A Rebuke

In a speech in which he challenged the belief of war critics that Iraqis' lives are now worse than under Saddam Hussein, Barham Salih said, "The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told." He went on to say, "I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam's regime."

A Kurdish politician who took his high school exams from inside a Baathist prison, Mr. Salih said he was the target of the alliance between jihadists, Baathists, and Al Qaeda in 2001, when a group known as Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate him. In 2002, envoys of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two Kurdish parties sharing sovereignty over northern Iraq between the two Iraq wars, presented the CIA with evidence that the organization that tried to kill Mr. Salih had been in part funded and directed by Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.

Those words directly contradict a recent report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that declassified a 2005 CIA assessment of Iraq's pre-war ties to Al Qaeda and found that none existed. In an interview after the speech yesterday, Mr. Salih said he was unaware of the CIA assessment. But he added, "There were links between Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda. The information at time [in 2002] was quite different. Now, we could not prove this in a court of law, but this is intelligence."

So, not only do we hear that the media's perception of the situation in Iraq is wrong, but the Iraqis themselves believe that there were links between Saddam Hussein and various terrorist groups, including al Qaeda predating the 2003 invasion.

UPDATE:
Hindraker at Powerline wonders if anyone on the Senate Intel Committee bothered to pick up the NY Sun this morning and read what they could have picked up if they had spoken to the Iraqis. Hindraker also notes the craziness that the Left has to go through to claim that Saddam didn't have any ties to al Qaeda even though Ansar al Islam was linked to al Qaeda and Saddam tolerated the group's continued presence in Kurdish Iraq. Macranger is also scratching his head over this but notes that this has nothing to do with the facts, but everything to do with the politics and Democrats think that the claims that there were no ties between Iraq and the global war on terrorism help their cause - getting elected in 2006 and beyond.

Alphabet City notes that this so-called impossible relationship between Sunni and Ba'athist went on for more than a decade before the 2003 invasion.

Clarice at American Thinker has more.