Overwhelming evidence of connection between al-Qaida, Iraq before attack

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Osama-Saddam links

9-11 commission missed

Overwhelming evidence of connection

between al-Qaida, Iraq before attack

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Posted: June 18, 2004

1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Joseph Farah

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – In concluding there was "no credible evidence" of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, the commission charged with investigating events leading to 9-11 overlooked more than 10 years of connections and cooperation between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's network, WorldNetDaily has found.

While acknowledging that bin Laden made overtures to Hussein in the mid-1990s while he was in Sudan and again after he went to Afghanistan in 1996, they "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," the commission's staff said in a report released yesterday. The report also seems to rely heavily on the word of two of bin Laden's most senior associates who "have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq'' during interrogations.

President Bush, who minimized the bin Laden-Iraq connection as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq, quickly responded to the report by affirming that "numerous contacts" between Iraq and al-Qaida did indeed justify the U.S.-led war on Hussein's regime.

"There was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida,'' Bush told reporters after meeting with his Cabinet at the White House. "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam and al-Qaida.''

Bush added: "Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He was a threat because he was a sworn enemy of the United States of America, just like al-Qaida. He was a threat because he had terrorist connections."

"The world is better off and America is more secure without Saddam Hussein in power," the president said.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts, responded to the report from the commission by saying Bush misled the nation.

"This president failed the test in Iraq," Kerry, 60, said while campaigning in Ohio yesterday. "When it comes to war and peace, I will tell the truth to the American people."

Vice President Dick Cheney also said there were clearly ties between Hussein and the al-Qaida terrorists going back to the early 1990s, and he called the New York Times coverage of the story "outrageous."

"It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials," he told CNBC. "It involves a senior official, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service going to the Sudan before bin Laden ever went to Afghanistan to train them in bomb-making, helping teach them how to forge documents."

Cheney pointed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, still in Iraq today, who, he points out, "is an al-Qaida associate who took refuge in Baghdad, found sanctuary and safe harbor there before we ever launched into Iraq."

He also noted the link provided by Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals used in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He fled to Iraq "and we found since when we got into Baghdad, documents showing that he was put on the payroll and given housing by Saddam Hussein after the '93 attack; in other words, provided safe harbor and sanctuary. There's clearly been a relationship," said Cheney.

"What the New York Times did today was outrageous," added Cheney. He says the suggestion that there is a fundamental split between what the president said and what the commission reported is preposterous. "What they were addressing was whether or not they [iraqis] were involved in 9-11. And there they found no evidence to support that proposition. They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida in other areas, in other ways."

In the Zarqawi case, Cheney added: "Here's a man who's Jordanian by birth. He's described as an al-Qaida associate. He ran training camps in Afghanistan back before we went to war in Afghanistan. After we went in and hit his training camp, he fled to Baghdad. Found safe harbor and sanctuary in Baghdad in May of 2002. He arrived with about two dozen other supporters of his, members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was (Ayman) al-Zawahiri's organization. He's the number two to bin Laden, which was merged with al-Qaida interchangeably. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida, same-same. They're all now part of one organization. They merged some years ago. So Zarqawi living in Baghdad. We arranged for information to be passed on his presence in Baghdad to the Iraqis through a third-party intelligence service. They did that twice. There's no question but what Saddam Hussein really was there. He was allowed to operate out of Baghdad. He ran the poisons factory in northern Iraq out of Baghdad. ... There clearly was a relationship there that stretched back over that period of time to at least May of '02, a year before we launched into Iraq. He is the worst offender. He's probably killed more Iraqis than any other man in Iraq today. He is probably the leading terrorist still operating in Iraq today."

With regard to the reports that Mohammad Atta, the Sept. 11 mastermind, met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague April 9, 2001, Cheney pointed out that the 9-11 commission merely found no evidence to confirm the information. Some reports have suggested the commission found that the meeting never took place.

"The notion that there is no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida just simply is not true," Cheney asserted.

Yossef Bodansky, author of "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," written and published well before the Sept. 11 attacks, documents numerous contacts and meetings between bin Laden's agents and agents of Hussein. In addition, Bodansky, the U.S. Congress' top terrorism adviser, said the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida predated the Sept. 11 attacks by a decade, and continued thereafter.

CIA reports of Iraqi-al-Qaida cooperation number nearly 100 and extend back to 1992, according to WorldNetDaily sources.

According to a Dec. 9, 2002, report in the Los Angeles Times, shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks, a group of al-Qaida fighters left Afghanistan and set up shop in Iraq as a backup base. Bin Laden's jihadists established such a base in town of Al Biyara and nearby mountain villages where Kurdish militants had begun imposing the strict Islamic rule much like Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime, according to the Times report.

Last year the London Guardian reported the deadly poison ricin discovered at a makeshift lab in a north London apartment was linked to a group of Algerian extremists with ties to al-Qaida and Iraq.

The Associated Press reported a senior U.S. official traveling in Europe said men arrested in the alleged ricin plot were linked to Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group in northern Iraq with ties to al-Qaida and possibly to Saddam Hussein's regime. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

Four men were arrested in the apartment raid Jan. 5 and charged with attempting to develop a chemical weapon.

Ansar al-Islam is led by an Iraqi Kurd named Nejmeddin Faraj Ahmad (also known as Mullah Krekar) who trained with bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Senior al-Qaida leaders fled Afghanistan for Iraq and received safe harbor before Hussein was overthrown by U.S. forces, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

On Jan. 27 of last year, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said terrorist detainees from Afghanistan had implicated Iraq in providing training and support to al-Qaida.

WorldNetDaily reported exclusively that Iraqis were among the detainees captured in Afghanistan.

Fleischer said the U.S. knows Iraq has supported al-Qaida in the past and there have been "contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of the al-Qaida organization, going back for quite a long time."

"We know, too, that several of the detainees, particularly some of the high-level detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al-Qaida and chemical weapons development," said Fleischer. "There are contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida. We know that Saddam Hussein has a long history of terrorism in general. And again, if you are waiting for the smoking gun, the problem is, when you see the smoke coming out of the gun, it's too late; the damage has been done."

Perhaps more interesting is the contention of terrorism expert Laurie Mylroie, author of "The War Against America." She says senior al-Qaida operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in Pakistan, is not the man he claims to be. He is actually an Iraqi intelligence agent – a fact that would serve as smoking-gun evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the terror of Sept. 11.

Mylroie, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, explains that Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, March 1, 2003, and has been providing interrogators with critical information about al-Qaida operations and ongoing attack plots, according to U.S. officials.

As the operational leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network, Mohammed is said to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and is thought to have planned the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

Mylroie maintains Mohammed is a Pakistani Baluch, along with Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The two collaborated with a third Baluch in 1995, Abdul Hakam Murad, in an unsuccessful plot to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes. The plot, called "Project Bojinka," involved ramming a fuel-laden airliner into the Pentagon.

Baluchs are Sunni Muslims who live in the desert regions of eastern Iran and western Pakistan – Baluchistan – and have longstanding ties to Iraqi intelligence. Wafiq Samarrai, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence who defected to the West in 1994, explains that Iraqi intelligence worked with the Baluch during the Iran-Iraq war.

Mylroie said Mohammed, Yousef and Murad, are part of a tight circle.

Their identities are based on documents from Kuwaiti files that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation. These documents form the basis of Mylroie's false-identity theory. When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, it used some Kuwaiti files to create false identities for key agents, according to Mylroie.

There is evidence Yousef's file was tampered with. The front pages of his passport, including his picture and signature, are missing. Extraneous information was also inserted: the notation that Yousef and his family left Kuwait on Aug. 26, 1990 – during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait – and traveled through Iraq on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan in Iran.

Mylroie points out people don't provide authorities with itineraries when crossing a border.

She concludes Yousef is an Iraqi agent who assumed the identity of Abdul Basit Karim, a Kuwaiti who disappeared during Iraq's occupation. Records show Yousef entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, but fled on a passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim.

According to Mylroie, the New York FBI – particularly its director, Jim Fox – believed that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was an Iraqi intelligence operation.

The Los Angeles Times uncovered critical family ties between Mohammed and Karim.

"What little is known about the sister [of Mohammed]," the paper reported, "includes one compelling piece of information: She is thought to be the mother of Abdul Karim Basit, better known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef."

Mylroie deduces that Mohammed would know if someone was falsely passing himself off as his nephew, and therefore, must be an Iraqi operative as well.

According to documents, Mohammed was born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents on April 19, 1965. That puts Mohammed just under 38 years of age. Mylroie suggests the graying sideburns and heavy jowls in Mohammed's arrest photo circulated by federal agents belong to someone substantially older than 38.

For what it's worth, the connection between bin Laden and Hussein has also been proven in a court of law to the satisfaction of a federal judge.

Judge Harold Baer awarded families of two victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks nearly $104 million in damages against Hussein and his Iraqi government along with bin Laden and the Taliban. Baer ruled the plaintiffs had shown that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network.

In January, 2003, Baer granted a default judgment to the plaintiffs after defendants failed to respond to the suit. The default order was issued against the Taliban, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, al-Qaida, bin Laden, Hussein and the Republic of Iraq.

The case was brought on behalf of George Eric Smith, 38, a senior business analyst for SunGard Asset Management, and Timothy Soulas, a senior managing director and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities. Last month, the judge heard evidence presented by the plaintiffs' lawyers for two days to help him determine damages. In a written decision filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Baer outlined the damages and his conclusion.

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Hussein actually stepped up his support of al-Qaida terrorists, according to WorldNetDaily's U.S. military sources. In October 2002, Hussein welcomed dozens of al-Qaida operatives to Iraq, where they were provided with new identities linking them with prominent Iraqi families.

Among the senior al-Qaida operatives in Iraq are Othman Suleiman Daoud, an Afghan national. Daoud was believed based in the Sunni Triangle, north of Baghdad, the focus of the insurgency against the U.S. military.

Another al-Qaida leader in Iraq is Faraj Shaabi, a Libyan national. The sources said Shaabi spent most of the last decade in Sudan until he was ordered by bin Laden to transfer to Iraq.

Meanwhile, last year, a 16-page top secret government memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed bin Laden and Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, as well as financial and logistical support, and may have included the bombing of the USS Cole and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The memo, dated Oct. 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. The memo cites reports from a variety of domestic and foreign spy agencies including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources.

The memo reports Hussein's willingness to help bin Laden plot against Americans began in 1990, shortly before the first Gulf War, and continued through his overthrow. It says bin Laden sent ''emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials.'' At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, ''Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al-Qaida.''

The primary go-between throughout these early stages was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the al-Qaida-affiliated National Islamic Front.

A defector reported that ''al-Turabi was instrumental in arranging the Iraqi-al-Qaida relationship." The defector said Iraq sought al-Qaida influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided al-Qaida with training and instructors.

Another man, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim – who's described as the terror lord's ''best friend'' – was involved in planning the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

The CIA believes ''fragmentary evidence points to possible Iraqi involvement'' in the bombing of the USS Cole in Oct. 2000, according to the memo.

Two members of al-Qaida were sent to Iraq following the attack on the USS Cole, to be trained in weapons of mass destruction and to obtain information on ''poisons and gases.''

And according to the CIA, in December of 2000, the Saudi National Guard went on alert after learning Saddam agreed to ''assist al-Qaida in attacking U.S./UK interests in Saudi Arabia.''

The report also contains information about meetings between the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks Mohamed Atta and former Iraqi intelligence chief Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani. The memo says the men met several times in the Czech Republic city of Prague and Iraq authorized the transfer of funds to Atta.

More evidence of the connection was found when Iraq was liberated.

Documents found last year in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's secret police, show Hussein brought a bin Laden aide to Baghdad in early 1998 from Osama's former base in Sudan to arrange closer ties, and to seek a meeting with the terror kingpin in person.

Al-Qaida was based in Sudan until 1996, when its leadership moved to Afghanistan after the Sudanese government bowed to pressure from the U.S. to expel bin Laden's terror network.

The paper trail indicates the meeting, which was based on a common hatred of America and Saudi Arabia, apparently went so well it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad.

The documents include a letter containing a message to be relayed to the terrorist leader that would ''relate to the future of our relationship with bin Laden, and achieve a direct meeting with him.'' The documents do not make clear whether the hoped-for meeting between Iraqi officials and bin Laden took place.

