WASHINGTON -- Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida.
"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and al-Qaida," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002 memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official.
Using Pentagon jargon for Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe SecDef some analysis of this subject. Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate the short turn-around."
Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo marked the first days of what would become a controversial, yearlong Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior levels of the Bush administration that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked -- a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and discredited in the years since.
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