Reuters: Russia Says It Warned U.S. Saddam Planned to Attack

"Russia warned the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that Iraq's Saddam Hussein planned to hit targets on U.S. soil, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.
Putin's remarks looked certain to help President Bush (news - web sites), but officials at the State Department expressed surprise, saying they knew of no such information from Russia.
Putin said Russian intelligence had been told on several occasions that Saddam's special forces were preparing to attack U.S. targets inside and outside the United States.
"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing 'terrorist acts' on the United States and beyond its borders," he told reporters.
"This information was passed on to our American colleagues," he said. He added, however, that Russian intelligence had no proof that Saddam's agents had been involved in any particular attack.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters he did not know anything about the information that Putin said Russia passed on. No such information was communicated from Russia through the State Department, he said.
"Everybody's scratching their heads," said one State Department official, who asked not to be named.
But the Kremlin leader's comments seemed certain to bolster Bush, whose campaign for re-election in November is under pressure from the Iraq crisis.
Bush has been on the defensive at home for insisting -- against the findings of an independent commission -- that Saddam had links with al Qaeda, the militant group behind the 2001 airline attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. war on terrorism.
Putin's remarks were all the more unusual since Russia had diplomatic relations with Saddam's Iraq and sided with France and Germany in opposing the invasion."