Pentagon report on Saddam's Iraq censored?

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a US military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida to get any attention. On Mar. 12, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online. The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via US mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online. Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail." Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive." ABC News obtained the comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's alleged links to terrorism on Mar. 11. The study, which was due to be released the following day, found no "smoking gun" or any evidence of a direct connection between Saddam's Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist organization. The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in US custody. Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the US military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to al-Qaida. Bush administration officials have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in their justification for waging war against Iraq. "What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network," former US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. On June 18, 2004 the Washington Post quoted President Bush as saying: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush said. "We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaida organization," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's Meet The Press on Mar. 16, 2003. ''There is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and al-Qaida operatives. They have occurred over a span of some 8 or 10 years to our knowledge,'' former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a interview with Infinity CBS Radio on Nov. 14, 2002.