Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has evidence of some prewar Iraqi contacts and training with al-Qaida, based on prisoner interrogations, defector statements and documents collected in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no proof of joint terror operations, according to U.S. officials.
Most of the administration's public assertions have focused on a supporter of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is believed to have run terrorist training camps in both Iraq and Afghanistan and received medical care in Baghdad.
U.S. officials have accused al-Zarqawi of trying to train terrorists in the use of poison for possible attacks in Europe, running a terrorist haven in northern Iraq and organizing an attack that killed an American aid executive in Jordan last year.
But the Associated Press, quoting U.S. officials familiar with intelligence, reported that the administration has evidence of other contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida. These contacts spiked in 1995-96, when bin Laden was living in Sudan, which he left for Afghanistan in early 1996; and in 1998, while his terror network was in Afghanistan, and his operatives bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa.
The officials, all of whom spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, said there was credible evidence of more than a half-dozen high-level contacts between Iraqi intelligence agencies and leaders of bin Laden's organization but no direct evidence of Iraqi government sponsorship of al-Qaida attacks.
The AP reported that nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials said the strongest account of collaboration comes from the captured leader of one of al-Qaida's Afghan training camps. He claimed that bin Laden turned to Iraq for technical help on chemical weapons because bin Laden was concerned that al-Qaida lacked the expertise.
The captive has told interrogators that an al-Qaida militant known as Abdallah al-Iraqi shuttled between Afghanistan and Iraq from 1997 to 2002 looking to acquire poisons, officials said.
The captive also claims two al-Qaida associates were offered training by Hussein's government in chemical and biological poisons, officials said.