Cheney reasserts Iraq/al-Qaeda links

US Vice-President Dick Cheney repeated assertions on Sunday on links between the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda despite a recent Senate intelligence committee report that concluded otherwise.

In defending the decision to invade Iraq despite its lack of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Cheney said the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a US air strike this year, was in Baghdad before the war was evidence that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda.

But a Senate intelligence committee report on prewar Iraq intelligence released on Friday concluded that there was no evidence that Mr Hussein’s Ba’athist regime had either harboured or turned a blind eye to Mr Zarqawi.

Read the rest at the Financial Times