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Pentagon will mail you a copy of Iraq study that finds no smoking gun

ABC News is reporting that the Pentagon canceled plans to post a new comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorism on the website of the Joint Forces Command. The story says, “The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. It won’t be emailed to reporters and it won’t be posted online.” The Pentagon also canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release.

The report was prepared by Kevin M. Woods and James Lacey “under the Iraqi Perspectives sub task of the Joint Advanced Warfighting Program (JAWP) task order for the Director, Joint Center for Operational Analyses and Lessons Learned, United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)” and the Institute For Defense Analyses. It is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam’s government in U.S. custody.

The executive summary of the report says

This study found no “smoking gun” (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations.

The ABC report says that when asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed a Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it “too politically sensitive.”

ABC has posted a copy of an executive summary of the document here:

ABC also has a copy of a longer version of what is apparently the same report here:

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