No Saddam link to Zarqawi says report

THERE’S no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaida associates, according to a Senate report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Democrats said the report undercuts President Bush’s justification for going to war.

The declassified document released yesterday by the Senate Intelligence Committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the lead up to war.

The report comes at a time when Bush is emphasising the need to prevail in Iraq to win the war on terrorism while Democrats are seeking to make that policy an issue in the mid-term elections.

It discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam’s government “did not have a relationship, harbour, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to excerpts of the 400-page report provided by Democrats.

Bush and other administration officials have said that the presence of Zarqawi in Iraq before the war was evidence of a connection between Saddam’s government and al-Qaida. Zarqawi was killed by a US airstrike in June.

White House press secretary Tony Snow played down the report as “nothing new”.

The administration, said Senator John Rockefeller, a top Democrat on the committee, “exploited the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, leading a large majority of Americans to believe — contrary to the intelligence assessments at the time — that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks”.