LAT : Senate Report Contradicts Administration Intelligence Claims

Senate Report Contradicts Administration Intelligence Claims

By Greg Miller | Times Staff Writer | September 8, 2006

Washington -- The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday said it had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida or provided safe harbor to one of its most notorious operatives, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- conclusions contradicting claims by the Bush administration before it invaded Iraq.

In a long-awaited report, the committee determined that the former Iraqi dictator was wary of al-Qaida, repeatedly rebuffed requests from its leader, Osama bin Laden, for assistance and sought to capture al-Zarqawi when the deadly terrorist turned up in Baghdad.

The findings are the latest in a series of high-profile studies to refute some of the Bush administration's key arguments for invading Iraq, mainly that the Saddam regime possessed stockpiles of banned weapons and had cultivated ties to terrorist networks. Presenting these since-discredited allegations as fact, President Bush and other high-ranking officials argued that Saddam's government posed an intolerable risk in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The 356-page report is certain to fuel election-season debate over the administration's foreign policy as Bush is seeking to shore up support for the war in Iraq through a series of speeches that cast the conflict as central to winning the larger war on terror.

White House spokesman Tony Snow on Friday described the report as "nothing new."

"It's, again, kind of re-litigating things that happened three years ago," Snow said. "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."

In one of its main conclusions, the report said that "postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support."

The report's disclosures include a classified assessment by the CIA last year that Saddam's regime "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."

The committee said U.S. intelligence agencies "accurately characterized" bin Laden's intermittent interest in pursuing assistance from Iraq but were largely wrong about Saddam's attitudes. The dictator, according to the report, was so wary of the terrorist network that he "issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qaida."

Democrats seized on the findings to accuse the Bush administration of distorting the threat Iraq posed.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the chamber's intelligence committee, accused the White House of pursuing "a deceptive strategy of using intelligence reporting that the intelligence community had already warned was uncorroborated, unreliable, and in critical instances, fabricated."

The report is based largely on documents recovered from Iraqi facilities in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, as well as interrogations of Saddam and other Iraqi officials captured by coalition forces.

As a result, it represents the most thorough comparison to date of prewar suspicions with evidence subsequently collected. Much of the information was unavailable to U.S. intelligence agencies and policymakers before the war.

The report's publication was marked by political wrangling within the Republican-controlled intelligence committee, with two GOP members -- Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- breaking ranks to vote for conclusions drafted by Democrats.

In a statement, Snowe cited the "obligation of our government to learn from these horrific mistakes" and complained that the intelligence committee "once noted for its bipartisanship, has become marred by partisan feuding." Hagel was not available for comment.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the committee chairman, objected to findings he said overstated the influence of the Iraqi National Congress -- an Iraqi exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi that had close ties to the Bush administration and has been accused of funneling prewar misinformation about Baghdad's weapons programs to U.S. intelligence agencies and news organizations.

The committee devoted 207 pages to an analysis of the INC, concluding that it "attempted to influence U.S. policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors."

Another section focused on the erroneous prewar estimates by the CIA and other agencies that Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions and was pursuing the development of nuclear arms.

But the report's most significant new information focuses on Baghdad's alleged ties to al-Qaida.

Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials persistently have touted intelligence reports suggesting a relationship between Saddam and bin Laden. But the Senate report contradicts many of those assertions.

The report affirms, for instance, that al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad for about seven months in 2002. But Hussein was initially unaware of his presence in the country and later ordered his intelligence services to capture al-Zarqawi, according to the report.

The attempt was unsuccessful, and al-Zarqawi escaped to Iran. He also hid in areas of northern Iraq beyond Saddam's reach. After Saddam was overthrown, al-Zarqawi led the deadly insurgency against U.S. forces before he was killed by a U.S. air strike in June.

The committee's report also dismisses a claim repeatedly cited by Cheney that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2001. That claim has bolstered public perceptions that Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

But postwar evidence indicates no such meeting occurred, the committee found, citing Atta's travel and cell-phone records obtained by the FBI, as well as information from the Iraqi agent alleged to have attended the meeting.

The report casts similar doubt on assertions that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qaida operatives or allowed terrorist organizations to practice for attacks on aircraft at a facility south of Baghdad known as Salman Pak.

Despite reports of repeated contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, the committee said U.S. intelligence has been able to assemble evidence of only one meeting -- a 1995 encounter in Sudan between bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officer Faruz Hijazi.

In postwar debriefings, Hijazi said Saddam had instructed him to "only listen" and not negotiate or offer support to bin Laden. He said bin Laden "requested an office in Iraq, military training for his followers, Chinese sea mines and the broadcast of speeches from an anti-Saudi cleric."

Hijazi said he "immediately rejected" virtually all of the requests, offering only to consider the one on broadcasting anti-Saudi speeches.

Overall, the document portrays Hussein and his underlings as alarmed by U.S. accusations linking him to al-Qaida. At one point, the report said, Saddam was warned by the director of Iraq's intelligence service "that U.S. intelligence was attempting to fabricate connections between the (Iraqi intelligence services) and al-Qaida" to justify an invasion.

The Senate report also offers new theories as to why Saddam's regime was unable to convince U.N. inspectors before the U.S. invasion that it no longer had stocks of illegal weapons.

A recent CIA analysis concluded that Saddam was stunned by the aggressiveness of weapons inspections after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and he ordered the covert destruction of undeclared weapons and documents. In the process, Saddam destroyed the records U.N. inspectors sought a decade later when putting pressure on Iraq to account for its illicit weapons.

"The result was that Iraq was unable to provide proof when it tried at a later time to establish compliance," the report said, citing the CIA study.

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds contributed to this story.