Posted on 09/08/2006 3:11:07 PM PDT by Jacob Kell
WASHINGTON (AP) - There's no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Democrats said the report undercuts President Bush's justification for going to war.
The declassified document being released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the march to war.
It discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."
Bush and other administration officials have said that the presence of Zarqawi in Iraq before the war was evidence of a connection between Saddam's government and al-Qaida. Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in June this year.
The long-awaited report, said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a member of the committee, is "a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration's unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts" to link Saddam to al-Qaida.
The report, two years in the making, comes out amid a series of Bush speeches stressing that pursuing the military effort in Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terrorism, and two months before that policy will be tested in midterm elections.
"Based on the characterizations we've seen, it's nothing new," White House press secretary Tony Snow said of the report.
"In 2002 and 2003, members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had and they came to the very same conclusions about what was going on," Snow said. That was "one of the reasons you had overwhelming majorities in the United States Senate and the House for taking action against Saddam Hussein," he said.
The report deals with two aspects of prewar intelligence - the role of the Iraqi National Congress and its exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and a comparison of prewar intelligence assessments and postwar findings on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's links to terrorist groups.
Thank you for these notes. When you first consider that this was a Democrat-written appendix, and so it is not even a commitee report, then you have, by the time Charlie Gibson:
You have media spin put on Democrat spin put on CIA spin.
No wonder the end product is so far from the truth.
bump
They count on it.
In the caveman age, the Dems could rely on the three networks to run interference for them by not bringing up any info from the past that could contradict their lies. Oh, they STILL can count on that, but thankfully in this day and age there is MORE to the media than just the three networks. And the Democrats occasionally forget that fact.
Families sue Iraq over 9/11?
What about those Pinko Firefighters trying to sue Haliburton?
9/11 families didn't only sue Iraq over 9/11, they won in federal court.
I think the whole committee signed off on the sections of the report I read yesterday. It really surprised me that Sen. Roberts would sign off on a report that interviewed such a small group of people.
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