Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida

I don't expect a small matter like facts to get in the way of anything that Vice President Cheney says but, despite his repeated claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, a new Pentagon-sponsored study has found that the VP was talking through his bottom. After all, when a previous report discounted any link the Vice President was on the Rush Limbaugh show spouting the opposite. He claimed:

.. that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

The first report was not conclusive, but the latest certainly appears to be:

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.

I seriously don't expect this will change a single thing that Cheney says, as he has always insisted on seeing a link where there was none.

However this report does highlight just how much the war with Iraq was consistently and repeatedly sold on lies. One of the reasons Cheney clung to the al Qaeda link with Saddam was because, once WMD failed to materialise, this was the last and only justification for the war that could be put forward.

Now, even that has been removed. So we are left looking at a war that was not to remove WMD, nor to remove a man who had a link to al Qaeda. I suppose what they are left with now is that Saddam was a very bad man.

The real scandal here is that both Bush and Cheney will get to leave office without being impeached.

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Tags: Iraq war, Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, links, Bush, Cheney