Washington – A government document raises doubts about claims that al-Qaeda members received training in Iraq to use biological and chemical weapons, as Senate Democrats on Sunday defended their push for a report on how the Bush administration handled prewar intelligence.
Democrats forced the Senate into an unusual closed session last week as they sought assurances that the Intelligence Committee would complete an investigation of intelligence about Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
Republicans said the session was a stunt and that the report, after nearly two years, was nearly complete. They agreed to appoint a bipartisan task force to review the committee’s prog ress and report by Nov. 14.
“We cannot have a government which is going to manipulate intelligence information. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it,” Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Newly declassified portions of a document from the Defense Intelligence Agency showed that the administration was alerted that an al-Qaeda member in U.S. custody probably was lying about links between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of al-Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort, identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training was taking place, the report said.
The DIA concluded that al- Libi probably was deliberately misleading theinterrogators, and he recanted the statements in January 2004, according to the document made public by Sen. Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“In other words, he’s an entirely unreliable individual upon whom the White House was placing substantial intelligence trust,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a member of the Intelligence Committee on CNN’s “Late Edition.”
Levin said in a statement that the declassified DIA material – which he had requested from the agency – indicates that the administration’s use of prewar intelligence was misleading and deceptive.
