi was indeed an Iraqi with connections to the embassy in Malaysia who helped organize the Kuala Lumpur meeting, he is a different person from a Fedayeen officer with a similar name ().

2001

• February 25- February 27 -- Two unidentified Iraqi men are arrested in Germany on suspicion of spying. , According to the Weekly Standard, an Arab newspaper in Paris called Al-Watan al-Arabi reported: "The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties. The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies." This report and the interrogation records of the detained Iraqi agents were not discussed in the 9/11 Commission Report, and do not seem to be mentioned in other media sources. It is not known whether the arrests revealed any cooperation between the men and either Iraqi intelligence or al Qaeda.

• April 8 -- Prague, Czech Republic -- Czech counterintelligence service claimed that Mohamed Atta al-Sayed, 9/11 hijacker, met with Ahmad Samir al-Ani, the consul at the Iraqi Embassy in Prague, in a cafe in Prague. This claim, known as Prague connection, is generally considered to be false, although the Czech Foreign Minister (also in charge of intelligence) continued to give credence to the report in 2003. According to columnist Robert Novak, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "confirmed published reports that there is no evidence placing the presumed leader of the terrorist attacks in the Czech capital." According to the January 2003 CIA report Iraqi Support for Terrorism, "the most reliable reporting to date casts doubt on this possibility" that such a meeting occurred. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet released "the most complete public assessment by the agency on the issue" in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2004, stating that the CIA was "increasingly skeptical" any such meeting took place. The claim that the meeting did occur was based on a report from "a single informant from Prague's Arab community who saw Atta's picture in the news after the 11 September attacks, and who later told his handlers that he had seen him meeting with Ani. Some officials have called the source unreliable." The claim was officially stated by Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman and Interior Minister Stanislav Gross (), but Czech officials later backed off of the claim, first privately, and then later publicly after the New York Times conducted "extensive interviews with leading Czech figures." When rumors of the Czech officials privately backing off the claims first appeared in the Western media, according to The Prague Post, Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech envoy to the UN stated "The meeting took place." One senior Czech official who requested anonymity speculated that the media reports dismissing the meeting were the result of a "guided leak.". By 2002 the Czechs were already backing away from the claimed meeting. On 15 March 2002 David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post: "Even the Czechs, who initially put out the reports about Atta's meeting with al-Ani, have gradually backed away. The Czech interior minister, Stanislav Gross, said in October that the two had met in April 2001. That version was altered slightly by Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman when he told CNN in November: 'Atta contacted some Iraqi agent, not to prepare the terrorist attack on but to prepare terrorist attack on just the building of Radio Free Europe' in Prague. Then, in December, Czech President Vaclav Havel retreated further, saying there was only 'a 70 percent' chance Atta met with al-Ani." But Havel later "moved to quash the report once and for all" by making the statement publicly to the White House, as reported in the New York Times. According to the Times report, "Czech officials also say they have no hard evidence that Mr. Ani was involved in terrorist activities, although the government did order his ouster in late April 2001." The New York Times report was described as "a fabrication" by a Ladislav Spacek, a spokesman for Czech president Vaclav Havel. But Spacek also "said Mr. Havel was still certain there was no factual basis behind the report that Mr. Atta met an Iraqi diplomat." The Times story was a potential embarrassment to Czech prime minister Milos Zeman after "extensive interviews with Czech and other Western intelligence officials, politicians and people close to the Czech intelligence community revealed that Mr. Zeman had prematurely disclosed an unverified report." According to an article in the Washington Post more recently, the Czechs backed off of the claim: "After months of further investigation, Czech officials determined last year that they could no longer confirm that a meeting took place, telling the Bush administration that al-Ani might have met with someone other than Atta." This perception seems confirmed by an associate of al-Ani's who suggested to a reporter that the Czech informant had mistaken another man for Atta. The associate said "I have sat with the two of them at least twice. The double is an Iraqi who has met with the consul. If someone saw a photo of Atta he might easily mistake the two." The Chicago Tribune on 29 September 2004 also reported that a man from Pakistan named Mohammed Atta (spelling his name with two "m's" rather than one) flew to the Czech Republic in 2000, confusing the intelligence agency, who thought it was the same Mohamed Atta. Jiri Ruzek, the former head of the Czech Republic's BIS, told reporters, "This information was verified, and it was confirmed that it was a case of the same name." Opposition leaders in the Czech Republic have publicly called this a failure on the part of Czech intelligence, and it is not clear that any Czech officials still stand by the story. In hopes of resolving the issue, Czech officials hoped to be given access to information from the U.S. investigation but that cooperation was not forthcoming. In May 2004, the Czech newspaper Pravo speculated that the source of the information behind the rumored meeting was actually the discredited INC chief Ahmed Chalabi. In addition, a senior administration official told Walter Pincus of the Washington Post that the FBI had concluded that "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S. at the time he was supposed to be in Prague." FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III outlined the extent of their investigation into the hijacker's whereabouts in a speech in April 2002: "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts." (). There are no known travel records showing Atta leaving or entering the US at that time, and everything known about Atta's whereabouts suggests that he was in Florida at that time. Also, the Czech police chief, Jiri Kolar, "said there were no documents showing that Atta visited Prague at any time" in 2001. Even further doubt was cast on rumors of such a meeting in December 2003 when Al-Ani, who is in U.S. custody, denied having ever met Atta (, ). According to Newsweek, it was "a denial that officials tend to believe given that they have not unearthed a scintilla of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the alleged rendezvous." It is also notable that Atta's own religious and political convictions made him violently opposed to the Saddam regime; according to the 9/11 Commission Report, "In his interactions with other students, Atta voiced virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American opinions, ranging from condemnations of what he described as a global Jewish movement centered in New York City that supposedly controlled the financial world and the media, to polemics against governments of the Arab world. To him, Saddam Hussein was an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East." The 9/11 Commission also addressed the question of an alleged Prague connection and listed many of the reasons above that such a meeting could not have taken place. The report notes that "the FBI has gathered intelligence indicating that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 (as evidenced by a bank surveillance camera photo), and in Coral Springs, Florida on April 11, where he and Shehhi leased an apartment. On April 6,9,10, and 11, Atta's cellular telephone was used numerous times to call various lodging establishments in Florida from cell sites within Florida. We cannot confirm that he placed those calls. But there are no U.S. records indicating that Atta departed the country during this period." Combining FBI and Czech intelligence investigations, "o evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001." The Commission still could not "absolutely rule out the possibility" that Atta was in Prague on April 9 travelling under an alias, but the Commission concluded that "There was no reason for such a meeting, especially considering the risk it would pose to the operation. By April 2001, all four pilots had completed most of their training,and the muscle hijackers were about to begin entering the United States. The available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting." (p. 229)

• summer -- United Arab Emirates -- According to Vanity Fair reporter David Rose, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, two of the 9/11 hijackers, supposedly meet with unidentified Mukhabarat officer (, ). No evidence has emerged to support this claim.

