No link between Saddam and Al Qaeda?

Not so fast….

” deputy prime minister of Iraq yesterday offered a sharp contradiction of the conventional wisdom here that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al Qaeda had no connection before the 2003 war, flatly contradicting a recent report from the Senate’s intelligence committee.

In a speech in which he challenged the belief of war critics that Iraqis’ lives are now worse than under Saddam Hussein, Barham Salih said, “The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told.” He went on to say, “I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam’s regime.”

A Kurdish politician who took his high school exams from inside a Baathist prison, Mr. Salih said he was the target of the alliance between jihadists, Baathists, and Al Qaeda in 2001, when a group known as Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate him. In 2002, envoys of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two Kurdish parties sharing sovereignty over northern Iraq between the two Iraq wars, presented the CIA with evidence that the organization that tried to kill Mr. Salih had been in part funded and directed by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

Those words directly contradict a recent report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that declassified a 2005 CIA assessment of Iraq’s pre-war ties to Al Qaeda and found that none existed.”

Of course we know that the report itself wasn’t worth the paper it was written on as the agenda driven Democrats immediately used it for political purposes.

Since the report was released last week, it’s findings have been rounded and solidly refuted by bloggers, and yes, us intelligence experts who cite the various proofs that show the links DID exist.

No more condemning of the nonsense that the SSCI-2 came up with than that of Stephen Hayes 2005’s “The Mother of All Connections”, which is worth a read.

You know, this isn’t about politics folks, but that’s what it has become. Democrats could care less about security or intelligence, they’re only concern is defeating President Bush in 2006 and 2008 (even though he isn’t running). It’s about “he said, she said, they said”, but not about the facts and the fact is that if anyone thinks Saddam and Al Qaeda weren’t linked has their head up their ass, it’s just that simple.

UPDATE: Read Clarice Feldman’s American Thinker article - right on.