ADMINISTRATION — PENTAGON REPORT CONFIRMS NO SADDAM LINK TO AL QAEDA: McClatchy reports that an “exhaustive” Pentagon-sponsored review of “more than 600,000 Iraqi documents” captured after the 2003 invasion “has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.” The full report, set to be released tomorrow, “was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a ‘painful’ declassification review.” In September 2002, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that American intelligence had “bulletproof” evidence of links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Earlier that same week, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice asserted that “there are some Al Qaeda personnel who found refuge in Baghdad.” In fact, the Defense Department reported last April that interrogations of deposed Iraqi leaders showed that Hussein’s government “did not cooperate” with al Qaeda. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s September 2006 report revealed a 2005 CIA assessment declaring that prior to the war Saddam’s government “did not have a relations, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward” al Qaeda leader Abu Musam al-Zarqawi and his associates.

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