CIA had doubts on Iraq link to al-Qaida

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

Tuesday June 10, 2003

The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk

The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely.

As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war.

The interrogation reports of two senior al-Qaida members, both in US custody, showed that the CIA had reason to doubt the allegations of a connection between Saddam's regime and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Such assertions, promoted vigorously by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, were used as an additional justification for war, after the central argument that Iraq's arsenal of banned weapons posed an imminent danger.

The charge of a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam was contentious even at the time, and yesterday's report in the New York Times that the two al-Qaida members, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, dismissed the idea deepened the impression that Americans had been deliberately misled to support the decision for war.

In recent days that impression has become sufficiently widespread to put officials on the defensive.

Yesterday Mr Bush predicted that US inspectors scouring Iraq would soon find evidence of a programme of weapons of mass destruction. He also reaffirmed that al-Qaida maintained a network in Baghdad.

"Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons programme," Mr Bush said. "I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons programme."

That assertion stops well short of Mr Bush's statement during a visit to Poland on May 31 that US troops had already found weapons of mass destruction: two trailers the US said at the time had been used as mobile biological labs.

With the White House fighting for its credibility, the New York Times reported that the two al-Qaida lieutenants had dismissed the notion of cooperation between Saddam and Bin Laden.

Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March last year, told his CIA interrogators that Bin Laden had considered and then rejected the idea of working with Saddam because he did not want to be in the Iraqi leader's debt.

His information was supported on the eve of war after Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan on March 1. Mohammed, who had been al-Qaida's chief of operations, told the CIA the group did not work with Saddam.

While the CIA shared its interrogation record of Zubaydah with other intelligence agencies, it did not release its conclusions to the public.

That omission could prove extremely damaging to the administration because it suggests that officials ignored intelligence that did not fit with their plans for Iraq.

"This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted," an intelligence official told the New York Times.

"Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted."