Iraq, al-Qaida tie rejected

WASHINGTON — The CIA last fall repudiated the claim that there were prewar ties between Saddam Hussein's government and an operative of al-Qaida, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a report issued on Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The disclosure undercuts continuing assertions by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. The Republican-controlled committee also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

The findings, in two new reports, are part of an ongoing inquiry by the committee into prewar intelligence about Iraq. The conclusions went beyond its earlier findings, issued in the summer of 2004, by including criticism not just of American intelligence agencies but also of the administration.

Several Republicans strongly dissented from the conclusions in the report about the Iraqi National Congress, saying they overstated the role that the exile group played in the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. But the committee overwhelmingly approved the other report, with only one Republican senator voting against it.

The reports did not address the politically divisive question of whether the Bush administration had exaggerated or misused intelligence as part of its effort to win support for the invasion of Iraq. But one report did contradict the administration's assertions, made before the war and since, that ties between al- Zarqawi and Saddam's government provided evidence of a close relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

As recently as Aug. 21, President Bush said at a news conference that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi." But a CIA report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates," according to the new Senate findings.

The CIA report also directly contradicted claims made in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who mentioned al- Zarqawi by name no fewer than 20 times during a speech to the United Nations Security Council that made the administration's case to go to war. In that speech, Powell said that Iraq "today harbors a deadly terrorist network" headed by al-Zarqawi, and dismissed as "not credible" assertions by the Iraqi government that it had no knowledge of al-Zarqawi's whereabouts.

In fact, the Senate investigation concluded that Saddam regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a potential ally, and that the Iraqi intelligence service "actively attempted to locate and capture al-Zarqawi without success."