http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=16&u=/ap/20030913/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq_wolfowitz
Official Backs Off al-Qaida, Iraq Claim
Sat Sep 13, 7:33 AM ET
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's No. 2 official is backtracking from a public claim that associates of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden are trying to link up with Saddam Hussein loyalists to attack Americans.
"We know it had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with al-Qaida in particular, and we know a great many of bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organize in cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime to attack in Iraq," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Thursday on ABC's "Good Morning America." But Wolfowitz ? a key architect of U.S. policy in Iraq ? said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press that he had misspoken.
He said he was referring to only one man ? bin Laden supporter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the few names that Bush administration officials previously have cited to assert pre-war links between al-Qaida and Iraq.
Al-Zarqawi allegedly helped train Iraqis in the use of poisonous chemicals and once received medical care in Baghdad, U.S. officials have said.
"Zarqawi is actually the guy I was referring to ? should have been more precise," Wolfowitz said Friday. "It's not a great many ? it's one of bin Laden's key associates ? probably better referred to that way than a key lieutenant."
"On the specific issue of cooperation (between al-Qaida and insurgents), I have to emphasize this is a very hard target to penetrate," Wolfowitz said in the AP interview. "Our highest priority in Iraq is to get better intelligence on these people."
"There are some indications that they work together and they certainly work at common purpose," he said, declining to say what the indications are.
Wolfowitz's original claim had suggested a dangerous new development for the U.S.-led forces trying to stabilize the country.
Wolfowitz made the bin Laden deputy assertion Thursday after an ABC interviewer asked why the administration had put resources into the campaign in Iraq, which the interviewer said had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, while bin Laden was still at large.
"I appreciate the chance to say it a little more carefully because this was sort of unanticipated," Wolfowitz told the AP in retracting his statements. "I went ... to talk about Sept. 11."
In a Sept. 11 anniversary interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Wolfowitz said al-Qaida members have always been present in Iraq.
"They've been in Iraq before the war, they were there during the war, they're there now and they see any opportunity to kill Americans, to defeat Americans, as part of their war," he said.
In a Sept. 6 interview with The Washington Post, he also said hundreds of fighters from al-Qaida and other groups were now in Iraq.
"There are some thousands of former Baathists (members of Saddam's Baath Party) and some hundreds of al-Qaida and other foreign terrorists who are ... killing Americans and Iraqis and U.N. officials and moderate Shiite leaders in order to destabilize Iraq," Wolfowitz said in that interview.
On Friday he said he couldn't say how many of the foreigners might be al-Qaida because U.S. military forces were still trying to identify them.
The Bush administration has outlined only limited evidence of Iraqi-al-Qaida contacts before the war, and no conclusive evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida plotted joint terror operations.
Likewise, U.S. officials have said they have a poor picture of who is arrayed against U.S. forces in Iraq now, and how coordinated their activities are.
Even though weeks have passed, it remains unknown who carried out the three large terror bombings in Iraq since the war ended ? at the Jordanian Embassy, the U.N. headquarters and a mosque in Najaf.
Commanders on the ground in Iraq said they are still pressing efforts to determine whether there was a link between insurgents attacking coalition forces and any particular terrorist organization.
The administration argued long before the war against Iraq that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which he would sooner or later share with al-Qaida or other terrorists bent on targeting America. No such weapons have been found.
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