PENTAGON RELEASES STUDY SHOWING THERE NEVER WAS A LINK BETWEEN SADDAM AND AL QAEDA

It took five years but the Pentagon has finally released a study showing there never was a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda before the United States invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003.

The Pentagon study shoots down former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statement that there was "bullet-proof evidence" that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein an al Qaeda.

Even after the United States invaded Iraq and didn't find any weapons of mass destruction, or a nuclear capability, Vice President Dick Cheney was still telling veteran audiences there was a tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

But it didn't stop there.

President Bush not long ago said al Qaeda was active in Iraq before the invasion, and then Republican Presidential candidate John McCain made fun of Democratic Presidential candidate Barak Obama for saying al Qaeda was not in Iraq until the United States invaded Iraq.

Obama was right and both Bush and McCain were wrong according to the Pentagon study.

Al Qaeda didn't make their presence known in Iraq until AFTER the United States invaded and occupied Iraq five years ago.


Study finds no Saddam-al-Qaeda link

The US invaded Iraq saying it had ties to al-Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BC09965E-724A-45E0-BDF6-CC4681C87BFB.htm

An exhaustive Pentagon-backed study of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents seized after the 2003 US-led invasion has found no direct link between Saddam Hussein's government and The alleged link was one of the main reasons given by the US for going to war with Iraq and the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had said there was "bulletproof" evidence of a connection.

But leaked excerpts from the report due for release on Wednesday indicate the first official acknowledgement from the US military that there was no "direct operational link" with al-Qaeda, according to the McClatchy Newspapers group.

The original reason for going to war - that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat - has also lost credibility, with no such weapons found five years after the invasion.

Besides the hundreds of thousands of documents, the study's researchers also used thousands of hours of interrogations of former senior officials in Saddam's government now in US custody.

The study does indicate that Saddam Hussein did much to support "terrorism" in the Middle East and used it "as a routine tool of state power".

His government, the study says, had a programme for the "development, construction, certification and training for car bombs and suicide vests in 1999 and 2000".

But "the predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq" who were seen as Saddam's enemies, the report says.