US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday that he had seen no "strong, hard evidence" linking former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, though he tempered his comment by noting that stark disagreements on the issue remained among US intelligence analysts.
"I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way," Rumsfeld said when asked about ties between Saddam and the terror network run by Osama bin Laden.
Senior administration officials cited the existence of ties between them as a rationale for war on Iraq.
"Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was," Rumsfeld said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."
Relationships among terrorists and terrorist networks are complicated to track, Rumsfeld said, because "in many cases, they cooperate not in a chain of command but in a loose affiliation, a franchising arrangement almost."
He said that even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist leader blamed for some of the most violent attacks inside Iraq since the end of major combat operations, probably had no formal allegiance to Osama bin Laden, although "they're just two peas in a pod in terms of what they're doing."
The extent of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda has been subjected to intense and often contentious scrutiny, especially this campaign season. While Rumsfeld has frequently cited CIA reports of murky ties, including the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, he has not been as adamant on the issue as other senior administration officials, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney.
"There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials, and al-Qaeda operatives," Rumsfeld said in November 2002.
"They have occurred over a span of some eight or 10 years to our knowledge. There are currently al-Qaeda in Iraq."
But even when discussing intelligence pointing to Iraq-al-Qaeda links, Rumsfeld has noted the absence of certainty.
In September 2002, he warned that it was not always possible for the government to satisfy a public desire for "some hard evidence" of Iraq's ties to terrorist networks.
"We have to face that fact that we're not going to have everything beyond a reasonable doubt," Rumsfeld said.
In his speech on Monday, Rumsfeld also gave an impassioned defense of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for his actions in support of the military effort to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and for serving as a voice of moderation in the Muslim world.
In particular, Rumsfeld said, Musharraf should not be criticized for pardoning Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan's nuclear laboratories who operated a secret network to sell nuclear equipment and skill abroad.
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