Not only has there never been any evidence of any involvement by Saddam or Iraq with the attacks on 9/11, but there has never been any evidence of any operational connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

And Colin Powell finally conceded that there is, and these are his words, no "concrete evidence about the connection." "The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track al Qaeda" disclosed that "his team had found no evidence linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein." And the top investigator for our European allies has said, 'If there were (any) such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.'"

President Bush, by the way, finally admitted nine days ago on Aug. 21 during a press conference that there was no connection between the attacks on 9/11 and Iraq. It's terrific that the President has now admitted what others have known for so long — but where is the accountability for the tragic war we were led into on the basis of his earlier misrepresentations?

Beside the fictions of Saddam Hussein somehow being linked to the 9/11 attacks and his supposed connections with al Qaeda, what was the principal justification for forgoing additional weapons inspections, working with our allies toward a solution, refraining from seeking additional resolutions from the United Nations consistent with international law, and hurrying to war — a so-called "pre-emptive" war — in which we would attack and occupy a Muslim nation that posed no security risk to the United States, and cause the deaths of so many thousands of innocent men, women, and children — and the deaths and lifetime injuries to so many thousands of our own servicemen and servicewomen?

The principal claim was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — biological and chemical weapons — and was seeking to build up a nuclear weapons capability. As we now know, there was nothing — no evidence whatsoever — to support those false claims.

President Bush represented to us — and to people around the world — that one of the reasons we needed to make war in Iraq — and to do it right away — was because Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons. His assertions about Saddam Hussein trying to purchase nuclear materials from an African nation and about Iraq seeking to obtain aluminum tubes for the enrichment of uranium were challenged at the time by our own intelligence agency and by our own scientists, yet President Bush failed to tell us that!