The 1998 visit described in the documents took place less than five months before bin Laden became a household name in the West, when Washington zeroed in on him for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa later that year.

The discovery of the documents coincides with the capture of former Mukhabarat head of operations Farouk Hijazi near the Syrian border. Washington has said Hijazi was Iraq's key link man with al-Qaida, and that he traveled to meet bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Also last year, documents seized by Spanish investigators and turned over to U.S. authorities show an alleged terrorist accused of helping the Sept. 11 conspirators was invited to a party by the Iraqi ambassador to Spain under his al-Qaida pseudonym.

Yusuf Galan, who was photographed being trained at a camp run by bin Laden, is now in jail in Madrid. The indictment against him, drawn up by investigating judge Baltasar Garzon, claims he was "directly involved with the preparation and carrying out of the attacks ... by the suicide pilots on 11 September."

Evidence of Galan's links with Iraqi government officials came to light as investigators pored through more than 40,000 pages of documents seized in raids at the homes of Galan and seven alleged co-conspirators.

While the skeptics are sure to persist – especially in an election year – it is worth noting that Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism official promoting a book critical of the Bush administration and insisting Hussein had no connection to al-Qaida, believed in the link in 1999.

He defended President Clinton's attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant by revealing the U.S. was "sure" it manufactured chemical warfare materials produced by Iraqi experts in cooperation with bin Laden.

Clarke told the Washington Post in a Jan. 23, 1999, story that U.S. intelligence officials had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was hit with Tomahawk cruise missiles in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7, 1998, embassy bombings in Africa.

The sample contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, which Clarke said when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

Clarke told the Post the U.S. did not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it.

"But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan," the paper reported.

More recently, he seems to have forgotten his earlier position, insisting in an interview on "60 Minutes" earlier this year: "There is absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaida ever."

Just last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the paper reported.

The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work.

The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala Lumpur meeting on behalf of Saddam's regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamist on his own, the Journal notes. While the paper cautioned it is possible the Shakir listed on the rosters is not the Iraqi of the same name with proven al-Qaida connections.

Reported accounts of the al-Qaida planning summit said Shakir had a job at the Kuala Lumpur airport he obtained through an Iraqi intelligence agent at the Iraqi embassy.

Among the al-Qaida operatives in attendance were the two who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon – Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi – and Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9-11 attacks.

Also in attendance was Tawfiz al Atash, a high-ranking Osama bin Laden lieutenant and mastermind of the USS Cole bombing.

Shakir left Malaysia four days after the summit finished, Jan. 13, 2000, then turned up in Qatar, where he was arrested Sept. 17, 2001, four days after the attacks.

A search uncovered phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers' safe houses and contacts and information related to a 1995 al-Qaida plot to blow up a dozen commercial airliners over the Pacific.

But Shakir, inexplicably, was released after a brief detention and flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was arrested again. The Jordanians released him, however, with the OK of the CIA, after pressure from the Iraqis and Amnesty International.

He was last seen returning to Baghdad.

The information supports other journalists who have uncovered a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, including Jayna Davis, author of "The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing."

In her book, Davis suggests the Sept. 11 attacks possibly could have been prevented if evidence of an Iraqi and al-Qaida link to the OKC bombing had been pursued.

Davis writes that in November 1997, Hussain Hashem Al-Hussaini – a former Iraqi Republican Guardsman whom multiple eyewitnesses identified as McVeigh's elusive accomplice, John Doe 2 – confided to his psychiatrist that he was anxious about his airport job because "if something were to happen there, I [Al-Hussaini] would be a suspect." At the time, Al-Hussaini was employed at Boston Logan International Airport, where two of the four 9-11 suicide hijackings originated.

She also reveals court records that suggest one of bombers Timothy McVeigh's and Terry Nichols's accused Middle Eastern handlers had foreknowledge of the 9-11 plot.

In addition, Davis discusses information she first uncovered eight years ago – that Nichols learned the macabre genius of terrorist bomb making under the training of Philippines-based al-Qaida explosives expert Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In February, columnist and author Jonathan Schanzer wrote in the Weekly Standard of his meeting in a Kurdish prison with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who claims he worked for a man who was Hussein’s envoy to al-Qaida.

In the interview, al-Shamari confirmed he was involved in assisting Ansar al Islam, an al-Qaida affiliate responsible for attacks against Kurdish and Western targets in northern Iraq. Weapons, "mostly mortar rounds," were supplied to the terrorists, the prisoner told Schanzer.

Besides weapons, al-Shamari says, Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, helped the terror group financially "every month or two months."

In December, Geostrategy-Direct reported Iraqi officers interrogated by the United States and coalition officials said Saddam, through Saudi contacts, had invited al-Qaida insurgents to form suicide and other units to stop the U.S. military in March.

Saddam's contacts with al-Qaida, the officers told interrogators, preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. They said Saudi envoys arranged for al-Qaida insurgents to enter Iraq and begin training in camps around Baghdad.

The al-Qaida insurgents were trained at two camps – Nahrawan and Salman Pak – under the supervision of the Fedayeen Saddam.

Officers said the Salman Pak training included ways to hijack airplanes. Training was conducted under the supervision of an unidentified Iraqi general who is currently a police commander. They said many of the al-Qaida insurgents left Iraq after their training stint.

The London Telegraph reported last December the discovery of a secret memo to Hussein that gives details of a visit by Atta to Baghdad just weeks before the 9-11 attacks. Information obtained by Iraq's coalition goverment indicated Atta was trained in Baghdad by Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.

"We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaida," said Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq's ruling seven-man presidential committee, according to the London paper.

"But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far," he said. "It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaida, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."

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The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda

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The Connection

From the June 7, 2004 issue: The collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda.

by Stephen F. Hayes

06/07/2004,

Buy The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America

by Stephen F. Hayes.

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"THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday.

"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in an interview on March 21, 2004.

The editor of the Los Angeles Times labeled as "myth" the claim that links between Iraq and al Qaeda had been proved. A recent dispatch from Reuters simply asserted, "There is no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda." 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl was equally certain: "There was no connection."

And on it goes. This conventional wisdom--that our two most determined enemies were not in league, now or ever--is comforting. It is also wrong.

In late February 2004, Christopher Carney made an astonishing discovery. Carney, a political science professor from Pennsylvania on leave to work at the Pentagon, was poring over a list of officers in Saddam Hussein's much-feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. One name stood out: Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. The name was not spelled exactly as Carney had seen it before, but such discrepancies are common. Having studied the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda for 18 months, he immediately recognized the potential significance of his find. According to a report last

week in the Wall Street Journal, Shakir appears on three different lists of Fedayeen officers.

An Iraqi of that name, Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.

A greeter typically meets VIPs upon arrival and accompanies them through the sometimes onerous procedures of foreign travel. Shakir was instructed to work on January 5, 2000, and on that day, he escorted one Khalid al Mihdhar from his plane to a waiting car. Rather than bid his guest farewell at that point, as a greeter typically would have, Shakir climbed into the car with al Mihdhar and accompanied him to the Kuala Lumpur condominium of Yazid Sufaat, the American-born al Qaeda terrorist who hosted the planning meeting.

The meeting lasted for three days. Khalid al Mihdhar departed Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok and eventually Los Angeles. Twenty months later, he was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it plunged into the Pentagon at 9:38 A.M. on September 11. So were Nawaf al Hazmi and his younger brother, Salem, both of whom were also present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting.

Six days after September 11, Shakir was captured in Doha, Qatar. He had in his possession contact information for several senior al Qaeda terrorists: Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who helped mix the chemicals for the first World Trade Center attack and was given safe haven upon his return to Baghdad; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, otherwise known as Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by one top al Qaeda detainee as Osama bin Laden's "best friend."

Despite all of this, Shakir was released. On October 21, 2001, he boarded a plane for Baghdad, via Amman, Jordan. He never made the connection. Shakir was detained by Jordanian intelligence. Immediately following his capture, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence on Shakir, the Iraqi government began exerting pressure on the Jordanians to release him. Some U.S. intelligence officials--primarily at the CIA--believed that Iraq's demand for Shakir's release was pro forma, no different from the requests governments regularly make on behalf of citizens detained by foreign nationals. But others, pointing to the flurry of phone calls and personal appeals from the Iraqi government to the Jordanians, disagreed. This panicked reaction, they say, reflected an interest in Shakir at the highest levels of Saddam Hussein's regime.

CIA officials who interviewed Shakir in Jordan reported that he was generally uncooperative. But even in refusing to talk, he provided some important information: The interrogators concluded that his evasive answers reflected counterinterrogation techniques so sophisticated

that he had probably learned them from a government intelligence service. Shakir's nationality, his contacts with the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia, the keen interest of Baghdad in his case, and now the appearance of his name on the rolls of Fedayeen officers--all this makes the Iraqi intelligence service the most likely source of his training.

The Jordanians, convinced that Shakir worked for Iraqi intelligence, went to the CIA with a bold proposal: Let's flip him. That is, the Jordanians would allow Shakir to return to Iraq on the condition that he agree to report back on the activities of Iraqi intelligence. And, in one of the most egregious mistakes by the U.S. intelligence community after September 11, the CIA agreed to Shakir's release. He posted a modest bail and returned to Iraq.

He hasn't been heard from since.

The Shakir story is perhaps the government's strongest indication that Saddam and al Qaeda may have worked together on September 11. But it is far from conclusive; conceivably there were two Ahmed Hikmat Shakirs. And in itself, the evidence does not show that Saddam Hussein personally had foreknowledge of the attacks. Still--like the long, on-again-off-again relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda--it cannot be dismissed.

THERE WAS A TIME not long ago when the conventional wisdom skewed heavily toward a Saddam-al Qaeda collaboration. In 1998 and early 1999, the Iraq-al Qaeda connection was widely reported in the American and international media. Former intelligence officers and government officials speculated about the relationship and its dangerous implications for the world. The information in the news reports came from foreign and domestic intelligence services. It was featured in mainstream media outlets including international wire services, prominent newsweeklies, network radio and television broadcasts.

Newsweek magazine ran an article in its January 11, 1999, issue headed "Saddam + Bin Laden?" "Here's what is known so far," it read:

Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas--assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.

Four days later, on January 15, 1999, ABC News reported that three intelligence agencies believed that Saddam had offered asylum to bin Laden.

Intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Sudan's fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. . . . ABC News has learned that in December, an Iraqi intelligence chief named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what was discussed, but almost certainly, they say, bin Laden has been told he would be welcome in Baghdad.

NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, and offered this report.

Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. . . . Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.

By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: "The Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against Western powers."

Where did journalists get the idea that Saddam and bin Laden might be coordinating efforts? Among other places, from high-ranking Clinton administration officials.

In the spring of 1998--well before the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa--the Clinton administration indicted Osama bin Laden. The indictment, unsealed a few months later, prominently cited al Qaeda's agreement to collaborate with Iraq on weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton Justice Department had been concerned about negative public reaction to its potentially capturing bin Laden without "a vehicle for extradition," official paperwork charging him with a crime. It was "not an afterthought" to include the al Qaeda-Iraq connection in the indictment, says an official familiar with the deliberations. "It couldn't have gotten into the indictment unless someone was willing to testify to it under oath." The Clinton administration's indictment read unequivocally:

Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda terrorists struck almost simultaneously at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The blasts killed 257 people--including 12 Americans--and wounded nearly 5,000. The Clinton administration determined within five days that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks and moved swiftly to retaliate. One of the targets would be in Afghanistan. But the Clinton national security team wanted to strike hard simultaneously, much as the terrorists had. "The decision to go to [sudan] was an add-on," says a senior intelligence officer involved in the targeting. "They wanted a dual strike."

A small group of Clinton administration officials, led by CIA director George Tenet and national security adviser Sandy Berger, reviewed a number of al Qaeda-linked targets in Sudan. Although bin Laden had left the African nation two years earlier, U.S. officials believed that he was still deeply involved in the Sudanese government-run Military Industrial Corporation (MIC).

The United States retaliated on August 20, 1998, striking al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum. "Let me be very clear about this," said President Bill Clinton, addressing the nation after the strikes. "There is no question in my mind that the Sudanese factory was producing chemicals that are used--and can be used--in VX gas. This was a plant that was producing chemical warfare-related weapons and we have physical evidence of that."

