Still no evidence for a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida

We knew this already, but it has been verified again - there was absolutely no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, no matter what the Bush administration claimed before the invasion.

Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

While state sponsored terrorism is always bad, it certainly is not grounds for preemptive attacks, according to international law (which allows for self-defense), unless it can be proven that the terrorism was targeted towards the country making the preemptive attack.

I don't know if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell actively lied when they claimed a link existed, and that there were evidence for it, but it might be a impeachable offense if they lied, since they used the lies to take the US into an unjustified war.

Caveat: yes, I know that Saddam Hussein was a bad man, and that it would have been better for Iraq if he hadn't been in power. However, given the frightening death toll in Iraq after the invasion, you won't get me to ever say that the invasion was good for them.

I am no dove, and have supported numerous military interventions in the past, but there was nothing to justify this one, and I've been opposed to it from the start.

Edit: I got the link from a poster, tpc, in Readerville, who also posted another very relevant link: False Pretenses - about the at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.