U.S. troops have captured dozens of alleged Al Qaeda members, but these arrests have so far failed to bring new evidence of Iraqi–Al Qaeda cooperation.
The New York Times reported in June that two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in custody, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, both told interrogators that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not carry out operations together. In July, it was reported that U.S. authorities captured Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence officer alleged to have met with Al Qaeda mastermind Mohamed Atta in April 2001 in Prague, but the results of his interrogation were not reported.
The UN Monitoring Group on Al Qaeda released a draft report in June that found no link between Iraq and the terrorist group. The committee’s chief investigator said, "Nothing has come to our notice that would indicate links. . . hat doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. But from what we’ve seen the answer is no."
Since September, some administration officials reiterated that they never directly linked Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. President Bush said on September 17, "No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th. Now, what the vice president said was that he has been involved with Al Qaeda. And al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He’s the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. . .There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties."
The administration continued to insist that the potential combination of Iraq, WMD, and terrorism posed an unacceptable threat. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on October 8, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks. Yet the possibility remained that he might use his weapons of mass destruction or that terrorists might acquire such weapons from his regime, to mount a future attack far beyond the scale of 9/11. This terrible prospect could not be ignored or wished away."
The president and the vice president, however, continue to assert the links by implication. Vice President Dick Cheney said in October: "Saddam Hussein had a lengthy history of reckless and sudden aggression. He cultivated ties to terror—hosting the Abu Nidal organization, supporting terrorists, and making payments to the families of suicide bombers in Israel. He also had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional bombs."
In November, the Weekly Standard published excerpts from a classified annex to a memo dated October 27, 2003 by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The article claimed that Feith’s list of fifty incidents of alleged Iraqi–Al Qaeda contacts proved "an operational relationship from the early 1990s," and that "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans."
The Department of Defense issued a statement saying the memo had been misinterpreted, saying that the items were raw intelligence previously considered and did not represent new information. "The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."
For a complete copy of the report WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications,
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