Interrogations of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and documents seized after the 2003 US-led invasion confirmed that his regime had not been cooperating with al-Qaeda, the Washington Post reported on its Web site yesterday.
The report contradicted a strong argument for the invasion made by the administration of US President George W. Bush that Baghdad had a working relationship with al-Qaeda, the Afghanistan-based group led by Osama bin Laden blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
The Post reported that a newly released declassified Department of Defense report said information obtained after the fall of Saddam confirmed the prewar position of CIA and Pentagon intelligence that the Iraqi government had no substantial contacts with al-Qaeda.
This position was shored up by interrogations of Saddam and other top officials captured by the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, said the report, obtained by the Post.
The report said that the office of then-undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith -- one of the foremost advocates for invading Iraq after the 2001 attacks -- had deliberately ignored the CIA's position and characterized the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda as "mature" and "symbiotic" in a September 2002 briefing to the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Feith briefing alleged that the two cooperated in 10 areas, including training, financing and logistics.
But the new report, the Post said, demonstrated that the US intelligence community had concluded at the time that there were "no conclusive signs" of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda and that "direct cooperation ... has not been established" between the two.
Prior to the war there was little public dispute inside the US over the Bush administration's linking Iraq and bin Laden's group.
But since the invasion, a number of intelligence officials have said that the White House and its backers ignored their intelligence and "cherry picked" information that supported their campaign to persuade the US of the need for war.
In a radio interview on Wednesday, Cheney insisted on a prewar link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, saying that the group was working in Iraq "before we even arrived on the scene."
"As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq," Cheney told a conservative radio talk-show host.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS