Remarks on Iraq’s links to al-Qaida were ‘misunderstood’, says Rumsfeld

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday he was misunderstood when he stated hours earlier that he knew of no “strong, hard evidence” linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaida.

“I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between al-Qaida and Iraq,” Mr Rumsfeld said in a Pentagon website statement, issued following remarks he made to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Monday.

“Today at the council, I even noted that ‘when I’m in Washington, I pull out a piece of paper and say “I don’t know, because I’m not in that business, but I’ll tell you what the CIA thinks” and I read it’.”

In the new statement, Mr Rumsfeld listed what he said were arguments for suggesting links between al-Qaida and Iraq under Saddam, including what the CIA regarded as “credible evidence” that al-Qaida leaders had sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session before the Council on Foreign Relations, had been asked to explain the connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network - one of the US arguments for launching a war on Iraq.

He replied: “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

He said there were “many differences of opinion in the intelligence community.” He did not elaborate on that, but said relationships among terrorists “evolve and change over time.”

When asked what he thought was the primary reason for invading Iraq, he said it was important to remove Saddam’s regime.

“It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “But the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail.”