US: Despite US President George Bush's admission last month that "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th", the Vice- President, Mr Dick Cheney, continues to insist - even more emphatically - on such a link.
In a speech in Texas at the weekend, Mr Cheney stated without qualification that Saddam Hussein "had an established relationship with al-Qaeda, providing training to al-Qaeda members in areas of poisons, gases and conventional bombs". Intelligence services have been unable to confirm that al-Qaeda, which carried out the September 11th attacks on the US, had any meaningful links or contacts with Saddam Hussein's regime. Mr Bush's acknowledgement in September that this was so came after he was challenged about Mr Cheney's claim to the contrary on a television programme.
The Vice-President's remarks to the James Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston came on the heels of harsh attacks on the administration's credibility from liberal Democrats in the US Congress. "The trumped-up reasons for going to war have collapsed," Senator Edward Kennedy told the Senate on Friday before a vote in both houses of Congress to devote $87 billion to post-war reconstruction and military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie," Senator Kennedy said.
Yesterday US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell replied that "the American people were not told lie after lie after lie". They were told of a "dangerous situation in Iraq" where Saddam Hussein "was developing weapons of mass destruction".
Interviewed from Bangkok on CBS News, Mr Powell also confirmed the existence, not known before now, of a year-long State Department study which a month before the Iraq invasion concluded that the post-war situation would be more dire than the Pentagon was predicting.
Pentagon officials ignored the report and blocked the appointment of its co-ordinator, Mr Tom Warrick, to the US military's reconstruction office, the New York Times reported yesterday, citing administration officials.
The report warned of the need to deploy significant force to prevent criminals from engaging "in acts of killing, plunder and looting" immediately after regime change, something which did not occur, and predicted a high level of resistance while the Pentagon was forecasting a friendly reception for US troops.
Despite the extensive nature of the year-long study which cost $5 million and involved 200 Iraqi exiles and experts, the military office charged with rebuilding post-war Iraq did not hear of it until less than a month before the March invasion by US-led forces.
The report was made available to the Pentagon, "how they used it I can't answer," said Mr Powell, whose department was significantly sidelined by the Pentagon in the planning for the war and its aftermath.
In his speech on Friday evening, Mr Cheney outlined the case for American pre-emptive action and added - in a clear reference to a threatened French veto at the UN before the war - that the US must not "neglect our own defence, merely on the say-so of a single foreign government". The action in Iraq was "another essential step in the war on terror", he said. Saddam Hussein "had a lengthy history of reckless and sudden aggression. He cultivated ties to terror, hosting the Abu Nidal organisation, supporting terrorists, and making payments to the families of suicide bombers. He also had an established relationship with al-Qaeda, providing training to al-Qaeda members in areas of poisons, gases and conventional bombs. He built, possessed, and used weapons of mass destruction."
With the Iraq action losing popularity among the electorate, linking Saddam Hussein with the attacks on America could have an important bearing on the 2004 presidential election. A mid-summer poll showed that seven in 10 Americans believe Saddam Hussein was implicated in the attacks.
Meanwhile US military commanders have developed a plan that could see the number of troops in Iraq falling by 30,000 or more before the election.
The Pentagon would begin to draw down forces next spring, cutting the number of troops from 130,000 to fewer than 100,000 by the summer and then to 50,000 by mid-2005, officers involved in the planning told the Washington Post.