The physical evidence was a soil sample containing EMPTA, a precursor for VX nerve gas. Almost immediately, the decision to strike at al Shifa aroused controversy. U.S. officials had expressed skepticism that the plant produced pharmaceuticals at all, but reporters on the ground in Sudan found aspirin bottles and a variety of other indications that the plant had, in fact, manufactured drugs. For journalists and many at the CIA, the case was hardly clear cut. For one thing, the soil sample was collected from outside the plant's front gate, not within the grounds, and an internal CIA memo issued a month before the attacks had recommended gathering additional soil samples from the site before reaching any conclusions. "It caused a lot of heartburn at the agency," recalls a former top intelligence official.

The Clinton administration sought to dispel doubts about the targeting and, on August 24, 1998, made available a "senior intelligence official" to brief reporters on background. The briefer cited "strong ties between the plant and Iraq" as one of the justifications for attacking it. The next day, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering briefed reporters at the National Press Club. Pickering explained that the intelligence community had been monitoring the plant for "at least two years," and that the evidence was "quite clear on contacts between Sudan and Iraq." In all, at least six top Clinton administration officials have defended on the record the strikes in Sudan by citing a link to Iraq.

The Iraqis, of course, denied any involvement. "The Clinton government has fabricated yet another lie to the effect that Iraq had helped Sudan produce this chemical weapon," declared the political editor of Radio Iraq. Still, even as Iraq denied helping Sudan and al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction, the regime lauded Osama bin Laden. On August 27, 1998, twenty days after al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Africa, Babel, the government newspaper run by Saddam's son Uday Hussein, published a startling editorial proclaiming bin Laden "an Arab and Islamic hero."

Five months later, the same Richard Clarke who would one day claim that there was "absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was "sure" that Iraq was behind the production of the chemical weapons precursor at the al Shifa plant. "Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at al Shifa or what happened to it," wrote Post reporter Vernon Loeb, in an article published January 23, 1999. "But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to al Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts, and the National Islamic Front in Sudan."

Later in 1999, the Congressional Research Service published a report on the psychology of terrorism. That report created a stir in May 2002 when critics of President Bush cited it to suggest that his administration should have given more thought to suicide hijackings. On page 7 of the 178-page report was a passage about a possible al Qaeda attack on Washington, D.C., that "could take several forms." In one scenario, the report suggested "suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House."

A network anchor wondered if it was possible that the White House had somehow missed the report. A senator cited it in calling for an investigation into the 9/11 attacks. A journalist read excerpts to the secretary of defense and raised a familiar question: "What did you know and when did you know it?"

But another passage of the same report has gone strangely unnoticed. Two paragraphs before, also on page 7, is this: "If Iraq's Saddam Hussein decide to use terrorists to attack the continental United States [he] would likely turn to bin Laden's al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is among the Islamic groups recruiting increasingly skilled professionals," including "Iraqi chemical weapons experts and others capable of helping to develop WMD. Al Qaeda poses the most serious terrorist threat to U.S. security interests, for al Qaeda's well-trained terrorists are engaged in a terrorist jihad against U.S. interests worldwide."

CIA director George Tenet echoed these sentiments in a letter to Congress on October 7, 2002.

-- Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.

--We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.

--Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.

--Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

--We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

--Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.

Tenet has never backed away from these assessments. Senator Mark Dayton, a Democrat from Minnesota, challenged him on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in an exchange before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 9, 2004. Tenet reiterated his judgment that there had been numerous "contacts" between Iraq and al Qaeda, and that in the days before the war the Iraqi regime had provided "training and safe haven" to al Qaeda associates, including Abu Musab al Zarqawi. What the U.S. intelligence community could not claim was that the Iraqi regime had "command and control" over al Qaeda terrorists. Still, said Tenet, "it was inconceivable to me that Zarqawi and two dozen [Egyptian Islamic Jihad] operatives could be operating in Baghdad without Iraq knowing."

SO WHAT should Washington do now? The first thing the Bush administration should do is create a team of intelligence experts--or preferably, competing teams, each composed of terrorism experts and forensic investigators--to explore the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. For more than a year, the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group has investigated the nature and scope of Iraq's program to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. At various times in its brief history, a small subgroup of ISG investigators (never more than 15 people) has looked into Iraqi connections with al Qaeda. This is not enough.

Despite the lack of resources devoted to Iraq-al Qaeda connections, the Iraq Survey Group has obtained some interesting new information. In the spring of 1992, according to Iraqi Intelligence documents obtained by the ISG after the war, Osama bin Laden met with Iraqi Intelligence officials in Syria. A second document, this one captured by the Iraqi National Congress and authenticated by the Defense Intelligence Agency, then listed bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence "asset" who "is in good relationship with our section in Syria." A third Iraqi Intelligence document, this one an undated internal memo, discusses strategy for an upcoming meeting between Iraqi Intelligence, bin Laden, and a representative of the Taliban. On the agenda: "attacking American targets." This seems significant.

A second critical step would be to declassify as much of the Iraq-al Qaeda intelligence as possible. Those skeptical of any connection claim that any evidence of a relationship must have been "cherry picked" from much larger piles of existing intelligence that makes these Iraq-al Qaeda links less compelling. Let's see it all, or as much of it as can be disclosed without compromising sources and methods.

Among the most important items to be declassified: the Iraq Survey Group documents discussed above; any and all reporting and documentation--including photographs--pertaining to Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi and alleged Saddam Fedayeen officer present at the September 11 planning meeting; interview transcripts with top Iraqi intelligence officers, al Qaeda terrorists, and leaders of al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al Islam; documents recovered in postwar Iraq indicating that Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who has admitted mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was given safe haven and financial support by the Iraqi regime upon returning to Baghdad two weeks after the attack; any and all reporting and documentation--including photographs--related to Mohammed Atta's visits to Prague; portions of the debriefings of Faruq Hijazi, former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence, who met personally with bin Laden at least twice, and an evaluation of his credibility.

It is of course important for the Bush administration and CIA director George Tenet to back up their assertions of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. Similarly, declassifying intelligence from the 1990s might shed light on why top Clinton officials were adamant about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection in the Sudan and why the Clinton Justice Department included the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship in its 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden. More specifically, what intelligence did Richard Clarke see that allowed him to tell the Washington Post that the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq had provided a chemical weapons precursor to the al Qaeda-linked al Shifa facility in Sudan? What would compel former secretary of defense William Cohen to tell the September 11 Commission, under oath, that an executive from the al Qaeda-linked plant "traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX [nerve gas] program"? And why did Thomas Pickering, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, tell reporters, "We see evidence that we think is quite clear on contacts between Sudan and Iraq. In fact, al Shifa officials, early in the company's history, we believe were in touch with Iraqi individuals associated with Iraq's VX program"? Other Clinton administration figures, including a "senior intelligence official" who briefed reporters on background, cited telephone intercepts between a plant manager and Emad al Ani, the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program.

We have seen important elements of the pre-September 11 intelligence available to the Bush administration; it's time for the American public to see more of the intelligence on Iraq and al Qaeda from the 1990s, especially the reporting about the August 1998 attacks in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S. counterstrikes two weeks later.

Until this material is declassified, there will be gaps in our knowledge. Indeed, even after the full record is made public, some uncertainties will no doubt remain.

The connection between Saddam and al Qaeda isn't one of them.

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. Parts of this article are drawn from his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America (HarperCollins).

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Saddam's al Qaeda Connection - Proof mounts

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Saddam's al Qaeda Connection : The evidence mounts, but the administration says surprisingly little.

by Stephen F. Hayes

09/01/2003, Volume 008, Issue 48

KIDS KNOW exactly when it comes--the point when you're repaving a driveway or pouring a new sidewalk, right before the wet concrete hardens completely. That's when you can make your mark. The Democrats seem to understand this.

For months before the war in Iraq, the Bush administration claimed to know of ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. For months after the war, the Bush administration has offered scant evidence of those claims. And the conventional wisdom--that there were no links--is solidifying. So Democrats are making their mark.

"The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." So claimed Al Gore in an August 7 speech. "There is evidence of exaggeration" of Iraq-al Qaeda links, said Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who recently launched an investigation into prewar intelligence. "Clearly the al Qaeda connection was hyped and exaggerated, in my view," said Senator Dianne Feinsten. Chimed in Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, as reported in the National Journal, "The evidence on the al Qaeda links was sketchy." Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate side of that committee, agrees. "The evidence about the ties was not compelling."

These are serious charges that deserve to be answered. If critics can show that the administration overplayed the al Qaeda-Saddam connection, they will undermine not only an important rationale for removing the Iraqi dictator, but the broader, arguably more important case for the war--that the conflict in Iraq was one battle in the worldwide war on terror.

What, then, did the Bush administration say about this relationship before the war? Which parts of that case, if any, have been invalidated by the intelligence gathered in the months following the conflict? What is this new "evidence," cited by Gore and others, that reveals the administration's arguments to have been embellished? Finally, what if any new evidence has emerged that bolsters the Bush administration's prewar case?

The answer to that last question is simple: lots. The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants it finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. More disturbing, according to an administration official familiar with briefings the CIA has given President Bush, the Agency has "irrefutable evidence" that the Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998, around the time his Islamic Jihad was merging with al Qaeda. "It's a lock," says this source. Other administration officials are a bit more circumspect, noting that the intelligence may have come from a single source. Still, four sources spread across the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment.

In interviews conducted over the past six weeks with uniformed officers on the ground in Iraq, intelligence officials, and senior security strategists, several things became clear. Contrary to the claims of its critics, the Bush administration has consistently underplayed the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Evidence of these links existed before the war. In making its public case against the Iraq regime, the Bush administration used only a fraction of the intelligence it had accumulated documenting such collaboration. The intelligence has, in most cases, gotten stronger since the end of the war. And through interrogations of high-ranking Iraqi officials, documents from the regime, and further interrogation of al Qaeda detainees, a clearer picture of the links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is emerging.

To better understand the administration's case on these links, it's important to examine three elements of this debate: what the administration alleged, the evidence the administration had but didn't use, and what the government has learned since the war.

WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION ALLEGED

TOP U.S. OFFICIALS linked Iraq and al Qaeda in newspaper op-eds, on talk shows, and in speeches. But the most detailed of their allegations came in an October 7, 2002, letter from CIA director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham and in Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

The Tenet letter declassified CIA reporting on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to al Qaeda. Two sentences on WMD garnered most media attention, but the intelligence chief's comments on al Qaeda deserved notice. "We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qa'ida going back a decade," Tenet wrote. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [in Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that al Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." In sum, the letter said, "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military actions."

That this assessment came from the CIA--with its history of institutional skepticism about the links--was significant. CIA analysts had long contended that Saddam Hussein's secular regime would not collaborate with Islamic fundamentalists like bin Laden--even though the Baathists had exploited Islam for years, whenever it suited their purposes. Critics of the administration insist the CIA was "pressured" by an extensive and aggressive intelligence operation set up by the Pentagon to find ties where none existed. But the Pentagon team consisted of two people, at times assisted by two others. Their assignment was not to collect new intelligence but to evaluate existing intelligence gathered by the CIA, with particular attention to any possible Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. A CIA counterterrorism team was given a similar task, and while many agency analysts remained skeptical about links, the counterterrorism experts came away convinced that there had been cooperation.

For one thing, they cross-referenced old intelligence with new information provided by high-level al Qaeda detainees. Reports of collaboration grew in number and specificity. The case grew stronger. Throughout the summer and fall of 2002, al Qaeda operatives held in Guantanamo corroborated previously sketchy reports of a series of meetings in Khartoum, Sudan, home to al Qaeda during the mid-90s. U.S. officials learned more about the activities of Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi, an al Qaeda WMD specialist sent by bin Laden to seek WMD training, and possibly weapons, from the Iraqi regime. Intelligence specialists also heard increasingly detailed reports about meetings in Baghdad between al Qaeda leaders and Uday Hussein in April 1998, at a birthday celebration for Saddam.

In December 2002, as the Bush administration prepared its public case for war with Iraq, White House officials sifted through reams of these intelligence reports on ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. Some of the reporting was solid, some circumstantial. The White House identified those elements of the reports it wanted to use publicly and asked the CIA to declassify them. The Agency agreed to declassify some 75 percent of the requested intelligence.

According to administration sources, Colin Powell, in his presentation before the U.N. Security Council, used only 10 or 15 percent of the newly declassified material. He relied heavily on the intelligence in Tenet's letter. Press reports about preparations for the Powell presentation have suggested that Powell refused to use the abundance of CIA documents because he found them thin and unpersuasive. This is only half right. Powell was certainly the most skeptical senior administration official about Iraq-al Qaeda ties. But several administration officials involved in preparing his U.N. presentation say that his reluctance to focus on those links had more to do with the forum for his speech--the Security Council--than with concerns about the reliability of the information.

Powell's presentation sought to do two things: make a compelling case to the world, and to the American public, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; and more immediately, win approval for a second U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force. The second of these objectives, these officials say, required Powell to focus the presentation on Hussein's repeated violations of Security Council resolutions. (Even in the brief portion of Powell's talk focused on Iraq-al Qaeda links, he internationalized the case, pointing out that the bin Laden network had targeted "France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia.") Others in the administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, favored using more of the declassified information about Hussein's support of international terrorism and al Qaeda.

Powell spent just 10 minutes of a 90-minute presentation on the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network." He mentioned intelligence showing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a known al Qaeda associate injured in Afghanistan, had traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment. Powell linked Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda cell operating in a Kurdish region "outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq." Powell told the Security Council that the United States had approached an unnamed "friendly security service"--Jordan's--"to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi," providing information and details "that should have made it easy to find Zarqawi." Iraq did nothing. Finally, Powell asserted that al Qaeda leaders and senior Iraqi officials had "met at least eight times" since the early 1990s.

These claims, the critics maintain, were "hyped" and "exaggerated."

WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION DIDN'T USE

IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION had been out to hype the threat from an al Qaeda-Saddam link, it stands to reason that it would have used every shred of incriminating evidence at its disposal. Instead, the administration was restrained in its use of available intelligence. What the Bush administration left out is in some ways as revealing as what it included.

* Iraqi defectors had been saying for years that Saddam's regime trained "non-Iraqi Arab terrorists" at a camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. U.N. inspectors had confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707. Defectors say the plane was used to train hijackers; the Iraqi regime said it was used in counterterrorism training. Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi Army, worked at Salman Pak. In October 2001, he told PBS's "Frontline" about what went on there. "Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism. . . . All this training is directly toward attacking American targets, and American interests."

But the Bush administration said little about Salman Pak as it demonstrated links between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to administration sources, some detainees who provided credible evidence of other links between Iraq and al Qaeda, including training in terrorism and WMD, insist they have no knowledge of Salman Pak. Khodada, the Iraqi army captain, also professed ignorance of whether the trainees were members of al Qaeda. "Nobody came and told us, 'This is al Qaeda people,'" he explained, "but I know there were some Saudis, there were some Afghanis. There were some other people from other countries getting trained."

* On February 13, 2003, the government of the Philippines asked Hisham al Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, to leave the country. According to telephone records obtained by Philippine intelligence, Hussein had been in frequent contact with two leaders of Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda affiliate in South Asia, immediately before and immediately after they detonated a bomb in Zamboanga City. That attack killed two Filipinos and an American Special Forces soldier and injured several others. Hussein left the Philippines for Iraq after he was "PNG'd"--declared persona non grata--by the Philippine government and has not been heard from since.

According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, an Abu Sayyaf leader who planned the attack bragged on television a month after the bombing that Iraq had contacted him about conducting joint operations. Philippine intelligence officials were initially skeptical of his boasting, but after finding the telephone records they believed him.

* No fewer than five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly confirmed that Mohammed Atta, the lead September 11 hijacker, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer working at the Iraqi embassy, in Prague five months before the hijacking. Media leaks here and in the Czech Republic have called into question whether Atta was in Prague on the key dates--between April 4 and April 11, 2001. And several high-ranking administration officials are "agnostic" as to whether the meeting took place. Still, the public position of the Czech government to this day is that it did.

That assertion should be seen in the context of Atta's curious stop-off in Prague the previous spring, as he traveled to the United States. Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but did not have a valid visa and was denied entry. He returned to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and took a bus back to Prague. One day later, he left for the United States.

Despite the Czech government's confirmation of the Atta-al Ani meeting, the Bush administration dropped it as evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection in September 2002. Far from hyping this episode, administration officials refrained from citing it as the debate over the Iraq war heated up in Congress, in the country, and at the U.N.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS LEARNED SINCE THE WAR

THE ADMINISTRATION'S CRITICS, including several of the Democratic presidential candidates, have alluded to new "evidence" they say confirms Iraq and al Qaeda had no relationship before the war. They have not shared that evidence.

Even as the critics withhold the basis for their allegations, evidence on the other side is piling up. Ansar al-Islam--the al Qaeda cell formed in June 2001 that operated out of northern Iraq before the war, notably attacking Kurdish enemies of Saddam--has stepped up its activities elsewhere in the country. In some cases, say national security officials, Ansar is joining with remnants of Saddam's regime to attack Americans and nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq. There is some reporting, unconfirmed at this point, that the recent bombing of the U.N. headquarters was the result of a joint operation between Baathists and Ansar al-Islam.

And there are reports of more direct links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden. Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997. Hijazi continues to deny that he met with bin Laden on December 21, 1998, to offer the al Qaeda leader safe haven in Iraq. U.S. officials don't believe his denial.

For one thing, the meeting was reported in the press at the time. It also fits a pattern of contacts surrounding Operation Desert Fox, the series of missile strikes the Clinton administration launched at Iraq beginning December 16, 1998. The bombing ended 70 hours later, on December 19, 1998. Administration officials now believe Hijazi left for Afghanistan as the bombing ended and met with bin Laden two days later.

Earlier that year, at another point of increased tension between the United States and Iraq, Hussein sought to step up contacts with al Qaeda. On February 18, 1998, after the Iraqis repeatedly refused to permit U.N. weapons inspectors into sensitive sites, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and delivered a hawkish speech about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." Said Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The following day, February 19, 1998, according to documents unearthed in Baghdad after the recent war by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing upcoming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered with Liquid Paper. The memo laid out a plan to step up contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's security forces, agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might be "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

I emailed Potter, a Jerusalem-based correspondent for the Toronto Star, about his findings last month. He was circumspect about the meaning of the document. "So did we find the tip of the iceberg, or the whole iceberg? Did bin Laden and Saddam agree to disagree and that was the end of it? I still don't know." Still, he wrote, "I have no doubt that what we found is the real thing. We plucked it out of a building that had been J-DAMed and was three-quarters gone. Beyond the pale to think that the CIA or someone else planted false evidence in such a dangerous location, where only lunatics would bother to tread. And then to cover over the incriminating name Osama bin Laden with Liquid Paper, so that only the most stubborn and dogged of translators would fluke into spotting it?"

Four days after that memo was written, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a famous fatwa about the plight of Iraq. Published that day in al Quds al-Arabi, it reads in part:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. . . . The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million . . . despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

The Americans, bin Laden says, are working on behalf of Israel.

The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

Bin Laden urges his followers to act. "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." It was around this time, U.S. officials say, that Hussein paid the $300,000 to bin Laden's deputy, Zawahiri.

ACCORDING TO U.S. officials, soldiers in Iraq have discovered additional documentary evidence like the memo Potter found. This despite the fact that there is no team on the ground assigned to track down these contacts--no equivalent to the Iraq Survey Group looking for evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Interviews with detained senior Iraqi intelligence officials are rounding out the picture.

The Bush administration has thus far chosen to keep the results of its postwar findings to itself; much of the information presented here comes from public sources. The administration, spooked by the media feeding frenzy surrounding yellowcake from Niger, is exercising extreme caution in rolling out the growing evidence of collaboration between al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq. As the critics continue their assault on a prewar "pattern of deception," the administration remains silent.

This impulse is understandable. It is also dangerous. Some administration officials argue privately that the case for linkage is so devastating that when they eventually unveil it, the critics will be embarrassed and their arguments will collapse. But to rely on this assumption is to run a terrible risk. Already, the absence of linkage is the conventional wisdom in many quarters. Once "everybody knows" that Saddam and bin Laden had nothing to do with each other, it becomes extremely difficult for any release of information by the U.S. government to change people's minds.

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

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More Connections

Two new members of the Iraqi interim government insist that Saddam and al Qaeda were linked.

by Stephen F. Hayes

06/03/2004 8:15:00 AM

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SADDAM HUSSEIN "always had links with international terrorist organizations."

On the face of it, this is not a controversial statement. It comes from a CNN interview of Iyad Allawi, recently chosen as the interim prime minister of Iraq. Allawi expanded on this assessment in a December 31, 2003, interview with CNN's Bill Hemmer, when he estimated that more than 1,000 al Qaeda terrorists were operating in Iraq. But his more interesting comment came moments later. The al Qaeda fighters, he said,

were present in Iraq, they came and they were active in Iraq before the war of liberation. They were inflicting a lot of problems on the--and inflaming the situation in northern Iraq, in Iraq Kurdistan. They killed once about a year and a half ago 42 worshipers in one of the mosques in Harachi [ph] in a very ugly way.

Again, on the surface, this was not a particularly revealing statement. After all, Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that al Qaeda was operating in Iraq--almost certainly with the knowledge and approval of the Iraqi regime--before the war. CIA Director George Tenet has testified to the presence of al Qaeda in Iraq on several occasions. Allawi went on:

Those people have had the backing of Saddam prior to liberation, and they remained in Iraq after the collapse, and after the vacuum was created. After the way, they remained in Iraq. Many joined them since then.

Allawi's declaration that the Iraqi regime supported al Qaeda terrorists before the war in Iraq is intriguing

not because of the claim itself, but because of the man making it. Allawi for years ran an Iraqi exile group called the Iraqi National Accord. In recent years, he was the Iraqi exile closest to the CIA. And although George Tenet has spoken repeatedly about the prewar Iraq-al Qaeda connection, he has been at odds with many in the bureaucracy beneath him.

Allawi's claims about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection--claims he has made for several years--have not always been solid. In December, Allawi provided journalists with a document indicating that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta trained in Iraq weeks before the 9/11 hijackings. That same three-page document also claimed that Iraq had--as President Bush claimed in his State of the Union Address--sought uranium from Niger. The report was a bit too politically convenient and was quickly dismissed as a forgery.

But Allawi isn't the only prominent member of the new Iraqi government to have suggested Iraq-al Qaeda connections. His deputy, Barham Salih, has also repeatedly alleged that Saddam's regime supported Ansar al Islam, al Qaeda-linked Islamists in Kurdistan. "Yes, they hate each other, but they're very utilitarian," said Salih. "Saddam Hussein, a secular infidel to many jihadists, had no problem giving money to Hamas. This debate [about whether Saddam worked with al Qaeda] is stupid. The proof is there."

ABC News' outstanding Pentagon reporter, Martha Raddatz, also reported on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection last week. But her May 25, 2004, report on Abu Musab al Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associate who joined forces with Ansar al Islam terrorists, buried an important detail. "In late 2002, officials say, Zarqawi began establishing sleeper cells in Baghdad and acquiring weapons from Iraqi Intelligence officials." (emphasis added).

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America (HarperCollins).

[igloo]

June 01, 2004, 8:21 a.m.

Iraq & Militant Islam

Saddam’s al Qaeda links were a worthy rationale for toppling his regime.

“We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." — President George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime indisputably harbored terrorists and supported terrorism. Under the Bush Doctrine that won resounding bipartisan assent in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and that remains as worthy today as it was back then, that should have been more than enough to justify deposing Saddam, even if there had not been ample evidence of — and decisive consensus about — his intentions and wherewithal regarding weapons of mass destruction.

DROPPED LINK: PIGHEADED SILENCE

Yet, although there should be few, if any, matters more important to national security than boring into the linkage between Iraq and militant Islamic terror, the very idea of linkage has been discredited. Thanks to a withering campaign waged by ideological opponents of U.S. military operations against Iraq — led by the mainstream media, partisans such as former Clinton counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, and disgruntled factions of the so-called intelligence community whose anonymous carping to sympathetic journalists has now reached a fever pitch — conventional wisdom now holds that secular Saddam could not conceivably have collaborated with Osama bin Laden's jihadist network.

