Was there a plot at all to kill Bush dad?

But curiously little has been heard about the allegedly foiled assassination plot in the five years since the US military invaded Iraq. A just-released Pentagon study on the Iraqi regime8217;s ties to terrorism only adds to the mystery. The review, conducted for the Pentagon8217;s Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam8217;s conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence.

8220;It was surprising,8221; said one source. 8220;Given how much the Iraqis did document, 8220;you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about the plot.8221;

The failure does not, of course, prove that the Iraqis were not planning such an operation. 8220;It would not have surprised me at all if the Iraqis expunged any record of that 8212; it was an utter embarrassment for them,8221; says Paul Pillar, the CIA8217;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 smugglers8217; 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 Kuwait8217;s emir declined to sign al-Ghazali8217;s death warrant.

There were also no records showing what the report called a 8220;smoking gun8221; connection between Saddam8217;s regime and Al Qaeda 8212; one of the principal claims made by the White House to advance the case for war. The report did find plenty of evidence that Saddam8217;s regime had close ties to other mainly Palestinian terror groups and had maintained contacts with some radical Islamic movements 8212; including, according to one 1993 document, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney said the document showed there was a 8220;link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.8221; But Pillar notes the Egyptian group 8212; headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri 8212; didn8217;t merge with al-Qaeda until years later. 8220;This is the same kind of word game they played before the war,8221; Pillar says.

Perhaps most revealing of all was a tape of Saddam8217;s conversations with his ministers after the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993 8212; a plot linked to a group of Islamic radicals, one of whom, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was an Iraqi-American who fled to Baghdad after the attack. For years Bush administration officials like Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz charged that Iraq had given 8220;sanctuary8221; to Yasin, suggesting that the regime may have been complicit in the 1993 bombing.

But the newly discovered tape shows that Saddam and his ministers were puzzled by the bombing and wondered whether the 8220;Zionists8221; or U.S. intelligence were secretly behind it.