• summer -- A man known as "Abu Wael" ("Abu Wa'il"), who worked with the Ansar al-Islam organization in northern Iraq, allegedly worked with al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan to set up a backup base. According to Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, Abu Wael is an alias for Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani, allegedly a colonel in Iraq's Mukhabarat (, ). The 9/11 Commission reported: "There are indications that by then (2001) the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy." (Page 61) And al-Shamari, sitting in a Kurdish prison, has said that Saddam Hussein supported Ansar al Islam because he wanted to "foment unrest in the pro-American Kurdish area of Iraq." Intelligence agencies have disputed such claims of support, however. According to Con Coughlin in the Telegraph, "While the White House has attempted to link the group directly to Hussein's intelligence agents, both the CIA and MI6 insist that all their intelligence suggests the group operates in area over which Saddam has no control." Spenser Ackerman wrote in November 2003, "Far from being "harbored" by Saddam, Ansar al Islam operated out of northeastern Iraq, an area under Kurdish control that was being protected from Saddam's incursions by U.S. warplanes. Indeed, some of its members fought against Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war." Additionally, Mullah Krekar, the leader of Ansar al-Islam, calls himself "Saddam's sworn enemy" and "scoffs" at the notion that his friend Abu Wael works with the Mukhabarat. Elsewhere, Abu Wael is described as a "former Iraqi army officer" and it is suggested that, while he may still have been working for Saddam, it was as a spy, gathering intelligence on Ansar al-Islam rather than cooperating with them. Jason Burke notes, "Saddam may well have infiltrated the Ansar-ul-Islam with a view to monitoring the developments of the group (indeed it would be odd if he had not) but that appears to be about as far as his involvement with the group, and incidentally with al-Qaeda, goes." Ackerman likewise notes that the "far more likely explanation" of Abu Wael's contact with Ansar al-Islam, "is that the dictator had placed an agent in the group not to aid them, as Powell implied to the Security Council, but to keep tabs on a potential threat to his own regime." Additionally, while Mullah Krekar has expressed admiration for bin Laden, he has denied any actual links to al-Qaeda, stating, "I have never met with him, nor do I have any contacts ." The Belgian think tank International Crisis Group called the group "nothing more than a minor irritant in local Kurdish politics" and suggested that the alleged ties to bin Laden were the product of propaganda by the secular Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Nevertheless, Ansar al-Islam is generally considered an al-Qaeda affiliate organization and is designated officially as such by the United Nations. But it was not an organization identified as a terrorist group by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury until 20 February 2003, just one month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and just weeks after Powell's presentation to the United Nations, and it was not until March 2004 that it was officially added to the U.S. list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

• July -- Rome, Italy -- Habib Faris Abdullah al-Mamouri, general in the Iraqi intelligence, allegedly meets with Mohamed Atta, 9/11 hijacker () Daniel McGrory, the reporter who claims this information came from Italian intelligence, admits "There is no proof the men were in direct contact." A June or July meeting in Rome is completely at odds with everything known about Atta's whereabouts in mid-2001.

• July 21 -- Iraq -- The state-run Iraqi newspaper Al-Nasiriya publishes an opinion piece written by Naeem Abd Muhalhal. This piece praises Osama bin Laden and includes the following, which James Woolsey has interpreted (in testimony before Judge Baer) as a "vague" foreshadowing of the 9/11 attacks: bin Laden "continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House." The opinion piece also reads that “Bin Ladin is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting.” On the floor of the Senate, Senator Ernest Hollings interpreted this as foreknowledge: “In other words, the World Trade Towers. Here, over a year ahead of time in the open press in Iraq, they are writing that this man is planning not only to bomb the White House, but where they are already hurting, the World Trade Towers.” Senator Hollings read the opinion piece into the U.S. Congressional Record. Judge Baer also interprets this opinion piece as an allusion to the once-bombed World Trade Center. This editorial, by itself, is not proof of Iraqi complicity in the attacks of 9/11. No evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks on the part of the Iraqi government has ever materialized.

• September 5 -- Spain -- Abu Zubayr, an al-Qaeda cell leader in Morocco, allegedly meets with Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, 9/11 financier. Some allege that Abu Zubayr was also an officer in the Iraqi Mukhabarat. () Abu Zubayr was arrested in Morocco in 2002 and while news accounts widely noted that he was "one of the most important members of Al Qaeda to be captured," no mainstream source substantiated (or even saw fit to mention) the allegation that the Saudi citizen abu Zubayr worked for the Iraqi Secret police.

• September 11 -- United States -- The September 11, 2001 attacks take place as four airliners are apparently hijacked by members of al Qaeda, with two airliners striking the World Trade Center in New York City and a third striking The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane crashes in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

• September 21 -- Washington, D.C. -- Ten days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, President Bush receives a classified Presidential Daily Briefing (that had been prepared at his request) indicating that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks and that there was no credible evidence of any collaborative relationship between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda. The PDB writes off the few contacts that existed between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda as attempts to monitor the group rather than attempts to work with them. The National Journal's Murray Waas reported the existence of the briefing on November 22, 2005, describing it as saying that "Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources." This PDB was one of the documents the Bush Administration refused to turn over to the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq, even on a classified basis, and refuses to discuss other than to acknowledge its existence.

• November 21 -- The Bush Administration froze the assets of the Al Taqwa network, accusing them of raising, managing and distributing money for al Qaeda under the guise of legitimate business activity. Youssef Nada and Ali Ghalib Himmat, the two principals of Al Taqwa, are members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Nada was known to have good relations with Saddam Hussein. Asat Trust, a Liechtenstein-based company earning revenue from Iraq’s Oil for Food contracts, also had its assets frozen due to its relationship to Al Taqwa. Marc Perelman speculates: “The operation raises the possibility that Iraq quietly funneled money to Al Qaeda by deliberately choosing an oil company working with one of the terrorist group's alleged financial backers.” Perelman presents no evidence to substantiate this speculation.

2002

• January -- Captured al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, after being secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States for interrogation, gives specific and elaborate details of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, included training in explosives, biological, and chemical weapons. His account, which has since been repudiated by himself, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA as being fabricated under duress (see below), nevertheless provides much of the basis for United States claims of the threat from Hussein's continued regime, including Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN the next year.

• February -- U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency issues Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary No. 044-02, the existence of which was revealed on December 9, 2005, by Doug Jehl in the New York Times, impugning the credibility of information gleaned from captured al-Libi. The DIA report suggested that al-Libi had been "intentionally misleading" his interrogators. The DIA report also cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy: "Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

• March 22 -- U.K. -- British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts sends memo to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stating bluntly that "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing."

• March 25 -- The New Yorker publishes comments by weapons smuggler Mohamed Mansour Shahab that he had been directed by the Iraqi intelligence community to organize, plan, and carry out up to nine terrorist attacks against American targets in the Middle East, including an attack similar to the one carried out on the USS Cole.. The smuggler is not considered credible however; Reporter Guy Dinmore wrote in the London Financial Times: "it is apparent that the man is deranged. He claims to have killed 422 people, including two of his wives, and says he would drink the blood of his victims. He also has no explanation for why, although he was arrested two years ago, he only revealed his alleged links to al-Qaeda and Baghdad after the September 11 attacks." Al Qaeda expert Jason Burke wrote after interviewing Shahab, "Shahab is a liar. He may well be a smuggler, and probably a murderer too, but substantial chunks of his story simply are not true.".

• May – July -- Abu Musab al Zarqawi allegedly recuperated in Baghdad after being wounded in the war in Afghanistan. Dozens of his followers came to Baghdad as well. The United States, through a foreign intelligence service, notified Saddam Hussein’s government that Zarqawi was living in Baghdad under an alias. "A foreign government service asserted that the IIS (Iraqi Intelligence Service) knew where al-Zarqawi was located despite Baghdad’s claims that it could not find him." (Page 337) "Senate Report on PreWar Intelligence on Iraq" Nevertheless, no evidence has emerged of any collaboration between Zarqawi and Saddam's government. According to Jason Burke, "Stories that an injured leg had been amputated in Baghdad as al-Zarqawi was cared for by Saddam Hussein's personal physicians proved false." And Spenser Ackerman wrote in the Washington Monthly that "if Zarqawi's ties to al Qaeda were loose, his ties to Saddam were practically non-existent." Intercepts of Zarqawi's phone calls in Iraq provided "no evidence that the suspected terrorist was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq." In addition, Zarqawi did not identify himself with bin Laden nor swear allegiance to him until October 2004. Before that time terrorist experts considered him an "independent actor" who was setting himself up as a "competitor to bin Laden" rather than an al Qaeda operative. Jason Burke writes, "What Powell did not say was that al-Zarqawi ... had operated independently of bin Laden, running his own training camp in the west of Afghanistan near Herat. It was a small operation and al-Zarqawi was not considered a significant player, by militants or Western and Middle Eastern intelligence services, at the time. It is likely that al-Zarqawi had some contact with bin Laden but never took the bayat and never made any formal allegiance with the Saudi or his close associates. Instead he was one of the thousands of foreign activists living and working in Afghanistan during the late 1990s.... al-Zarqawi was a rival, not an ally, of the Saudi." (p. 270). German law enforcement learned that Zarqawi's group operated in "opposition to" al-Qaeda and that Zarqawi even vetoed splitting charity funds with bin Laden's group. Recent information confirms the view of counterterrorism experts that Zarqawi's group was a rival of al-Qaeda until October 2004. In an interview on Al-Majd TV, former al-Qaeda member Walid Khan, who was in Afghanistan fighting alongside Zarqawi's group, said, "The problem was that most of the Arabs there were Jordanians, supporters of Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi. We mixed with them. The problem was they didn't care about anyone but their sheikh, al-Maqdisi. They belonged to the Jordanian Bay'at Al-Imam, organized from 1995. They pledged allegiance to al-Maqdisi and were in jail for five years. They were sentenced to 15 years. They served five years and then were pardoned. So they went to Afghanistan. Their ideology further developed there. Of course, they accused the government, the army, and the police of heresy. This is the most dangerous group. I understood that they had differences of opinion with bin Laden on a number of issues and positions. Of course, we understood that only later. From the day al-Zarqawi's group arrived, there were " Interestingly, even though no connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Zarqawi has emerged, the White House continued to insist on such a connection, and Colin Powell made this claim a feature of his February 2003 speech to the United Nations (which has been heavily criticized). Nevertheless, the White House on several occasions nixed Pentagon plans to attack Zarqawi. Former National Security Council member Roger Cressey noted, "People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists." It has been suggested by military officials that the White House let Zarqawi's camp continue to operate inside Iraq because destroying the camp "could undercut its case for war against Saddam." While U.S. officials now think reports of al-Zarqawi's leg being amputated are incorrect, they still believe that al-Zarqawi may have received medical treatment in Baghdad. However, a CIA report in late 2004 concluded that there was no evidence Saddam's government was involved or even aware of this medical treatment, and found "no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harbored Zarqawi." One U.S. official summarized the report: "The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything." Indeed, scholars have added that such cooperation between Saddam and al-Zarqawi goes against everything known about both people. Counterterrorism scholar Loretta Napoleoni quotes former Jordanian parliamentarian Layth Shubaylat, who was personally acquainted with both Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein: "'First of all, I don't think the two ideologies go together, I'm sure the former Iraqi leadership saw no interest in contacting al-Zarqawi or al-Qaeda operatives. The mentality of al-Qaeda simply doesn't go with the Ba'athist one.' When he was in prison , 'Abu Mos'ab wouldn't accept me,' said Shubaylat, 'because I'm opposition, even if I'm a Muslim.' How could he accept Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator?" A letter from an Iraqi intelligence official dated August 2002 that was recovered in Iraq by U.S. forces and released by the Pentagon in March 2006 suggests that Saddam's government was "on the lookout" for Zarqawi in Baghdad and noted that finding Zarqawi was a "top priority"; three responses to the letter claimed that there was "no evidence" Zarqawi was in Iraq. This suggests that if Zarqawi was in Baghdad during this time, it was without the knowledge or support of the Baathist regime.

• September 17 -– Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before a Congressional Committee: "There is evidence that Iraq provided al-Qaida with various kinds of training – combat, bomb-making, and CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear). Although Saddam did not endorse al-Qaida’s overall agenda and was suspicious of Islamist movements in general, he was apparently not averse, under certain circumstances, to enhancing bin Laden’s operational capabilities. As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training are (redacted as classified info) from sources of varying reliability." (Page 329) "Senate Report on PreWar Intelligence on Iraq" The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence pointed out that the DCI's comments could be misleading: "The DCI's unclassified testimony did not include source descriptions, which could have led the recipients of that testimony to interpret that the CIA believed the training had definitely occurred." (p. 330). It is now known that the main source for Tenet's claim, which was repeated by the White House in October, was the now-discredited interrogation of captured al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The DIA and CIA have since indicated their belief that al-Libi (who recanted the story in January 2004) fabricated the entire thing under harsh interrogation techniques.

• October -- U.K. -- British Intelligence investigation of possible links between Iraq and al-Qaeda issues report concluding: "We have no intelligence of current cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda and do not believe that al-Qaeda plans to conduct terrorist attacks under Iraqi direction."

• October 3 -- Philippines -- Hamsiraji Sali, leader of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Abu Sayyaf terrorist group, contacts Husham Hussain, deputy secretary of the Iraqi embassy immediately after a successful bombing (, ) Weekly Standard editor Stephen Hayes points to additional evidence indicating that the group may have received some funding from Saddam's regime. Hayes notes that the support was suspended "temporarily it seems - after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group." Hayes cites documentation demonstrating that the Saddam regime was cutting off all contact with the group: "We have all cooperated in the field of intelligence information with some of our friends to encourage the tourists and the investors in the Philippines ... The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them."

• October 8 -- Washington, D.C. -- Knight Ridder reports that "a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats" have serious doubts about the Bush Administration's case for war, specifically raising doubts about claimed "links" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. One official told the reporter that "Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books."

• November 14 -- Baghdad -- Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, officer at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan, is identified as "responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group" in a list of names published in an issue of the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper by Uday Hussein, interpreted by Judge Gilbert S. Merritt as some kind of private memo (). Judge Merrit leaves out the passage published at the top of the list, which undercuts his story: "This is a list of the henchmen of the regime. Our hands will reach them sooner or later. Woe unto them." The Defense Intelligence Agency's only comment on the list was, "There are innumerable lists. So you have to ask what does it mean to be on this list? It takes time to sort through all this. People give names all over the place."

2003

• January -- CIA releases special Report to Congress entitled Iraqi Support for Terrorism. The report states "We have reporting from reliable clandestine and press sources that (deleted) direct meetings between senior Iraqi representatives and top al-Qaida operatives took place from the early 1990s to the present." (Page 326) The report concludes that "In contrast to the patron-client pattern between Iraq and its Palestinian surrogates, the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other -- their mutual suspicion suborned by al-Qaida's interest in Iraqi assistance, and Baghdad's interest in al-Qaida's anti-U.S. attacks…. The Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike." (Page 332) (Prewar Intelligence Assessment (PDF)) The report also questioned the information coming from captured al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, determining that the al-Qaeda leader was not in a position to know about any links to Saddam Hussein and that his stories were likely fabrications. Nevertheless, this information was cited uncritically by Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

• February -- Israeli intelligence report concludes that no evidence ties Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.

• February 11 -- Satellite TV -- Osama bin Laden audiotape broadcast on Al Jazeera urges Iraqi Muslims to fight the American invaders who will soon be attacking Hussein's Baathist regime. He reaffirms his view of Saddam as an infidel: "Socialists are infidels wherever they are, whether they are in Baghdad or Aden."

• February 11 -- Washington, D.C. -- Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testifies before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, repeating the now-discredited claim that "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful." The associate he mentioned was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was known to the DIA to have fabricated the story in response to harsh treatment by the Egyptian captors to whom he had been rendered.

• April 28 -- The Toronto Star publishes a report by Middle East correspondent Mitch Potter about a memo discovered in the wreckage of Mukhabarat headquarters. The memo discusses a planned trip by a trusted aide of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to Baghdad. The story says the trip is "thought to have ended disastrously for the Iraqis, as bin Laden rejected any kind of alliance, preferring to pursue his own policy of global jihad, or holy war." Martin Bright and Jason Burke contend that "the find is unlikely to be the 'smoking gun' the US and Britain are looking for."

• May 8 -- New York District Court Judge Robert Baer issues a decision in a lawsuit ordering Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to pay $104 million to the families of two men killed in the September 11 attacks. Baer ruled in part that the plaintiffs had "shown, albeit barely ... that Iraq provided material support to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda." Judge Baer's decision was based on the testimony of former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey as well as on Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations that February. Judge Baer said, however, that these sources had provided "few actual facts" demonstrating that Iraq provided any material support for the attack and instead based his decision on this point of fact entirely upon their expertise. No testimony was introduced into the case by defendants to counter the statements of Woolsey or Powell.