It is, however, pigheaded blindness masquerading as wisdom. There are abundant strands of connection. It is, moreover, breathtakingly irresponsible for the press generally, and for an intelligence community purportedly dedicated to securing America from further attacks, to be ignoring or dismissing countless salient questions, rather than moving heaven and earth to answer them. There is good reason to think we have convicted several terrorists in this country on less proof than already exists regarding Saddam's Iraq. What's more, these linkage questions are not going away.

That is largely because some praiseworthy journalism is not going to let them. Most significant is the assiduous detective work of The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who has been investigating and writing about the links for months. Hayes's new book, The Connection, is being released today. It comprehensively lays out a mosaic of operational ties, and questions that Americans, far from brushing aside, should be demanding answers to. Further, the Wall Street Journal is on the case with vital new information, as are other investigative journalists such as Edward Jay Epstein. The issues they are raising may ultimately shape the legacy of the Iraq war, illustrating, in a way the Bush administration has abysmally failed to, that overthrowing Saddam's regime was a logical and worthy progression in the war against militant Islam.

THE ATTA CONNECTION

Of the utmost urgency are indications, continuing to emerge, that Iraq forged operational ties with al Qaeda, sought to conduct terrorist attacks against the United States, and may in fact have had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. The focus of this evidence is the Iraqi Intelligence Service and its apparent ties with not one but at least three leaders of the suicide hijacking plot: Mohammed Atta, Khalid al-Midhar, and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

The Atta connection has been downplayed for months by the mainstream media, which has used a simple tactic, found on page one of the defense-lawyer playbook, that has repeatedly served the Iraq/Qaeda naysayers: viz., cull from an entire subject of investigation one isolated piece of equivocal evidence, suggest that this piece is representative of the entire subject, and thus debunk the subject just because the piece is not a 100-percent lock. Of course, if this facile method of determining truth were followed in law enforcement or intelligence circles, most crime would never be solved and most threats would never be identified. Happily, that is not the case, but the approach, regrettably, plays effectively in the bumper-sticker-talking-points worlds of television news and ideology-driven "reporting."

In the instant case, the subject is whether Mohammed Atta had terrorist ties to the Iraqi regime, and the isolated piece of evidence concerns the narrow question whether Atta actually had a meeting in Prague on April 8, 2001 (i.e., a mere seven months before the 9/11 attacks), with an Iraqi intelligence officer named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. As recently as last week, Newsweek — in its gleeful piece about Ahmed Chalabi's seeming fall from grace (presented, naturally, as a straight news story) — summarily pronounced that although Chalabi had "hyped a story, often cited by the neocons, about" the secret Prague meeting, "[a]fter months of investigation, the CIA and FBI determined that the meeting had never taken place."

Not so fast. First of all, much as Newsweek would clearly like it to be the case, Chalabi is not remotely the source of information about Atta's alarming activities in Prague. More to the point, the CIA and FBI have not concluded that the meeting did not take place. Far from it. Indeed, the most that can be said is that (a) they are unable to say with certainty that the meeting happened, and ( because they have some hotel and banking records showing that Atta was in the U.S. during parts of April 2001, but have unearthed no records showing Atta traveled overseas during that time frame, some investigators infer that the meeting probably did not happen.

In point of fact, however, there is a powerful circumstantial case — which has grown only stronger — that the meeting not only did happen but must have involved anti-American terrorism. Further, the agencies cannot account for Atta's whereabouts day-by-day. Not only would they have to be able to do this to disprove the meeting, but the holes in their reconstruction of Atta's movements actually bolster the likelihood that he journeyed to Prague at the critical time. Substantial credit for our knowledge of all this must go to Edward Jay Epstein, who has closely followed the investigation since its inception.

A little background. The skepticism about the Prague meeting owes to some misunderstandings and some energetic efforts to cast doubt on it. The commonly accepted version of events is this: a witness on the outskirts of Prague happened to see al-Ani, the Iraqi agent, meeting with a young Arabic-looking male on April 8, 2001; the thin reed for claiming this Arabic male and Atta are one and the same is this witness, whose identification, made only after Atta's picture became a staple of sensational news coverage after 9/11, is thus highly suspect; the Czechs, so the story goes, came ultimately to doubt the veracity of the identification; the witness recanted it; and finally, according to James Risen of the New York Times (which, of course, is obsessively opposed to American military action in Iraq), Czech President Vaclav Havel called President Bush to inform the U.S. that, on further consideration, the meeting had not happened. But there is far more to the story, the Czechs have not walked away from the identification, the witness has not recanted, and Havel's spokesman has expressly stated that the Times reporting was "a fabrication." (See Epstein's report here.)

To begin with, by April 2001, the Czechs had profound reason to be worried about al-Ani and any Arabs he might meet with (more on that momentarily). The Czech Republic, though, does not have the vast resources of the U.S. government; it is not as feasible for the Czechs to commit the numerous police it would take to do round-the-clock surveillance on most investigative subjects. Thus, they take the more economical step of employing "watchers" — civilians stationed at obvious places like restaurants and hotels — who make observations and report them to government handlers. It was one of these watchers who observed al-Ani's meeting with the young Arabic male on April 8, 2001.

Experts and defense counsel will tell you that eyewitness-identification evidence is notoriously suspect. And they have a point if we are talking about, say, a lay witness who has the misfortune of being at a bank when it is robbed and gets a fleeting glimpse of the robber he is then asked to identify weeks or months later. As any experienced investigator will counter, however, there is a vast difference between the reliability of an untrained layperson in such circumstances and that of an agent or covert operative whose very job is to make and retain observations. In this instance, the "watcher" is far more analogous to a government agent than an untrained lay person, and thus the identification would be entitled to far more weight even if there weren't abundant other reasons to believe the Arabic male was Atta.

But there are. As Epstein has recently reported, Czech intelligence ultimately conducted a surreptitious search at the Iraqi embassy that turned up al-Ani's appointment calendar. It indicated that the person he had a scheduled meeting with on that day was a "Hamburg student." As is by now well known, Atta led al Qaeda's Hamburg cell in Germany, and he was for a time enrolled as a student at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University. Significantly, moreover, it turns out that Atta had prior contacts with the Czech Republic, and had in 2000 — right as he was about to head to the U.S. to execute the 9/11 plot — obtained a Czech visa, on the application for which he identified himself as a "Hamburg student."

Furthermore, the U.S. cannot account for Atta's whereabouts on April 8, 2001. What is known, Epstein reports, is that on April 4, 2001, Atta checked out of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach. He was not seen again by any American witness for a week. In addition, whatever he was doing at that point — like, say, traveling overseas — must have required funding because, on April 4, he cashed a check for $8,000 from a SunTrust account, according to the FBI. Access to cash, of course, would make travel expenditures less traceable.

On that score, contrary to what one would glean from the Newsweek and Times accounts, Epstein reports that as recently as February 24, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet acknowledged in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had not discounted the Prague meeting. That concession echoes Tenet's testimony on June 18, 2002, during which, regarding the Prague meeting, he stated that it was "possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias since we have been unable to establish that Atta left the US or entered Europe in April 2001 under his true name or any known aliases." In the interim, as Epstein notes, we now know not only of the "Hamburg student" entry in al-Ani's calendar but also of the investigation by Spanish intelligence, which determined that both Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh (his al Qaeda Hamburg-cell associate) acquired false passports from a pair of Algerians named Khaled Madani and Moussa Laoua. And, it must be observed, nothing says these were the cell's only sources for phony travel documents.

Remember now: We are talking about national security, which involves protecting American lives; we are not talking about building a criminal indictment so to bring the dear departed Saddam regime and Atta to court. Even if there were absolutely no other evidence of the Prague meeting than the Czech eyewitness identification corroborated by the appointment calendar, the inability to account for Atta's whereabouts on April 8, and the means he appears to have had to travel, that would be reason enough, for national-security purposes, to assume an Iraqi tie to Atta. This is a critical point, crossing into the worldview of counterterrorism Clinton-style — i.e., the so-called "law enforcement approach" to terrorism that Senator Kerry has suggested he would revive if he were elected, and that, maddeningly, remains the sclerotic mindset in swaths of our intelligence community.

In the criminal-justice system, when we are investigating even serious crimes that vex the body politic but that do not realistically threaten national security, it is all well and good to presume innocence and not take enforcement action until a particular quantum of criminal evidence has been amassed — "probable cause" for an arrest or search, "beyond a reasonable doubt" for conviction at trial. National security is vitally different. It is not about securing convictions but rather the survival of the system — the country — itself. It cannot afford to wait to take preventive action, or make assumptions about innocence, until evidence needed to convict in court has been amassed.

If we are to be meaningfully protected, once enough evidence has emerged to give ground for rational concern, we need to assume guilt until we are satisfied otherwise. In this instance, for over a dozen years up until Saddam's overthrow, Iraq was our enemy (and, to be sure, still is in some quadrants). If there is a colorable chance that it collaborated with Mohammed Atta, it is recklessly irresponsible to ignore that possibility until surer evidence develops; the duty of those charged with protecting national security is to get to the bottom of it, and not rest until they have done so.

But even if we leave that aside and put our law-enforcement hats back on, there is considerable other evidence that Atta, an important member of al Qaeda, had operational ties to Saddam's regime, ties that mortally imperiled American interests. These trace back to 2000 — at the very time Atta was about to enter the U.S. for the fateful 9/11 plan — and dovetail with a then-ongoing plot to bomb a distinctly American target: Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Prague.

As Epstein, upon meeting with Czech intelligence officials, reported in Slate in late 2003, al-Ani was not the only Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague to have been the cause of enormous U.S. concern. There was also his predecessor at the Iraq embassy, Jabir Salim. Salim defected at the end of 1998, and is said to have provided information to the Czechs and British intelligence that Saddam's regime supplied him with $150,000 to support a plot to bomb RFE. Salim's task was to recruit Islamic militants to carry out the attack — a sensible plan if Saddam did not want the attack traced to him, since segments of the American intelligence community, we have seen, could be relied on to cast knee-jerk doubt on the notion that secular Baathists and religiously motivated terrorists would ever conspire together.

CLARKE'S FANTASY WORLD

Such a plot would expose the fantasy world inhabited by Richard Clarke, in which it is said that, after the attempt to murder President George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993, so intimidated was Saddam by President Clinton's forceful response that he stopped taking aggressive action against the U.S. Of course, Clinton's response was not at all forceful — a feckless strike on a Baghdad building that housed Iraq's intelligence service but was intentionally hit while it was relatively empty. Clarke, further, has never quite gotten around to explaining how it was that the purportedly chastened Saddam continued for years after 1993 shooting at U.S. and British planes in the no-fly zone, gaming and finally expelling U.N. weapons inspectors from his country, and, as recent federal prosecutions indicate, stationing his intelligence operatives inside the U.S. to threaten Iraqi defectors. Those oversights, however, would pale next to a plot to destroy RFE circa 1998-2000 — i.e., the very time when Clarke served as counter-terrorism czar.

To be sure, that is an unfair dig unless there really was, at the time, an RFE plot. But not only was there one, it was well-known to U.S. intelligence. U.S. knowledge is plain from the State Department's report, "Global Patterns of Terrorism 2000." Immediately after somewhat misleadingly asserting, as Clarke frequently does, that Saddam's regime had "not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait" (italics mine), the report goes on sketchily to note what the intelligence community believed Saddam was conspiring to do:

Czech police continued to provide protection to the Prague office of the US Government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which produces Radio Free Iraq programs and employs expatriate journalists. The police presence was augmented in 1999, following reports that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) might retaliate against RFE/RL for broadcasts critical of the Iraqi regime.

(Italics mine.)

Thanks to Epstein, we now know much more about those "reports." Salim's information about Saddam's plans caused the Czechs and the U.S. to want al-Ani closely watched when he came to Prague as Salim's replacement in 1999. Al-Ani, it turned out, only exacerbated these fears: The Czech intelligence coordinator told Epstein that al-Ani was observed photographing RFE headquarters. Given that, and knowing that Salim's instructions had been to recruit an Islamic militant, the Czechs would obviously have been deeply concerned about any meeting between al-Ani and an Arabic male. It is thus no surprise that watchers would have been assigned, and no coincidence that a report of such a meeting, on April 8, 2001, would generate such interest. That interest turned to full-blown anxiety because the Czechs quickly lost track of this Arabic male (which would make sense if the male was Atta, since we know he was in the U.S. as of April 11). Consequently, the Czechs did at least three things: they informed their counterparts in the American intelligence community, they stepped up surveillance to protect RFE headquarters in Prague (as the State Department report observes), and, within two weeks of the April 8 meeting, they expelled al-Ani.

Okay, so granted: We understood Saddam was willing to conspire with militants to blow up an American target; we were manifestly worried about al-Ani meeting with Arab males who might be terrorists; and al-Ani met with an Arabic male whom a presumptively reliable witness has identified as Atta, under circumstances where al-Ani was evidently planning to meet on April 8 with a "Hamburg student," which Atta was. Not bad, but can we really be sure it was Atta? And even if it was, how can we be sure it wasn't just one of those chance encounters between an Iraqi intelligence officer looking to strike an American target and an al Qaeda terrorist hoping to destroy the World Trade Center.

Maybe we can know it because it wasn't the first time. That's right: Atta and al-Ani had almost certainly met before, and, not surprisingly, under highly suspicious circumstances. It is incontestable that Atta made at least two trips to Prague immediately before relocating to the U.S. to carry out the 9/11 plot. On May 26, 2000, he applied in Bonn for a visa to travel to the Czech Republic. This necessarily means he had business there; if he had merely sought to change planes in a Czech airport en route to some other country, he could have done so without a visa.

It also appears his business there was urgent and needed to be conducted on May 30, 2000. Why? Atta was told in Bonn that his visa to enter the Czech Republic would not be ready until May 31, but he went anyway. That is, he flew from Germany to the Prague International Airport on May 30, where, as Epstein reports, he would not have been permitted to go beyond the transit lounge. Six hours after arriving, he flew back to Germany. Did he visit with the Iraqi intelligence operative, al-Ani? Well, no one reported seeing him do so, but he was obviously there to conduct business so important it could not wait even until the next day. And he clearly did not want to be observed conducting that business: although all but a small area of the transit lounge was under video surveillance, Atta somehow managed to elude the cameras for all but a few minutes of his stay — indicating that he was either remarkably lucky or he was meeting with someone who knew the weaknesses in the surveillance system.

Nor is that all. Atta returned to Prague, by bus, only three days later, on June 2, 2000. This time, the visa having been issued, he was permitted to enter the country. His whereabouts for about twenty hours in the Czech Republic are unknown. What is known, though, is that at the end of that time he flew from Prague to the United States. In addition, as Epstein reports, it was shortly after Atta entered the U.S. that large amounts of laundered funds began flowing to the 9/11 conspiracy.

What is going on here? Is it possible that al-Ani and Atta were meeting in 2000 and 2001 about the 9/11 plot? Is it possible that al-Ani, knowing that the RFE plot had undoubtedly been compromised by his defector-predecessor, Salim, was brazenly photographing RFE headquarters as a ruse to make the U.S. think RFE was the real target? Is it possible that Saddam was not only in the 9/11 plot but in it as early as May 2000?

Probably not — but only because I'd put the time at least five months earlier. That brings us to Atta's fellow hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon on the morning of September 11. Their mission, it turns out, was the culmination of planning that had begun half a world away in January 2000.

HANGING AROUND THE HANGAR

Specifically, as the 9/11 Commission staff has reported, in late December 1999, the U.S. learned through signals intelligence that two likely Qaeda operatives — "Nawaf," who was in Pakistan, and "Khalid," who was in Yemen — were making plans to meet in Malaysia after departing from their respective destinations on January 2. Concerned, CIA sprung into action, such that by the time they arrived at Kuala Lampur's international airport on January 5, Khalid had already been identified as al-Midhar and his Saudi passport, showing a visa permitting entry into the U.S., had already been photocopied (although a series of missteps had resulted in the failure to identify Nawaf as al-Hazmi and to learn that he, too, had a visa to enter the U.S. — issued in Jeddah at the same time as al-Midhar's). CIA headquarters notified officials that same day of the "need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities...to determine if there is any true threat posed."

The commission's report does not discuss what happened at the airport. That, though, has been extensively investigated and recounted for months by The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes (See "Dick Cheney Was Right"), coverage that has culminated this week in both the publication of his book on Iraq/Qaeda links and some new reporting. The two eventual hijackers were in fact met by a Malaysian Airlines "greeter" — a functionary whose job is to "[meet] VIPs upon arrival and accompan[y] them through the sometimes onerous procedures of foreign travel." This greeter turned out to be a highly unusual one. For starters, he was not Malaysian; he was an Iraqi named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Moreover, he got the job in August 1999 not through Malaysian Airlines but through the intercession of the Iraqi embassy, which had him start that autumn and which controlled his work schedule. Coincidence? I don't think so. As both Hayes and the Wall Street Journal have recently reported, the Defense Department has acknowledged recovering, since toppling Saddam, at least three rosters of his elite paramilitary force, the Fedayeen. These have now been authenticated and translated, and they identify a Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir.

Although a greeter's job is generally concluded once the passengers have been cleared through Customs to enter the country, Shakir turns out to have been especially accommodating to al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. As Hayes reports, he not only saw them through the airport but further jumped into their car and accompanied them to the Kuala Lampur Hotel. The extent of Shakir's participation in what went on thereafter is unknown. What is known, however, is that other attendees at this crucial confab included Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Tawfiq bin Atash (aka "Khallad"). The aforementioned bin al-Shibh was, of course, the fellow Hamburg cell and 9/11 confederate of none other than Mohammed Atta. Atash is the reputed architect of the October 2000 bombing in Yemen of the U.S.S. Cole (which killed 17 U.S. sailors).

The timing of the Kuala Lampur meeting, and the presence of Atash and bin al-Shibh together with two of the 9/11 hijackers and, apparently, an officer of Saddam's Fedayeen are significant. The Cole attack was not the first effort to bomb an American destroyer docked in Yemen; that had actually occurred on January 2, 2000, (just three days before this Malaysia conference) against the U.S.S. The Sullivans. On that prior attempt, the attack boat had sunk from the weight of the explosives, but most of the weaponry was recovered, so as Atash traveled from Yemen to Kuala Lampur that week to meet with the eventual hijackers, he knew there had just been a near-miss (like several other al Qaeda near misses during that Millennium timeframe), but that there would be another attempt to attack a vessel in the near future. Furthermore, Atash and bin al-Shibh are believed to have teamed up on other terror initiatives, including an unsuccessful scheme to sink U.S. and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. To put it mildly, this is interesting company indeed for Shakir to have kept.

After meeting in Malaysia for a few days, on January 8, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi traveled to Bangkok together with Atash. They were there for a week, during which, the 9/11 Commission Staff reports, Atash received funds from al Qaeda sources, some of which were given to al-Midhar and al-Hazmi, who then flew to Los Angeles on January 15 to begin their in-country 9/11 preparations. Meanwhile, Hayes recounts that after the Malaysia meeting, Shakir showed up for work at the airport for two days (January 9 and 10) and then never again. Evidently, whatever the purpose of his posting there by Iraq was, it had been accomplished.

If that alone were the end of the Shakir story, it would be more than enough to raise deep suspicions. Indeed, is there a judge in America who would not have issued a warrant for Shakir's arrest post-9/11 on just the information heretofore described? But that's not all there is. Not by a long shot.

As Hayes has detailed, Shakir in fact was arrested just six days after the 9/11 attacks — not in the U.S. but in Qatar, where he happened somehow to have gotten a government job (in Qatar's ministry of religious development). Shakir, it seems, was of interest not only because of Kuala Lampur but because of telephone records tying him to a New Jersey location used in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His arrest produced a trove of intelligence, including his possession of contact information for: Zahid Sheikh Mohammed and Ammar al Baluchi, respectively the brother and nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Ibrahim Suleiman, a Kuwaiti whose fingerprints were found on bomb-making manuals during the 1993 WTC investigation; and Musab Yasin, a fugitive suspected of the 1993 WTC bombing, who fled to Baghdad where he was harbored and given financial support by Saddam's regime (and whose brother, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was actually convicted for the bombing).

Shakir also had contact information for an outfit called "Taba Investments." Taba is a well-known al Qaeda front for another Iraqi named Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. Abu Hajer al Iraqi). Salim, one of the formative figures of al Qaeda and among Osama bin Laden's closest advisers, was actually in a federal prison in the U.S. by the time Shakir was arrested. He had been indicted for the 1998 embassy bombings. He hadn't, however, been tried with his co-defendants because he had complicated matters by plunging a shiv through the eye of a prison guard (who survived but suffered brain damage) during an escape attempt. Last month, Salim was sentenced to 32 years' imprisonment for maiming the corrections officer.

Despite all this information, the Qatari government opted to release Shakir. He tried to flee to Iraq, but was intercepted in Jordan. There he was held for three months without charge (naturally, prompting shrieks from Amnesty International). Hayes reports that the Jordanians permitted Shakir to be interviewed during that time by the CIA, which concluded that he was well-schooled in counter-interrogation techniques. After intense pressure from Saddam's regime, Shakir was finally released in late January 2002. The motivation for letting him go, according to Hayes, was Jordanians' belief — as to which, it is said, they convinced the CIA — that Shakir might be used as a double-agent against Iraq (a strange calculation given that he had evidently been uncooperative during lengthy interrogation). In any event, Shakir is believed to have returned immediately to Baghdad; his current whereabouts are unknown.

Could there be satisfactory, exculpatory explanations here? Sure. Mohammed Atta may never have me an Iraqi intelligence officer — perhaps he made those furtive mid-2000 trips to Prague, in the middle of preparing to enter America for the 9/11 plot, in order to meet someone else besides an Iraqi agent caught up in an apparent conspiracy to blow up an American target; perhaps, the watcher who saw him meet al-Ani on April 8, 2001 — during the time when no other witness can account for Atta's whereabouts — is mistaken, and poor al-Ani should never have been expelled by the Czechs, and the State Department should never have talked about Iraq potentially plotting to bomb RFE in its 2000 report.

Maybe the Ahmed Hikmat Shakir who the CIA thought had counter-interrogation training and who Saddam's regime was anxious to bring home from post-9/11 captivity in Jordan is not the person of the same name who just happens to have been a high-ranking Fedayeen officer. And even if he is the same person, maybe he's just one of those friendly Fedayeens who happened to like militants — keeping up contacts with the very highest levels of al Qaeda, offering rides to secret meetings in the midst of multiple terrorist plots, and quitting the country once they left town.

MAKING THE CASE

Maybe all of this is just one big misunderstanding. But should we really be doing contortions to see it that way? Just on the basis of what is known about the RFE conspiracy, is it responsible for the media or current and former public officials to be publicly announcing with certainty that Saddam had nothing to do with anti-American terrorism? I don't pretend to have the answers, but it sure looks to me like Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaeda and that his regime may well have rendered assistance — probably very substantial assistance — to the 9/11 plot. Is there a better explanation than that for Prague and for Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, especially taken together? And if not, what more responsible thing could President Bush possibly have done than taken the war that had been declared against us straight to Butcher of Baghdad?

This last is the most curious question of all. Plainly, there is a case to be made that Saddam was, at the very least, an aider and abettor of a militant Islamic terror network that we have been at war with for over two years. If he was, then that was at least as good a rationale as fears about WMD for toppling him militarily. Why, then, has the administration, besieged by peals of thunderous criticism about the Iraq venture, failed to make the case?

It is hard to say. It could be that the country's fervor for the summoning rhetoric of the Bush Doctrine is not matched by true conviction about what it literally commands. Iraq is hardly the only state sponsor of terrorism — Iran and Syria come instantly to mind, and the jury is still out on whether the Saudis (who say all the right things and fund all the wrong things) are friend or foe. The administration must thus ask: Do we really want to posit that evidence of terror ties is sufficient cause for us to launch military operations? Plainly, it is a far easier thing to heed the Bush Doctrine as a matter of hortatory aspiration than to execute it — which would involve explaining to an already weary country, through the din of an anti-war press, that Iraq is far from the last stop on the long march. Yet, when the case for war is argued as a "links with al Qaeda" test, it immediately implicates uncomfortable matters of policy: What's the principled reason for not having invaded Iran? Do we have a sufficiently robust military to execute the Bush Doctrine? Do we have the budget to carry it out? Do we have the will?

