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White House denies report on fake letter linking Saddam with al-Qaida

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-08-06 09:39

WASHINGTON -- The report saying the U.S. government fabricated a letter that linked former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida to justify the Iraq war was a false allegation, the White House said on Tuesday.

"The notion that the White House directed anyone to forge a letter from Habbush to Saddam Hussein is absurd," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

The announcement was made as a response to a book by Washington-based journalist Ron Suskind which was published on Tuesday.

In the book, titled "The way of the world," Suskind said the letter was written supposedly by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, a director of Iraqi intelligence in the Saddam Hussein administration.

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001," the book says. "It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al-Qaida, something the vice president's office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link."

For its part, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet also denied the allegation in a Tuesday statement, saying "there was no such order from the White House to me nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from CIA ever involved in any such effort."

"It is well established that, at my direction, CIA resisted efforts on the part of some in the administration to paint a picture of Iraqi-al-Qaida connections that went beyond the evidence," he said. "The notion that I would suddenly reverse our stance and have created and planted false evidence that was contrary to our own beliefs is ridiculous."

On Suskind's another allegation that the U.S. government had credible intelligence showing Saddam's administration did not own any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before the Iraq war, Tenet said "this is a complete fabrication."

"There were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD but our foreign intelligence colleagues and we assessed that these individuals were parroting the Baath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack," he said.

President George W. Bush's government launched the Iraq war on March, 2003, alleging the Saddam administration had links with al-Qaida's terrorists and owned WMDs. But, no such weapons were found in Iraq at last.