This is the kind of B.S. you've posted before, like saying Bush said Iraq was an imminent threat to us when in fact he didn't. No claim the Bush admin. made has been refuted by them (or anyone else). The Bush administration never gave 9/11, or at least the claim that Iraq was involved in it, as a reason. The ties to terrorism and WMD's were both reasons given. The Al Qaeda tie is irrefutable. Also, the assertion was always one of connections with terrorism, of which Al Qaeda was just one element. About the only thing that can be said is that they are no longer talking much about WMD's, but they have not said that was not a reason.
it has been known for years that Saddam armed and financed Ansar al Islam, a force of some six to seven hundred extremists that operated a terror camp in northern Iraq’s no-fly zone, controlling a string of villages along the Iranian border of the Kurdish self-rule area. It has long been known that senior Ansar members trained at a camp in Afghanistan that specialized in the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, such as ricin. And it is hardly a secret that a very senior al Qaeda leader named Abu Mussab al Zarqawi fled Afghanistan after the Taliban was defeated, and had his injured leg treated in a Baghdad hospital – surely with the knowledge of the Iraqi dictator and his secret police – after which he was sent to create a poison laboratory in the Ansar terrorist cell. The Ansar camp, incidentally, was targeted and annihilated by American warplanes a few weeks ago.
Critics of the Bush policy similarly elected to ignore his October 2002 assertion that Iraq’s terror connection was evidenced by Saddam’s longstanding protection of Abu Abbas, the leader of a terrorist group that in 1985 hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered an elderly, wheelchair-bound American passenger named Leon Klinghoffer. This was the same Abu Abbas who in recent years, according to FBI counter-terrorism analyst Mathew Levitt, "was the conduit for Saddam Hussein’s financing of the [Palestinian] suicide bombers"; the same Abu Abbas whom three captured Palestinian terrorists recently admitted they had met in December 2000, at which time they were in Iraq for training in the use of weapons and explosives. Earlier this month, US commandoes tracked down and arrested Abbas in Iraq, where he had indeed been living for most of the past seventeen years – just as President Bush told us.
And now, within the past few days, the London Telegraph has reported the monumentally important discovery of top-secret documents in the bombed-out Baghdad headquarters of Iraq’s intelligence service, documents that provide "evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein’s regime." The newly unearthed papers show that in March 1998, "an al Qaeda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad . . . to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al Qaeda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia." According to the Telegraph report, "[t]he meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad." Notably, this envoy’s visit took place less than five months before bin Laden’s group bombed two US embassies in Africa.