• October 19 -- Al-Jazeera broadcasts Osama bin Laden's message to the Iraqi people, in which he expresses satisfaction at having lured the U.S. military into a conflict with Muslims in Iraq: "Be glad of the good news: America is mired in the swamps of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush is, through Iraq and its oil, easy prey. Here is he now, thank God, in an embarrassing situation and here is America today being ruined before the eyes of the whole world."

• October 27 -- Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy and head of the controversial Office of Special Plans, sends a memo to Congress that includes "a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the intelligence community...The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions." The memo was subsequently leaked to the media and became the foundation for reports in the Weekly Standard by Stephen F. Hayes. W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of Defense Intelligence Agency, called the Feith memo "a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" Daniel A. Benjamin criticized the memo, noting that "in any serious intelligence review, much of the material presented would quickly be discarded." A Pentagon press release warned: "Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."

• December 13 -- Saddam Hussein's arrest in Iraq yields a document from Saddam directing Iraqi Baathist insurgents to beware of working with foreign jihadists. The New York Times reported that the directive "provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Mr. Hussein's government and terrorists from al-Qaeda. C.I.A. interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Mr. Hussein." Reporter Greg Miller went even further, calling the document "one of the strongest pieces of evidence to contest the repeated insinuations of the Bush Administration that there were links between al-Qaeda and the Baath regime."

2004

• March -- The CIA withdraws its information regarding links between Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda based on the 2002 testimony of al-Libi, after he begins asserting that he fabricated them in order to receive better treatment from his captors.

• June 16 -- U.S. attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who oversaw the government's case against al Qaeda members accused of bombing U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, testifies to the 9/11 Commission. He told the Commission that a U.S. Department of Justice indictment that mentioned ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda -- which is frequently mentioned by Stephen F. Hayes to support his claim that the Clinton Administration supported the link (e.g. -- had been superceded by a later indictment which dropped the language because it could not be confirmed by investigators.

• July 7 -- Senate Select Committee on Intelligence releases report assessing the state of prewar intelligence on Iraq. The report concludes that the CIA's assessment that there was no evidence of a formal relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was justified. (See below).

• July 22 -- 9/11 Commission releases its final report on the September 11 attacks, concluding that there was no evidence of an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. (See below).

• October 4 – The internet news outlet Cybercast News Service published a story describing 42 documents dated January-April 1993 confiscated by U.S. forces. The documents supposedly include details of Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorists, records on WMDs and information on terrorists trained inside Iraq. The unnamed source of the documents is described as "a senior government official who is not a political appointee." The documents were examined by Bruce Tefft, a retired CIA specialist in counter-terrorism and expert on Islam, who speculated that "based on available, unclassified and open source information, the details in these documents are accurate ..." CNSNews, however, does not indicate whether Tefft identified any specific open-source information that confirms details in the documents. Laurie Mylroie wrote an article for the New York Sun expressing confidence in the documents' authenticity. As of December 2005, the documents have not been acknowledged by any Bush Administration official, not even when making the case for Saddam-al-Qaeda cooperation. They have nevertheless led to speculation in the blogosphere about a "smoking gun" proving Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda. The documents purport to establish that Saddam had been supporting terrorism for years and implicates Iraq in the defeat of Americans at the Battle of Mogadishu but also that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons. If these documents could be authenticated, the implications could be significant, at least for understanding events of early 1993. Some efforts to confirm the accuracy of the documents took place, but as of March 2006, no document expert had yet examined them, although no specific evidence has been advanced that they are not authentic. James Geraghty of the National Review questioned the timing and manner of the documents' release commenting that if the documents were as remarkable as they appear to be, why was there such a delay in their release and why the administration had not commented on them. CNSNews has posted translations of some of the documents online and has invited journalists and terror experts to study the documents in person in their corporate offices.

• October 5 -- U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tells the Council on Foreign Relations that he has seen no "strong, hard evidence that links" Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He admits in the statement that the information he relied upon for earlier statements linking the two "may have been something that was not representative of a hard linkage."

2005

• April 15 -- Senator Carl Levin releases newly declassified intelligence documents which suggest that Administration claims of a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda contradicted the conclusions of the intelligence community. Levin said, "These documents are additional compelling evidence that the Intelligence Community did not believe there was a cooperative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, despite public comments by the highest ranking officials in our government to the contrary."

• May 23 -- Seif al-Adl, the leader of al-Qaeda's security committee, publishes a testament on the internet about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist in Iraq who swore allegiance to bin Laden in October 2004. Among other things, the al-Qaeda leader clarifies the relationship between Zarqawi's group and the new Iraq: "contrary to what the Americans continuously claimed, al-Qaeda did not have any connection with Saddam whatsoever. American attempts to connect Saddam to al-Qaeda were in order to create excuses and legitimate causes to invade Iraq. So after we were trapped in Iran, after being forced out of Afghanistan, it became inevitable that we would plan to enter Iraq through the north, which was free from American control. It was then that we moved south to join our Sunni brothers." Al-Adl described the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a boon to al-Qaeda: "The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap."

• July -- Corporal Jonathan "Paco" Reese of the Pennsylvania National Guard, one of the Americans responsible for guarding the captured Saddam Hussein when he was in American custody, tells GQ magazine that the ousted leader insisted that he had no relationship with Osama bin Laden.

• October -- In Newsweek of October 26, 2005, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball describe a "secret draft CIA report" which stated, according to "two counterterrorism analysts familiar with the classified CIA study who asked not to be identified", that

Zarqawi probably did travel to the Iraqi capital in the spring of 2002 for medical treatment. And, of course, there is no question that he is in Iraq now-orchestrating many of the deadly suicide bombings and attacks on American soldiers. But before the American-led invasion, Saddam's government may never have known he was there. The reason: he used an alias and was there under what one U.S. intelligence official calls a "false cover." No evidence has been found showing senior Iraqi officials were even aware of his presence.

• November -- The New York Times answers the question as to what new evidence do the Democrats have regarding pre-war intelligence? Doug Jehl reported the contents of a newly declassified memo apparently passed to him by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The document provides the earliest and strongest indication there were doubts about the reliability of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda official in American custody, voiced by American intelligence agencies, Jehl writes. “Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons." On November 22, the National Journal's Murray Waas describes the existence of the highly classified September 21 2001 PDB described above, informing President Bush that there was no credible evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda.