Another factor, palpably, is national mindset. Much of the government and the media continue to think of terrorism as a criminal-justice issue. The evidence outlined above raises grave concerns, but if courtroom standards are to be applied and the defendant, Iraq, is presumed innocent, our mission too readily slips into a need to tighten up the proof, rather than an imperative to act despite many questions unanswered (and some perhaps unanswerable). It is all well and good to say that national security cannot wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt (just as it is all well and good to announce the Bush Doctrine); but it is quite another thing to arouse the political will toward urgent action as time passes without a domestic attack, as we get more distant from 9/11 and its fervor, and as the strands connecting state sponsors to terrorism — no matter how real they may be — come to be seen as too attenuated to warrant a massive military response. Showing a hostile regime may have profound links to terror simply does not have the visceral immediacy of showing it may have access to weapons of mass destruction.

When a country has treated terrorism like ordinary crime for decades, military action based on apparent but murky ties to terror — especially long after the fact — seems disproportionate. Of course, if we get hit again, there will no doubt be new 9/11 Commissions demanding to know: Whatever happened to the Bush Doctrine?

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is an NRO contributor.

[igloo]

Why Won't the Bush Administration Tell Us the Truth About Terrorism?

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

By Bill O'Reilly

Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight.

Why won't the Bush administration tell us the truth about terrorism? That is the subject of this evening's "Talking Points Memo."

President Bush continues to believe that the fight in Iraq will eventually make Americans safer. And I think he's right, but I also think he doesn't make a strong enough case. Let's keep it real simple so even the far left fanatics can understand it.

Does any clear thinking person believe that Usama bin Laden would not use a nuclear weapon to kill millions of Americans if he could? Does anyone say he would not do that? If you know someone who doesn't believe that, get away from them fast. Bin Laden would use anything he could to kill as many American civilians as possible.

Here's another question for you. How much do you know about Salman Pak (search)? Today on NPR Radio (search), the host of a New York morning program didn't seem to know much about it. Do you?

Salman Pak is located 15 miles southwest of Baghdad. It was here that Saddam Hussein trained terrorists. Both Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arabs learned how to hijack airlines, make and plant bombs, and stage assassinations, among other things. According to Saba Khodada (ph), a terrorist instructor at Salman Pak who worked for Saddam, the camp was run by an international terrorist called "the ghost", who has yet to be identified. When the Marines raided the camp last spring, they found vats of industrial chemicals, manuals on how to fool U.N. weapons inspectors, and mass graves. They also found a passenger jet.

Here's another question for you. How much do you know about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? He's a 37-year-old Jordanian terrorist who was wounded in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. He was shipped to Baghdad, where his leg was amputated. He has direct ties to al Qaeda and is believed to have executed American Nicholas Berg.

So let's connect some dots here. Bin Laden will murder any way he can. That's a given. Saddam was training terrorists and helped top Al Qaeda-linked guy Zarqawi, who continues to kill Americans. That's what President Bush should have told the nation last night because those facts are solid and have a direct meaning to us all.

We are now fighting terrorism as a divided nation. That's not going to cut it. Bin Laden actually predicted America would falter in the face of his violence and sees us as decadent and cowardly.

While it is true that Iraq has been somewhat mishandled by the Bush administration, it's also true that this battlefield is necessary and vital. All Americans should wake up and wise up. Terror is terror. We must defeat it totally. Retreat is not an option.

And that's "The Memo."

[igloo]

Saddam's Ambassador to al Qaeda

From the March 1, 2004 issue: An Iraqi prisoner details Saddam's links to Osama bin Laden's terror network.

by Jonathan Schanzer

03/01/2004,

A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam's envoy to al Qaeda.

Before recounting details from my January 29 interview, some caution is necessary. Al-Shamari's account was compelling and filled with specific information that would either make him a skilled and detailed liar or a man with information that the U.S. public needs to hear. My Iraqi escort informed me that al-Shamari has been in prison since March 2002, that U.S. officials have visited him several times, and that his story has remained consistent. There was little language barrier; my Arabic skills allowed me to understand much of what al-Shamari said, even before translation. Finally, subsequent conversations with U.S. government officials in Washington and Baghdad, as well as several articles written well before this one, indicate that al-Shamari's claims have been echoed by other sources throughout Iraq.

When I walked into the tiny

interrogation room, it was midmorning. I had just finished interviews with two other prisoners--both members of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda affiliate responsible for attacks against Kurdish and Western targets in northern Iraq. The group had been active in a small enclave near Halabja in the Kurdistan region from about September 2001 until the U.S. assault on Iraq last spring, when its Arab and Kurdish fighters fled over the Iranian border, only to return after the war. U.S. officials now suspect Ansar in some of the bloodier attacks against U.S. interests throughout Iraq.

My first question to al-Shamari was whether he was involved in the operations of Ansar al Islam. My translator asked him the question in Arabic, and al-Shamari nodded: "Yes." Al-Shamari, who appears to be in his late twenties, said that his division of the Mukhabarat provided weapons to Ansar, "mostly mortar rounds." This statement echoed an independent Kurdish report from July 2002 alleging that ordnance seized from Ansar al Islam was produced by Saddam's military and a Guardian article several weeks later alleging that truckloads of arms were shipped to Ansar from areas controlled by Saddam.

In addition to weapons, al-Shamari said, the Mukhabarat also helped finance Ansar al Islam. "On one occasion we gave them ten million Swiss dinars [$700,000]," al-Shamari said, referring to the pre-1990 Iraqi currency. On other occasions, the Mukhabarat provided more than that. The assistance, he added, was furnished "every month or two months."

I then picked up a picture of a man known as Abu Wael that I had acquired from Kurdish intelligence. In the course of my research, several sources had claimed that Abu Wael was on Saddam's payroll and was also an al Qaeda operative, but few had any facts to back up their claim. For example, one Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, stated flatly before the Iraq war, "all information indicates [that Abu Wael] was the link between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime" but neglected to provide any such information. Agence France-Presse after the war cited a Kurdish security chief's description of Abu Wael as a "key link to Saddam's former Baath regime" and an "intelligence agent for the ousted president originally from Baghdad." Again, nothing was provided to substantiate this claim.

In my own analysis of this group, I could do little but weakly assert that Wael was "reportedly an al Qaeda operative on Saddam's payroll." The best reporting on Wael came from a March 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, who had visited a Kurdish prison in northern Iraq and interviewed Ansar prisoners. He spoke with one Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammed, whom Kurdish intelligence captured while he was on his way to the Ansar enclave. Muhammed told Goldberg that Abu Wael was "the actual decision-maker" for Ansar al Islam and "an employee of the Mukhabarat."

"Do you know this man?" I asked al-Shamari. His eyes widened and he smiled. He told me that he knew the man in the picture, but that his graying beard was now completely white. He said that the man was Abu Wael, whose full name is Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani. The prisoner told me that he had worked for Abu Wael, who was the leader of a special intelligence directorate in the Mukhabarat. That directorate provided assistance to Ansar al Islam at the behest of Saddam Hussein, whom Abu Wael had met "four or five times." Al-Shamari added that "Abu Wael's wife is Izzat al-Douri's cousin," making him a part of Saddam's inner circle. Al-Douri, of course, was the deputy chairman of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council, a high-ranking official in Iraq's armed forces, and Saddam's righthand man. Originally number six on the most wanted list, he is still believed to be

at large in Iraq, and is suspected of coordinating aspects of insurgency against American troops, primarily in the Sunni triangle.

Why, I asked, would Saddam task one of his intelligence agents to work with the Kurds, an ethnic group that was an avowed enemy of the Baath regime, and had clashed with Iraqi forces on several occasions? Al-Shamari said that Saddam wanted to create chaos in the pro-American Kurdish region. In other words, he used Ansar al Islam as a tool against the Kurds. As an intelligence official for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (one of the two major parties in northern Iraq) explained to me, "Most of the Kurdish fighters in Ansar al Islam didn't know the link to Saddam." They believed they were fighting a local jihad. Only the high-level lieutenants were aware that Abu Wael was involved.

Al-Shamari also told me that the links between Saddam's regime and the al Qaeda network went beyond Ansar al Islam. He explained in considerable detail that Saddam actually ordered Abu Wael to organize foreign fighters from outside Iraq to join Ansar. Al-Shamari estimated that some 150 foreign fighters were imported from al Qaeda clusters in Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Lebanon to fight with Ansar al Islam's Kurdish fighters.

I asked him who came from Lebanon. "I don't know the name of the group," he replied. "But the man we worked with was named Abu Aisha." Al-Shamari was likely referring to Bassam Kanj, alias Abu Aisha, who was a little-known militant of the Dinniyeh group, a faction of the Lebanese al Qaeda affiliate Asbat al Ansar. Kanj was killed in a January 2000 battle with Lebanese forces.

Al-Shamari said that there was also contact with the Egyptian "Gamaat al-Jihad," which is now seen as the core of al Qaeda's leadership, as well as with the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which bin Laden helped create in 1998 as an alternative to Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Al-Shamari talked of Abu Wael's links with Turkey's "Jamaa al-Khilafa"--likely the group also known as the "Union of Islamic Communities" (UIC) or the "Organization of Caliphate State." This terror group, established in 1983 by Cemalettin Kaplan, reportedly met with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997, and later sent cadres there to train. Three years before 9/11, UIC plotted to crash a plane into Ankara's Ataturk Mausoleum on a day when hundreds of Turkish officials were present.

Al-Shamari stated that Abu Wael sometimes traveled to meet with these groups. All of them, he added, visited Wael in Iraq and were provided Iraqi visas. This corroborates an interview I had with a senior PUK official in April 2003, who stated that many of the Arab fighters captured or killed during the war held passports with Iraqi visas.

Al-Shamari said that importing foreign fighters to train in Iraq was part of his job in the Mukhabarat. The fighters trained in Salman Pak, a facility located some 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. He said that he had personal knowledge of 500 fighters that came through Salman Pak dating back to the late 1990s; they trained in "urban combat, explosives, and car bombs." This account agrees with a White House Background Paper on Iraq dated September 12, 2002, which cited the "highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations."

Abu Wael also sent money to the aforementioned al Qaeda affiliates, and to other groups that "worked against the United States." Abu Wael dispensed most of the funds himself, al-Shamari said, but there was also some cooperation with Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Zarqawi, as the prisoner explained, was al Qaeda's link to Iraq in the same way that Abu Wael was the Iraqi link to al Qaeda. Indeed, Zarqawi (who received medical attention in Baghdad in 2002 for wounds that he suffered from U.S. forces in Afghanistan) and Abu Wael helped Ansar al Islam prepare for the U.S. assault on its small enclave last year. According to al-Shamari, Ansar was given the plan from the top Iraqi leadership: "If the U.S. was to hit [the Ansar base], the fighters were directed to go to Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul . . . Faluja and other places." This statement agreed with a prior prisoner interview I had with the attempted murderer of Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. This second prisoner told me that "Ansar had plans to go south if the U.S. would attack."

Al-Shamari said the new group was to be named Jund ash-Sham, and would deal mainly in explosives. He believed that Zarqawi and Abu Wael were responsible for some of the attacks against U.S. soldiers in central Iraq. "Their directives were to hit America and American interests," he said.

Al-Shamari claimed to have had prior information about al Qaeda attacks in the past. "I knew about the attack on the American in Jordan," he said, referring to the November 2002 assassination of USAID official Lawrence Foley. "Zarqawi," he said, "ordered that man to be killed."

These are some of the highlights from my interview, which lasted about 45 minutes.

I heard one other salient Abu Wael anecdote in an earlier interview during my eight-day trip to Iraq. That interview was with the former tenth-in-command for Ansar al Islam, a man known simply as Qods. In June 2003, just before he was arrested and put in the jail where I met him, Qods said that he saw Abu Wael. After the war, Abu Wael dispatched him from an Ansar safe house in Ravansar, Iran, to deliver a message to his son in Baghdad. The message: Ansar al Islam leaders needed help getting back into Iraq. It was only then, he said, when he met Abu Wael's son, that he learned of the link between the Baathists and al Qaeda.

Qods told me that he was angry with the leaders of Ansar for hiding its ties to Saddam. "Ansar had lots of secret ties between the Baath and Arab leaders," he said.

The challenge now is to document the claims of these witnesses about the secret ties between Saddam, al Qaeda, and Abu Wael. A number of U.S. officials have indicated to me that there are other Iraqis who have similar stories to tell. Perhaps they can corroborate Abdul Rahman al-Shamari's account. Meanwhile, the U.S. deck of cards representing Iraq's 55 most wanted appears to be one card short. Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani, aka Abu Wael, should be number 56.

