A new report finally tells the stupidest people in this country what the rest of us have known from day one.

Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq.

Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that before the war, Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

The report also faults intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

A second part of the report concluded that false information from the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam group led by then-exile Ahmed Chalabi, was used to support key U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq.

It said U.S. intelligence agents put out numerous red flags about the reliability of INC sources but the intelligence community made a "serious error" and used one source who concocted a story that Iraq was building mobile biological weapons laboratories.

The report also said that in 2002 the National Security Council directed that funding for the INC should continue "despite warnings from both the CIA, which terminated its relationship with the INC in December 1996, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), that the INC was penetrated by hostile intelligence services, including the Iranians."

According to the report, postwar findings indicate that Saddam "was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime."

Okay now I know that since you are spending your precious time reading this post on this site then you my friend are much, much too smart to have been fooled by the attempts of the Bush administration to blur the distinction between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

And therefore you might be shaking your head and thinking well this not news "everybody" knows that there has never been a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq. But I am afraid that many of your fellow Americans are not nearly as bright as you.

And the evidence for that last statement can be found here. This is part of what it says:

Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll.

Scary isn't it?