• December -- Vanity Fair publishes excerpt of counterterrorism expert Peter Bergen's new book, which cites Pakistani biographer Hamid Mir's interview with Osama bin Laden. Regarding Saddam Hussein, Mir commented that bin Laden "condemned Saddam Hussein ... He gave such kind of abuses that it was very difficult for me to write."

• 9 December -- Doug Jehl continues to report in the New York Times on the questionable nature of al-Libi's statements regarding ties between Saddam hussein and Al Qaeda, stating that "current and former government officials" had described to him

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 (see above) that expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility on questions related to Iraq and Al Qaeda ... based in part on the knowledge that he was no longer in American custody when he made the detailed statements, and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment. ... They said the C.I.A.'s decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Mr. Libi's claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he had fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors. ... American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

2006

• January - The Weekly Standard published a report confirmed by 11 government officials confirming that documents and photographs were seized in post-war Iraq proving Saddam Hussein trained Islamic terrorists such as Ansar al-Islam. Some two million documents were obtained after the fall of Baghdad. The documents had to be prioritized and translated. The priority at the time was weapons of mass destruction. According to columnist Stephen F. Hayes, a debate inside the Bush Administration delayed release of the translated documents, which should be released later in January. One anonymous official familiar with the captured documents stated: "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated support for transregional terrorists." Such documents may provide evidence of more extensive contact between Saddam and Ansar al-Islam, a group whose leader considers himself the "sworn enemy" of Saddam and who claims to have no ties to al-Qaeda. Experts argue that Saddam maintained some ties to this group in order to exploit it to use against their common enemy the Kurds. (See above, Summer 2001).

• 3 January -- CNN terrorism expert Peter Bergen's book The Osama bin Laden I Know is published. Christina Lamb, the foreign affairs correspondent for the London Sunday Times, noted that the book "makes clear that had no link with Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, he told his childhood friend Batarfi, 'This guy can never be trusted.'" In the book, Bergen discusses his conversations with bin Laden's Pakistani biographer Hamid Mir (see above, December 2005). Among other things, Mir tells Bergen that bin Laden cursed Saddam, calling him a "socialist motherfucker" and said "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother."

• 4 January - Newsweek publishes information about recently declassified slide show presentation prepared for a secret Pentagon briefing in 2002. The topic of the briefing was links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and the slides include previously unpublished information about allegations that Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi official in April 2001. While Delroy Murdock claimed that the slides were new evidence that the meeting might have occurred, Newsweek clearly put to rest such speculation, noting that "four former senior intel officials who monitored investigations into Atta's alleged Iraqi contacts say they never heard the airport anecdote." Another intelligence official "rejected" the anecdotal evidence. Newsweek concluded that the briefing "helped keep the tale alive" even though it had been rejected by intelligence experts.

• 21 January - Osama bin Laden tape is released in which the terrorist leader addresses American citizens, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq has led to a situation in which "there is no difference between this criminality and Saddam's criminality."

• 11 February -- U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, appeared on MSNBC to discuss the "Saddam Tapes." Reports claim Saddam discusses WMD and links to terrorists on these tapes. Some 12 hours of these tapes were aired at The Intelligence Summit conference from February 17-21. Hoekstra called for the U.S. government to put the remaining 35,000 boxes of documents on the internet so Arabic speakers around the world can help translate the documents. Attorney John Loftus, the controversial president of the Intelligence Summit, claims the tapes provide evidence that Saddam had ties to terrorists. Representative Hoekstra later said he felt the tapes were primarily of "historical interest" and cautioned, "I tried to stay away from whatever claims Loftus was making."

• 13 February -- Weekly Standard web published a story about documents seized from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry building in the days after the fall of Baghdad. Several sourced indicated seeing a document described as "listing jihadists" in Iraq. Also found were "16 or 17 floppy disks from the personal computer of Naji Sabri" believed to be "a treasure trove" of information. These documents and disks were presumably handed over to the CIA. Since that time, none of the intelligence officers involved have seen or heard anything more about them.

• 14 February -- Combating Terrorism Center at West Point published a study of al-Qaeda titled Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities. The study was based on documents seized from al-Qaeda and recently declassified from the Harmony database. The papers offer insight into the history of the movement, organizational structure, tensions among leadership and the lessons learned. One of the papers examines the lessons learned from jihad in Syria; the al-Qaeda writer concluded that one of the lessons learned from that experience is the influence of secular Baathist thinking distorts the message of jihad. This writer advises the movement no longer allow the jihad message to be influenced by the Iraqi Baath message. (Page 79) The writer called the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties "renegades" and noted that "the alliance with them was catastrophic." He also noted that these parties had "no influence or effect on the battle field." The writer identifies Saddam's Iraq one of the "apostate regimes that abandoned Islam." Another document in the collection lists Saddam as well as Arafat and Hikmatyar among Islamic leaders who lack "manhood" and suggests that "they are useless. Beware of them."

