Critics questioning link between Iraq, al-Qaeda By Matt Kelley ASSOCIATED PRESS July 13, 2003 WASHINGTON – As President Bush works to quiet controversy over his discredited claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa, another of his prewar assertions is coming under fire: the alleged link between Saddam Hussein's regime and al- Qaeda. Before the war, Bush and members of his Cabinet said Hussein was harboring top al-Qaeda operatives and suggested Iraq could slip the terrorist network weapons of mass destruction. Critics attacked those assertions from the beginning for being counter to the ideologies of Hussein and al-Qaeda and short on corroborating evidence. Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Hussein to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best. "There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said. Intelligence agencies agreed on the "lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaeda" and said so to the White House and Congress, Thielmann said. Before the war, Bush and administration officials repeatedly said Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and other terror groups that could provide a path for weapons of mass destruction to find their way to terrorists. U.S. forces have not found any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq so far. "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda," Bush said in his January State of the Union speech. At the time, many terrorism experts criticized the claim. They noted that Hussein's secular regime was just the kind of Arab government that bin Laden's Islamic extremists want to replace. The administration's key evidence of a link was an operative named Abu Musab Zarqawi, who got medical care in Baghdad in May 2002 after being wounded in Afghanistan. In his Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell called Zarqawi "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants." Current and former intelligence officials now say Zarqawi's links to al-Qaeda are more tenuous – the CIA now says Zarqawi considers himself independent of al-Qaeda, for example. And while Zarqawi spent time in Iraq, it's unclear whether Hussein's regime simply allowed him to be there or actively tried to work with him. Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said last week it's still unclear how much support Zarqawi got from Hussein. "That (Hussein) was promoting al-Qaeda is absurd," Cannistraro said. "That there was a tolerance for a Zarqawi network in Iraq seems clear." Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.