“In June [5] 2008, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded…that there was no ‘cooperative relationship’ between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The committee also found that ‘most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al-Qa’ida before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred.’ The only meeting that had actually taken place was eight years before the invasion of Iraq, between Farouq Hijazi, a senior Iraqi intelligence official, and bin Laden in Sudan in early 1995. Once he was in U.S. custody, Hijazi told his American interrogators that he had been admonished by Saddam before the meeting not to negotiate or promise anything to the al-Qaeda leader but ‘only to listen.’ Bin Laden asked to open an office in Baghdad and for military training for his men. Those requests were turned down flat by Saddam.”
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 151