• 15 February -- The ABC television news program Nightline airs translations of taped conversations of Saddam Hussein speaking candidly with advisers. On the ABC transcript of one of the tapes, Saddam is heard speaking with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz discussing terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Saddam specifically mentions that he had warned the United States in 1989 (when the two countries were allies) that terrorists would eventually gain access to weapons of mass destruction. "Terrorism is coming," the Iraqi leader is translated as saying. "I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and told the British as well, I think Hamed was there keeping the meeting minutes with one of them, that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. What prevents this technology from developing and people from smuggling it? All of this, before the stories of smuggling, before that, in 1989. I told them, 'In the future, what would prevent that we see a booby-trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?'" Saddam later adds, "This is coming, this story is coming but not from Iraq." Former U.N. inspector William Tierney, who claims that God directed him to weapons sites in Iraq, says the interpretation put on the tapes by ABC News downplayed Saddam's statements. As ABC News interpreted it, Saddam was saying Iraq itself would not launch a WMD terror attack on the U.S. "I disagree completely, because Saddam also says in other tapes that the war is ongoing," Tierney said on Hannity & Colmes. "And when I was there as an inspector, what struck me is that these people were still in the fight. There was no change of heart like you had in Germany after World War II. They were still in the fight. It makes perfect sense." Byron York in the National Review Online casts doubt on Tierney's objectivity and credibility, noting that he claims to know about Iraqi WMD thanks to messages from God and to a friend's clairvoyant dreams. York also points out: "Tierney said he believes other tapes, which have not yet been heard, will eventually reveal that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Tierney also said that he believes Iraq orchestrated the 2001 anthrax attacks, with Saddam Hussein using American scientist Steven Hatfill as a 'proxy' to carry out the mission." Reporter Sherrie Gossett wrote that the excerpts of the tapes presented at the Intelligence Summit were "vague, cryptic, nonsensical, insignificant" and notes that "the most-hyped excerpts are also subject to wide-ranging interpretations." A spokeswoman for John Negroponte, the Directorate of National Intelligence, noted that "Intelligence community analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq's weapons programs, nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey Group report." ABC News reporter Brian Ross commented that people on both sides of this controversy will use these tapes to support their side.

• 16 February -- former National Intelligence Officer Paul R. Pillar appears on the Charlie Rose Show. Pillar tells Rose, "Iraq did provide other kinds of sponsorship to terrorist groups, some of the Palestinian groups that aren't so active anymore. They were also an active sponsor of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian group, which killed Americans way back in the - in the '70s, but more recently has been focusing its aim at the clerical regime in Iran. But in terms of it having provided support or sustenance or strength, or having anything close to an alliance with al Qaeda, it simply wasn't there." Pillar also appeared on the NPR show Fresh Air and offered the following elaboration: "Well, what was found--and this has been the pretty consistent story all along with regard to intelligence coverage of that topic--is there were various data points that were relevant to that issue, even some encounters or meetings held years ago in Sudan, other kinds of coincidences or two different names appearing in the same place. What it all added up to in the view of the judgment--in the judgment of the intelligence analysts working those particular issues was that you had two entities, one the Saddam regime and the other al-Qaeda, that were kind of feeling each other out, trying to stay aware of what they were doing, what each other was doing, but no indication of anything that could be described as a patron-client relationship or a sponsor-client relationship or an alliance. There were some of these coincidences and contacts, but that's hardly anything out of the ordinary and not something that adds up to state sponsorship." Pillar later gave an interview to Voice of America, confirming that the Administration distorted intelligence findings to try to claim the opposite: "The main thing that happened there, particularly with reference to this issue of, was there a relationship between the Saddam regime and al-Qaida -- was a selective use of bits and pieces of reporting to try to build the case that in this case there was some kind of alliance without really reflecting the analytic judgment of the intelligence community that there was not."

• 16 March -- The Pentagon, at the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, begins releasing the Arabic-language documents obtained during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These documents have been hailed by some supporters of the invasion as a possible "smoking gun" connecting Saddam's Iraq to al-Qaeda terrorists and Representative Hoekstra has been calling for their release to the public; those released so far, however, fail to provide evidence of any such connection. According to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, the release of the documents "looks like an effort to discover a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq." The Pentagon cautions that the government "has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available." One of the documents, which seems to have been trumpeted by Stephen Hayes earlier in the year as proof that "thousands" of al-Qaeda terrorists were trained in Iraq between 1999 and 2002 to fight in Afghanistan, is according to the Pentagon simply an investigation of a rumor. The Pentagon synopsis of the document reads: "Fedayeen Saddam received news of a rumor that 3,000 volunteers from Iraq and Saudi Arabia had traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujahideen against the US. This letter is a request to investigate the rumor to determine whether it is true." Also present in the collection is Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence from 2002 concerning suspected al-Qaeda members in Iraq. The document includes names and photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Pentagon summary of the document indicates that Iraqi intelligence suspected these people to be members of al-Qaeda but provides no indication that they trained or supported them. Indeed, an Associated Press translation of the document suggests that the letter warned Iraqi agents to "be on the lookout" for Zarqawi and other al Qaeda agents; AP reports that "Attached were three responses in which agents said there was no evidence al-Zarqawi or the other man were in Iraq." A third document contains third-hand speculation by an Afghani Consul that the U.S. has proof that Iraq cooperated with bin Laden. ABC News has noted that while the document is suggestive, "the sourcing is questionable — i.e. an unnamed Afghan 'informant' reporting on a conversation with another Afghan 'consul.' The date of the document — four days after 9/11 — is worth noting but without further corroboration, this document is of limited evidentiary value." The Los Angeles Times notes that "the documents do not appear to offer any new evidence of illicit activity by Hussein, or hint at preparations for the insurgency that followed the invasion."

9/11 Commission Report

The official report issued by the 9/11 Commission in July 2004 addressed the issue of a possible conspiracy between the government of Iraq and al-Qaeda in the September 11 attacks. The report addressed specific allegations of contacts between al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, concluding: "to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." For specific quotations from the report, see 9/11 Commission Report and Saddam-al Qaeda Conspiracy Theory.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq

Looking at pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence examined “the quality and quantity of U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, ties to terrorist groups, Saddam Hussein’s threat to stability and security in the region, and his repression of his own people;” and “the objectivity, reasonableness, independence, and accuracy of the judgments reached by the Intelligence Community.”

