WASHINGTON, July 31 (AFP) - A top al-Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan months after the September 11 terror strikes was the main source for now-discredited intelligence claiming that Iraq provided chemical and biological arms training to members of the group, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Quoting unnamed US intelligence officials, the daily said "Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle, recanted the claims sometime last year, but not before they had become the basis of statements by President (George W.) Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda that involved poisons, gases and other illicit weapons."
Libi, captured in Pakistan in December 2001, "is still being held by the Central Intelligence Agency at a secret interrogation center, and American officials say his now-recanted claims raise new questions about the value of the information obtained from such detainees," the report said.
"Separate from the question of Mr. Libi's account, an internal CIA review of its prewar intelligence on Iraq is still underway, continuing a push to evaluate the information used as a rationale for war," the report added.
"The strongest White House assertions of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda that involved illicit weapons were made beginning in October 2002, when Mr. Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.'"
Ahead of the US-led invasion in March 2003, those claims were repeated by Bush and top advisers, but they have not repeated that allegation recently, the report noted.