Unqualified Offerings

The Post’s Jeff Smith throws the last bit of dirt on the remains of the “Saddam supported al-Qaeda!” case and tamps the mound flat:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides “all confirmed” that Hussein’s regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community’s prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information.

Via War and Piece. Note: The current holder of the Pentagon’s Feith Chair in Fancy, Eirc S. Edelman, has written a lengthy rebuttal to the IG report. Smith does not give much detail on the rebuttal – it’s hard to track his braiding of the duelling papers in the late part of his article – but Smith quotes the IG report as stating

But the inspector general’s report, in a footnote, commented that it was “noteworthy . . . that post-war debriefs of Sadaam Hussein, [former Iraqi foreign minister] Tariq Aziz, [former Iraqi intelligence minister Mani al-Rashid] al Tikriti, and [senior al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi, as well as document exploitation by DIA all confirmed that the Intelligence Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in all categories” alleged by Feith’s office.