Based on the information the CIA made available to the Senate Committee, the committee published a series of conclusions in the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq. These included the following:

Conclusion 91. The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) assessment that Iraq had maintained ties to several secular Palestinian terrorist groups and with the Mujahidin e-Khalq was supported by the intelligence. The CIA was also reasonable in judging that Iraq appeared to have been reaching out to more effective terrorist groups, such as Hizballah and Hamas, and might have intended to employ such surrogates in the event of war. (Page 345)

Conclusion 92. The CIA's examination of contacts, training, safehaven and operational cooperation as indicators of a possible Iraq-al-Qaida relationship was a reasonable and objective approach to the question. (Page 345)

Conclusion 93. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship. (Page 346)

Conclusion 94. The CIA reasonably and objectively assessed in Iraqi Support for Terrorism that the most problematic area of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida were the reports of training in the use of non-conventional weapons, specifically chemical and biological weapons. (Page 346)

Conclusion 95. The CIA’s assessment on safehaven – that al-Qaida or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control – was reasonable. (Page 347)

Conclusion 96. The CIA's assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al-Qaida attack was reasonable and objective. No additional information has emerged to suggest otherwise. (Page 347)

Conclusion 97. The CIA's judgment that Saddam Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with a global reach – al-Qaida – to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of war, was reasonable. No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ al-Qaida in conducting terrorist attacks. (Page 348)

Statements

• While speaking at the Pentagon on February 17 1998, President Bill Clinton warned of the "reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals." These "predators of the twenty-first century," he said "will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

• "Al-Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq." -- Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney in an indictment of Osama bin Laden, unsealed November 4 1998 (Page 128)

• "We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad," -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, September 2002

• "We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade. ... We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities." -- CIA Director George J. Tenet, October 2002

• "We could find no provable connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda." Senior CIA official, summing up conclusions of a 2003 report by the Directorate of Intelligence, 4 March 2004.

• "There is no doubt in my mind that trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons." -- Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, after reading classified intelligence as a member of the congressional commission investigating the September 11 attacks

• "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda, ever" -- Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, March 21 2004

• "The al-Shifa facility had been under surveillance for some time because of a variety of intelligence reports, including HUMINT reports identifying it as a WMD-related facility, indirect links between the facility and bin Laden and the Iraqi chemical weapons program, and extraordinary security – including surface-to-air missiles – used to protect it during its construction. The direct physical evidence from the scene obtained at that time convinced the U.S. intelligence community that their suspicions were correct about the facility’s chemical weapons role and that there was a risk of chemical agents getting into the hands of al-Qaeda, whose interest in obtaining such weapons was clear." William Cohen, former Secretary of defense in a sworn statement to the 9/11 Commission, March 23 2004 (Page 9)

• Interviewer, 31 January 2003: "Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September the 11th?" President Bush: "I can't make that claim."

• "What I have said, however, to the liaison committee, and this is backed up by the evidence we have from intelligence, submitted to me by the joint intelligence committee, is that, yes, on the one hand, we do not know of a link between Iraq and the September 11 attack. But on the other hand there are unquestionably links between al-Qaida and Iraq. Just how far those links go is a matter of speculation. This isn't a static situation. It is changing. We are getting fresh intelligence in the entire time." Tony Blair, February 5 2003

• "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. ... There's numerous contacts between the two" -- President George W. Bush, June 18 2004

• "In my judgment, Saddam assessed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as a threat rather than a potential partner to be exploited to attack the United States. Bin Laden wanted to attack Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990 rather than have the Saudi government depend on foreign military forces." Judith Yaphe CIA counterterrorism analyst who specialized in Iraq during the George H. W, Bush administration .

• Stephen Hayes's book, titled "The Connection", details this alleged link and is entirely based upon a report by the Undersecretary of Defense, Douglas Feith - which has since been characterized by the Pentagon as 'inaccurate'. It "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of Defense Intelligence Agency .

• An article in the Times Online quotes a recently-leaked 'Top Secret' UK government memo: marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "C {(head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove) states that} military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WDM. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Times Online

• "In 125 separate appearances, they (Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice) made {...} 61 misleading statements about Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda" -- Report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform - Minority Staff pdf

• "We owe it to the memories of those who lost their lives September 11 to remember, to reflect, and bring justice to those responsible.

"We also have a similar obligation not to use the events of 9/11, and the great loss which so many endured, as a pretext for launching a war against Iraq.

"Iraq was not responsible for 9/11.

"Iraq has not been linked to 9/11.

"Yet here we are on the anniversary of that grim day, and the Administration is attempting to reframe 9/11 by beating the drum for war against a nation not connected to 9/11." -- Dennis Kucinich, Washington, 10 September 2002

• "Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11." - North Carolina Representative Robin Hayes, Republican, vice-chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, interviewed on CNN, June 29, 2005

Carol Costello:"But there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al-Qaida."

Hayes: "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. There's evidence everywhere. We get access to it. Unfortunately others don't. But the evidence is very clear."

Costello: "What evidence is there?"

Hayes: "The connection between individuals who were connected to Saddam Hussein, folks who worked for him, we've seen it time and time again."

Costello: "Well, are you saying that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11?"

Hayes: "I'm saying that Saddam Hussein -- and I think you're losing track of what we're trying to talk about here -- Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11."

Costello: " no evidence ."

Hayes: "Well, I'm sorry, you haven't looked in the right places."

"I haven't seen compelling evidence of that" -John McCain, asked about Hayes' statements

"I think it undermines the confidence of the American people. I think it shows a contempt for the American people. Unless Robin is going to some tippy-top secret briefing, I'm not sure what Robin’s source of information is." - North Carolina Representative Brad Miller, Democrat

"Extensive research reveals that the facts are clear - Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorists' attacks." - North Carolina Representative G. K. Butterfield, Democrat, who serves with Hayes on the Armed Services Committee

• "I have not seen one.... I have never seen any evidence to suggest there was one." Colin Powell, when asked whether there had been a "connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attack of 9/11".

• "The Iraqi secret services had links to these groups through a person called Faruq Hajizi, later named Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and arrested after the fall of Saddam's regime as he tried to re-enter Iraq. Iraqi secret agents helped terrorists enter the country and directed them to the Ansar al-Islam camps in the Halbija area." Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, May 23rd, 2005

• "There was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida. This administration never said that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, for example, Iraqi intelligence agents met with (Osama) bin Laden, the head of al-Qaida in Sudan." President George W. Bush, June 17th, 2005

• "There was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We have found no relationship whatever between Iraq and 9/11." Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, July 22nd 2004

• "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there." Thomas Kean, July 22nd 2004

• "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two." --Donald Rumsfeld, October 2004, referring to Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

• Al-Qaeda
• Causes and prelude of the 2003 Iraq conflict
• Conspiracy theories
• History of Iraq
• United States-Iraqi relations