The Dog Ate My Report!

As I said the other day, a new Pentagon-sponsored study has discovered that there was no link between Saddam and al Qaeda.

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

So how does the Bush White House react to this embarassing report which confirms that, in addition to their failure to find WMD, we can now put a match to the other reason which they used to justify the invasion, Saddam's supposed links to al Qaeda?

Easy... they feed it to the dog.

The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network.

Rather than posting the report online and making officials available to discuss it, as had been planned, the U.S. Joint Forces Command said it would mail copies of the document to reporters — if they asked for it. The report won't be posted on the Internet.

The reversal highlighted the politically sensitive nature of its conclusions, which were first reported Monday by McClatchy.

But why would they do this?

The study comes at a difficult time for the Bush administration. The fifth anniversary of the Iraq war is approaching on March 19, and Bush is attempting to hold support for a continued large U.S. troop presence there following a report from his on-the-ground commander, Army Gen. David Petraeus, in early April.

Navy Capt. Dennis Moynihan, a spokesman for the Norfolk, Va.-based Joint Forces Command, said, "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Moynihan declined further comment.

Be sure to send off for your copy, but don't hold your breath waiting for it to arrive.

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Tags: Pentagon study, Iraq war, Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, Bush, Cheney