Rumsfeld doubts Iraq terror link

American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has admitted he has not seen any "strong, hard evidence" linking ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaida.

Asked to describe the connection between Hussein and al-Qaida, the Pentagon chief declined to answer the question but then said: “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

He said he had seen intelligence on that “migrate in amazing ways” in the past year, adding that 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, but he acknowledged the intelligence ahead of the invasion was faulty.

“It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Why the intelligence proved wrong, I’m not in a position to say, but the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail.”

Rumsfeld said US President George W Bush had taken the position that “it was unwise for the civilised world to allow Iraq to continue rejecting” UN resolutions calling for a “vicious regime” that had used weapons of mass destruction on its own people to give them up.

“It was important to set that right by removing that regime before they could gather weapons of mass destruction for themselves or transfer them to terrorists,” he said. ”That was his view … and that’s what the United Nations voted on.”

Rumsfeld said “everyone believed” Saddam had the weapons. “Even the people at the UN who voted the other way acknowledged the fact that he had filed a fraudulent declaration,” he said.

A day earlier, Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and the truth may unfold over months or years.

“I’m surprised we have not found them yet,” Rumsfeld said in the Fox News interview. “He has either hidden them so well or moved them somewhere else or decided to destroy them … in event of a conflict but kept the capability of developing them rapidly.”

In response to other questions, Rumsfeld said that Iran was engaged in “a lot of meddling” in Iraq and that Syria has been “notably unhelpful” by refusing to release frozen Iraqi assets and allowing foreign terrorist movements across its border with Iraq. He said talks were in progress with Syria “but it’s too early to say there’s been any progress at all”.

Rumsfeld drew one brief burst of applause, when he praised Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf for defying Islamic extremists “who want to kill him” and closing down the nuclear black market run by renegade scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

“Every day he gets up, he’s walking a tightrope,” Rumsfeld said of Musharraf. “He is a courageous person and a skilful person, and the world is very lucky he’s there, doing what he’s doing.”