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Pentagon report finds no evidence of Saddam attempt to assassinate Bush Nick Juliano In President Bush's view, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was many things -- a developer of weapons of mass destruction, an ally of al Qaeda and "a guy that tried to kill my dad." Recent intelligence reports have already shot down those first two notions. No WMD stockpiles were found in Iraq after the US invasion, and a just-released Pentagon assessment failed to find any "smoking gun" link between Saddam and the terror group that plotted the 9/11 attacks. Now skepticism is newly enveloping allegations of an Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush during a trip to Kuwait in 1993. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports that the same Pentagon report that has essentially disproved an Iraq-al Qaeda link also calls into question the 1993 plot that spurred former President Bill Clinton to launch a Tomahawk cruise-missle strike against Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). Isikoff writes:
Isikoff notes that the absence of evidence does not prove the Iraqis weren't planning to assassinate the former question (just as Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said about Iraq WMD never found, that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"), but his latest report adds to questions that have been raised about the alleged plot since the months before and after the missile strike it inspired. On May 27, 1993, the Boston Globe obtained a CIA report that questioned Kuwait's claims of the Iraqi plot to assassinate Bush (via Nexis):
In November 1993, the New Yorker's tenacious investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported, "[M]y own investigations have uncovered circumstantial evidence, at least as compelling as the [Clinton] Administration's, that suggests that the American government's case against Iraq—as it has been outlined in public, anyway—is seriously flawed."
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