Iraq has had contacts with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization and it would be a mistake to dismiss either Iraq or Iran as possible sponsors of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, the chief of US intelligence said today.
CIA Director Mr George Tenet's comments in Senate testimony marked a significant shift in emphasis for the US intelligence community which had previously discounted a connection between al-Qaeda and either Iraq or Iran because of their ideological and religious differences.
"As to where we are on September 11th, the jury is still out," Mr Tenet said. "As I said carefully in my statement it would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility of state sponsorship whether Iranian or Iraqi and we'll see where the evidence takes us," he said.
A US official, however, said the intelligence community's has not changed its view that the evidence does not link Iraq to the September 11th attack, and Mr Tenet did not intend to suggest otherwise.
"There is nothing new in the last several months that changes our analysis in any way," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The question of whether Iraq has secretly supported terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States has been at the center of a long-running debate here over the possible use of US military force to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The debate intensified following a disclosure by the Czech government last year that the lead September 11th hijacker Mohammad Atta met in Prague as recently April, 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence officer.
Earlier Iraq signaled that it might readmit UN weapons inspectors to avert a US onslaught that many Arab and European leaders fear could destabilise a Middle East already rocked by Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.
US Vice President Mr Dick Cheney said in Israel today that Washington had made no decision to launch a military strike.
He was speaking near the end of an 11-nation Middle East tour in which acute Arab concern about the increasingly bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict has overshadowed his focus on Iraq.
Mr Cheney reiterated US worries about what he called Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its failure to comply with UN resolutions designed to eliminate them.
Iraq has been widely tipped as the next target in Mr George W. Bush's "war on terror".
In the clearest hint yet that President Saddam Hussein is changing tack, one of his advisers said yesterday that Baghdad would co-operate with the international community to deprive the United States of any justification for new military strikes.
"Many Arab and non-Arab friends have called on Iraq to remove all pretexts for a US invasion of Iraq, so we are happy to cooperate with all countries... including the United Nations, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to avoid new US attacks," Iraqi Parliament Speaker Saadoun Hammadi said in Morocco.