CIA Rejected Prewar Hussein-Zarqawi Link

A Senate intelligence committee report released Friday said the CIA last year rejected prewar White House claims of a connection between the former regime in Iraq and al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the New York Times reported (see GSN, Sept. 7).

A second committee report criticizes administration’s use of the Iraqi National Congress in the buildup to the invasion.

Both reports are part of larger document on U.S. intelligence leading to the 2003 invasion, which is expected to be released following U.S. elections in November.  The reports released Friday do not address the potential exaggeration or misuse of intelligence to build support for the war.

The reputed connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda was one piece of the White House case for removing Hussein from power.  Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in February 2003 named Zarqawi at least 20 times in arguing for the invasion of Iraq before the U.N. Security Council, the Times reported.  Just last month, President George W. Bush said that Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.” 

However, the CIA reported in October 2005 that the regime in Iraq “did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the Senate committee.  Lawmakers said Hussein believed al-Qaeda was more threat than friend and “actively attempted to locate and capture al-Zarqawi without success.”

Bush administration officials yesterday continued to argue for the existence of a working relationship between prewar Iraq and al-Qaeda, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We’ve never been able to confirm a connection between Iraq and 9/11,” Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”  He said, though, that the Iraqi link to the terrorist organization was a “different issue.”

“There are two totally different propositions here.  People have consistently tried to confuse them,” he said.

“Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went to Iraq,” Cheney said.  “You had the poison facilities run by an affiliate of al-Qaeda. … This was a state sponsor of terror.  He had a relationship with terror groups, no doubt about it.”

“There were ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  “We know that Zarqawi was running a poison network in Iraq” (Agence France-Presse/News.com.au, Sept. 10).

The intelligence committee also chastised the National Security Council for its close prewar relationship with the Iraqi National Congress, and its leader Ahmad Chalabi, the Times reported.  The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency by 2002 had warned that “the INC was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” particularly from Iran.

The group delivered large amounts of faulty intelligence on Iraq, according to the report.  It said the organization “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.”

Bad information from the organization was included in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and other prewar U.S. intelligence documents, the report said.  Sources promoted by the group played a role in placing in the intelligence estimate now-discredited claims that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories and was working to resume its nuclear program.

Lawmakers could not determine whether the also-discredited intelligence source known as Curveball (see GSN, June 26) had connections to the Iraqi National Congress.  Curveball was a main source for the mobile laboratory claim.

A number of committee Republicans opposed the report’s findings regarding the Iraqi National Congress.  Panel Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) called the conclusions “misleading and … not supported by the facts.” 

“Information from the INC and INC-affiliated defectors was not widely used in intelligence community products and played little role in the intelligence community’s judgments about Iraq’s WMD programs,” according to a dissenting opinion from Roberts and four other panel Republicans.

All seven committee Democrats and Republican Senators Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) voted to approve the report (Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, Sept. 9).

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