Iraq link retracted

last updated 8 January 2015

Washington, D.C.

The captured al Qaida leader who claimed that Iraq trained terrorists to use chemical and biological weapons later retracted his story, The New York Times reported last week. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan captured in Pakistan two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was one of the main sources for the Bush administration’s assertion before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had collaborated with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, al-Libi “changed his story,” an intelligence official told The Washington Post, “and we’re still in the process of trying to determine what’s right and what’s not right.”