LONDON, July 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As U.S. Defense Secretary urged the military brass to stop leaks about plans to attack Iraq, a former Iraqi weapons inspector for the UN said Tuesday that there was no proof linking Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with terrorist groups, hence the U.S. threats to topple him were legally baseless.

"If someone can make a case based on substantive fact that Saddam Hussein's regime is in cahoots with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or any other anti-American, (allegedly) Islamic terrorist organization then Iraq poses a threat," Scott Ritter told Sky television, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"This case has not been made," said the former UN weapons inspector.

"If you're going to link Saddam with terrorist organizations, there must be hard fact and to date no hard fact has been presented," he added.

The United States considers the Iraqi President to be a threat to its national security and to the world because of what it claims is his appetite for weapons of mass destruction and his alleged links to terrorist groups.

Ritter said that if Washington could come up with the data showing the link between Hussein's regime and weapons of mass destruction then he would stop saying what he knew about the extent to which Iraq disarmed before April 1998.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for his part, claimed Tuesday that the threat posed by Iraq's policy on weapons of mass destruction was "growing, not diminishing."

"What we should learn from that is that if there is a gathering threat or danger, let us deal with it before it materializes rather than afterwards," Blair said, referring to Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Ritter, who headed a team investigating the Iraqi leader's alleged stockpile of biological and chemical weapons, was to address senior British politicians on the issue later Tuesday.

The former U.S. marine resigned as head of the UN Special Commission in 1998 and criticized the U.S.-British air strikes on the Gulf state as a "horrible mistake" and "bombing for bombing's sake."

In a separately related development, and stung by leaked reports of U.S. planning for military action against Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called on U.S. military leaders in a memorandum made public Tuesday to rein in damaging disclosures of classified information.

Rumsfeld circulated an unclassified CIA memorandum warning to the Pentagon brass that unauthorized leaks tipped off al-Qaeda to U.S. intelligence capabilities, hurting the U.S. war against terrorism, reported AFP.

"The disclosure of classified information is damaging our country's ability to stop terrorist acts and is putting American lives at risk," he said in the July 12 memorandum.

"Your leadership is needed to help stop leaks," he said. "Please meet with your staff to discuss the seriousness of the damaging lack of professionalism we continue to see on a daily basis," he wrote.

The memorandum came just two days after a New York Times report said that U.S. military planners considered using bases in Jordan to stage air and commando operations against Iraq in the event Washington decided to invade.

The Times earlier reported on a U.S. planning document that called for a massive U.S. air, land and sea invasion of Iraq from three directions in a campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.

In a televised interview late Monday, Rumsfeld vented his anger at the officials who leaked the information.

"I would dearly like to find them," he told CNBC. "I think that people who know who those people are would do the country a service if they'd let me know who those people are. And I'd like to see them behind bars."

A hallmark of Rumsfeld's tenure as Defense Secretary is to keep a close hold on information, a practice that led to clashes with members of Congress and senior military officials.

The CIA document attached to Rumsfeld's memo said al-Qaeda pays close attention to publicly available information that will help it evade U.S. intelligence.