U.N. group finds no al-Qaida Iraq link

UNITED NATIONS - The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the U.N. Security Council to track al-Qaida, said his five-member team has not found evidence linking al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein's former regime in Iraq.

A report released Thursday by the monitoring group did find that, despite "marked successes" in the fight against al-Qaida, a new generation of al-Qaida-trained terrorists, as well as veterans of the group, continue to threaten the global community.

The report lauds the capture of several senior Qal-aida operatives and successful efforts to block the group's access to the international banking system, but said recent bombings in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and elsewhere suggest al-Qaida "and its associated groups still pose a significant threat to international peace and security."

Monitoring group chairman Michael Chandler cautioned that the absence of evidence linking Hussein to al-Qaida was not definitive. "That doesn't mean to say it doesn't exist" but simply that his team hasn't found such evidence.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - A U.S. Special Forces soldier was killed and two were wounded in a firefight with suspected rebels in eastern Afghanistan, the military said Thursday.

The clash occurred Wednesday near the eastern town of Gardez, the military said in a statement from its headquarters at Bagram Air Base.

Names of the dead and wounded soldiers were withheld until their families are notified.

WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court Thursday rejected for the time being the Bush administration's request that it prohibit Zacarias Moussaoui from interviewing captured people linked to al-Qaida to support his defense that he was not involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist plot.

But the three-judge panel of the court, in Richmond, Va., left open the likelihood that it would revisit the issue. In rejecting the government's appeal, the court said that a lower court's order to allow Moussaoui's lawyers to interview one captured Qaida figure had not yet reached the stage at which it could be reviewed.

The judges said that if and when the Justice Department went through with its threat to refuse to make any al-Qaida figures available and the trial judge sanctioned the government, an appeals court could then consider intervening in the trial.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday delegated to his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, the final word on which terrorism suspects are to be tried by a military tribunal.

Wolfowitz also was given the authority to decide who will serve on the tribunals, which the Pentagon calls commissions.

After President Bush determines which terrorism suspects in U.S. custody are subject to be tried under his Nov. 13, 2001, military order, a chief prosecutor would draft charges against any or all of those suspects. It would then be for Wolfowitz to decide which would actually go to trial, according to Air Force Maj. John Smith of the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions.

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