“It was surprising,” said one source. “Given how much the Iraqis did document, “you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about (the plot).”

The failure does not, of course, prove that the Iraqis were not planning such an operation. “It would not have surprised me at all if the Iraqis expunged any record of that — it was an utter embarrassment for them,” says Paul Pillar, the CIA’s former top analyst on the Middle East.

But others have wondered whether the original allegations were exaggerated. The Kuwaiti claim grew out of the arrest of a band of whisky smugglers near the Iraq border that spring. Kuwaiti authorities also recovered a Toyota Land Cruiser containing 175 pounds of explosives connected to a detonator. After several days in Kuwaiti custody, the smugglers’ ringleader, Wali al-Ghazali, confessed that he had been dispatched by an Iraqi intelligence agent to blow up former president Bush.

Amnesty International questioned whether al-Ghazali (the only one to claim that Bush was the target) had been tortured. But when an FBI team concluded that the detonator and explosives closely resembled other Iraqi bombs, President Clinton ordered a Tomahawk cruise-missile strike on IIS headquarters. Years later Kuwait’s emir declined to sign al-Ghazali’s death warrant.

There were also no records showing what the report called a “smoking gun” connection between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda — one of the principal claims made by the White House to advance the case for war. The report did find plenty of evidence that Saddam’s regime had close ties to other (mainly Palestinian) terror groups and had maintained contacts with some radical Islamic movements — including, according to one 1993 document, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney said the document showed there was a “link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” But Pillar notes the Egyptian group — headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri — didn’t merge with al-Qaeda until years later. “This is the same kind of word game they played before the war,” Pillar says.

... contd.