Jonathan Schanzer is a terrorism analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of the forthcoming book "Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliates and the Next Generation of Terror."

[igloo]

The Clinton View of Iraq-al Qaeda Ties

Connecting the dots in 1998, but not in 2003.

by Stephen F. Hayes

12/29/2003, Volume 009, Issue 16

ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection.

For nearly two years, starting in 1996, the CIA monitored the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The plant was known to have deep connections to Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation, and the CIA had gathered intelligence on the budding relationship between Iraqi chemical weapons experts and the plant's top officials. The intelligence included information that several top chemical weapons specialists from Iraq had attended ceremonies to celebrate the plant's opening in 1996. And, more compelling, the National Security Agency had intercepted telephone calls between Iraqi scientists and the plant's general manager.

Iraq also admitted to having a $199,000 contract with al Shifa for goods under the oil-for-food program. Those goods were never delivered. While it's hard to know what significance, if any, to ascribe to this information, it fits a pattern described in recent CIA reporting on the overlap in the mid-1990s between al Qaeda-financed groups and firms that violated U.N. sanctions on behalf of Iraq.

The clincher, however, came later in the spring of 1998, when the CIA secretly gathered a soil sample from 60 feet outside of the plant's main gate. The sample showed high levels of O-ethylmethylphosphonothioic acid, known as EMPTA, which is a key ingredient for the deadly nerve agent VX. A senior intelligence official who briefed

reporters at the time was asked which countries make VX using EMPTA. "Iraq is the only country we're aware of," the official said. "There are a variety of ways of making VX, a variety of recipes, and EMPTA is fairly unique."

That briefing came on August 24, 1998, four days after the Clinton administration launched cruise-missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (Osama bin Laden's headquarters from 1992-96), including the al Shifa plant. The missile strikes came 13 days after bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 257 people--including 12 Americans--and injured nearly 5,000. Clinton administration officials said that the attacks were in part retaliatory and in part preemptive. U.S. intelligence agencies had picked up "chatter" among bin Laden's deputies indicating that more attacks against American interests were imminent.

The al Shifa plant in Sudan was largely destroyed after being hit by six Tomahawk missiles. John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News, reported the story on August 25, 1998:

Before the pharmaceutical plant was reduced to rubble by American cruise missiles, the CIA was secretly gathering evidence that ended up putting the facility on America's target list. Intelligence sources say their agents clandestinely gathered soil samples outside the plant and found, quote, "strong evidence" of a chemical compound called EMPTA, a compound that has only one known purpose, to make VX nerve gas.

Then, the connection:

The U.S. had been suspicious for months, partly because of Osama bin Laden's financial ties, but also because of strong connections to Iraq. Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country's chemical weapons program.

The senior intelligence officials who briefed reporters laid out the collaboration. "We knew there were fuzzy ties between [bin Laden] and the plant but strong ties between him and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Iraq." Although this official was careful not to oversell bin Laden's ties to the plant, other Clinton officials told reporters that the plant's general manager lived in a villa owned by bin Laden.

Several Clinton administration national security officials told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last week that they stand by the intelligence. "The bottom line for me is that the targeting was justified and appropriate," said Daniel Benjamin, director of counterterrorism on Clinton's National Security Council, in an emailed response to questions. "I would be surprised if any president--with the evidence of al Qaeda's intentions evident in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the intelligence on [chemical weapons] that was at hand from Sudan--would have made a different decision about bombing the plant."

The current president certainly agrees. "I think you give the commander in chief the benefit of the doubt," said George W. Bush, governor of Texas, on August 20, 1998, the same day as the U.S. counterstrikes. "This is a foreign policy matter. I'm confident he's working on the best intelligence available, and I hope it's successful."

Wouldn't the bombing of a plant with well-documented connections to Iraq's chemical weapons program, undertaken in an effort to strike back at Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, seem to suggest the

Clinton administration national security officials believed Iraq was working with al Qaeda? Benjamin, who has been one of the leading skeptics of claims that Iraq was working with al Qaeda, doesn't want to connect those dots.

Instead, he describes al Qaeda and Iraq as unwitting collaborators. "The Iraqi connection with al Shifa, given what we know about it, does not yet meet the test as proof of a substantive relationship because it isn't clear that one side knew the other side's involvement. That is, it is not clear that the Iraqis knew about bin Laden's well-concealed investment in the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation. The Sudanese very likely had their own interest in VX development, and they would also have had good reasons to keep al Qaeda's involvement from the Iraqis. After all, Saddam was exactly the kind of secularist autocrat that al Qaeda despised. In the most extreme case, if the Iraqis suspected al Qaeda involvement, they might have had assurances from the Sudanese that bin Laden's people would never get the weapons. That may sound less than satisfying, but the Sudanese did show a talent for fleecing bin Laden. It is all somewhat speculative, and it would be helpful to know more."

It does sound less than satisfying to one Bush administration official. "So, when the Clinton administration wants to justify its strike on al Shifa," this official tells me, "it's okay to use an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. But now that the Bush administration and George Tenet talk about links, it's suddenly not believable?"

The Clinton administration heavily emphasized the Iraq link to justify its 1998 strikes against al Qaeda. Just four days before the embassy bombings, Saddam Hussein had once again stepped up his defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors, causing what Senator Richard Lugar called another Iraqi "crisis." Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, one of those in the small circle of Clinton advisers involved in planning the strikes, briefed foreign reporters on August 25, 1998. He was asked about the connection directly and answered carefully.

Q: Ambassador Pickering, do you know of any connection between the so-called pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum and the Iraqi government in regard to production of precursors of VX?

PICKERING: Yeah, I would like to consult my notes just to be sure that what I have to say is stated clearly and correctly. We see evidence that we think is quite clear on contacts between Sudan and Iraq. In fact, al Shifa officials, early in the company's history, we believe were in touch with Iraqi individuals associated with Iraq's VX program.

Ambassador Bill Richardson, at the time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, echoed those sentiments in an appearance on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," on August 30, 1998. He called the targeting "one of the finest hours of our intelligence people."

"We know for a fact, physical evidence, soil samples of VX precursor--chemical precursor at the site," said Richardson. "Secondly, Wolf, direct evidence of ties between Osama bin Laden and the Military Industrial Corporation--the al Shifa factory was part of that. This is an operation--a collection of buildings that does a lot of this dirty munitions stuff. And, thirdly, there is no evidence that this precursor has a commercial application. So, you combine that with Sudan support for terrorism, their connections with Iraq on VX, and you combine that, also, with the chemical precursor issue, and Sudan's leadership support for Osama bin Laden, and you've got a pretty clear cut case."

If the case appeared "clear cut" to top Clinton administration officials, it was not as open-and-shut to the news media. Press reports brimmed with speculation about bad intelligence or even the misuse of intelligence. In an October 27, 1999, article, New York Times reporter James Risen went back and reexamined the intelligence. He wrote: "At the pivotal meeting reviewing the targets, the Director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, was said to have cautioned Mr. Clinton's top advisers that while he believed that the evidence connecting Mr. Bin Laden to the factory was strong, it was less than ironclad." Risen also reported that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had shut down an investigation into the targeting after questions were raised by the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (the same intelligence team that raised questions about prewar intelligence relating to the war in Iraq).

Other questions persisted as well. Clinton administration officials initially scoffed at the notion that al Shifa produced any pharmaceutical products. But reporters searching through the rubble found empty aspirin bottles, as well as other indications that the plant was not used exclusively to produce chemical weapons. The strikes came in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, leaving some analysts to wonder whether President Clinton was following the conspiratorial news-management scenario laid out in "Wag the Dog," then a hit movie.

But the media failed to understand the case, according to Daniel Benjamin, who was a reporter himself before joining the Clinton National Security Council. "Intelligence is always incomplete, typically composed of pieces that refuse to fit neatly together and are subject to competing interpretations," writes Benjamin with coauthor Steven Simon in the 2002 book "The Age of Sacred Terror." "By disclosing the intelligence, the administration was asking journalists to connect the dots--assemble bits of evidence and construct a picture that would account for all the disparate information. In response, reporters cast doubt on the validity of each piece of the information provided and thus on the case for attacking al Shifa."

Now, however, there's a new wrinkle. Bush administration officials largely agree with their predecessors. "There's pretty good intelligence linking al Shifa to Iraq and also good information linking al Shifa to al Qaeda," says one administration official familiar with the intelligence. "I don't think there's much dispute that [sudan's Military Industrial Corporation] was al Qaeda supported. The link from al Shifa to Iraq is what there is more dispute about."

According to this official, U.S. intelligence has obtained Iraqi documents showing that the head of al Shifa had been granted permission by the Iraqi government to travel to Baghdad to meet with Emad al-Ani, often described as "the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program." Said the official: "The reports can confirm that the trip was authorized, but the travel part hasn't been confirmed yet."

So why hasn't the Bush administration mentioned the al Shifa connection in its public case for war in Iraq? Even if one accepts Benjamin's proposition that Iraq may not have known that it was arming al Qaeda and that al Qaeda may not have known its chemicals came from Iraq, doesn't al Shifa demonstrate convincingly the dangers of attempting to "contain" a maniacal leader with WMD?

According to Bush officials, two factors contributed to their reluctance to discuss the Iraq-al Qaeda connection suggested by al Shifa. First, the level of proof never rose above the threshold of "highly suggestive circumstantial evidence"--indicating that on this question, Bush administration policymakers were somewhat more cautious about the public use of intelligence on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection than were their counterparts in the Clinton administration. Second, according to one Bush administration source, "there is a massive sensitivity at the Agency to bringing up this issue again because of the controversy in 1998."

But there is bound to be more discussion of al Shifa and Iraq-al Qaeda connections in the coming weeks. The Senate Intelligence Committee is nearing completion of its review of prewar intelligence. And although there is still no CIA team assigned to look at the links between Iraq and al Qaeda, investigators looking at documents from the fallen regime continue to uncover new information about those connections on a regular basis.

Democrats who before the war discounted the possibility of any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda have largely fallen silent. And in recent days, two prowar Democrats have spoken openly about the relationship. Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana who sits on the Intelligence Committee, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD, "the relationship seemed to have its roots in mutual exploitation. Saddam Hussein used terrorism for his own ends, and Osama bin Laden used a nation-state for the things that only a nation-state can provide."

And Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat and presidential candidate, discussed the connections in an appearance last week on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Said Lieberman: "I want to be real clear about the connection with terrorists. I've seen a lot of evidence on this. There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. I never could reach the conclusion that [saddam] was part of September 11. Don't get me wrong about that. But there was so much smoke there that it made me worry. And you know, some people say with a great facility, al Qaeda and Saddam could never get together. He is secular and they're theological. But there's something that tied them together. It's their hatred of us."

[igloo]

Weekly Standard: Intelligence Report Links Saddam, Usama

Saturday, November 15, 2003

by Stephen F. Hayes

Usama bin Laden (search) and Saddam Hussein (search) had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for Al Qaeda - perhaps even for Mohamed Atta - according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by The Weekly Standard.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith (search) to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level Al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

According to the memo, which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points, Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to Al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."

The primary go-between throughout these early stages was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the Al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front (search). Numerous sources have confirmed this. One defector reported that "al-Turabi was instrumental in arranging the Iraqi-Al Qaeda relationship. The defector said Iraq sought Al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided Al Qaeda with training and instructors."

One such confirmation came in a postwar interview with one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. As the memo details:

4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad , and later with Al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and Al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior Al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting - the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of Al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with Al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9/11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes.

A decisive moment in the budding relationship came in 1993, when bin Laden faced internal resistance to his cooperation with Saddam.

5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade Al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader.

Another facilitator of the relationship during the mid-1990s was Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. Abu Hajer al-Iraqi). Abu Hajer, now in a New York prison, was described in court proceedings related to the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as bin Laden¹s "best friend." According to CIA reporting dating back to the Clinton administration, bin Laden trusted him to serve as a liaison with Saddam's regime and tasked him with procurement of weapons of mass destruction for Al Qaeda. FBI reporting in the memo reveals that Abu Hajer "visited Iraq in early 1995" and "had a good relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Sometime before mid-1995 he went on an Al Qaeda mission to discuss unspecified cooperation with the Iraqi government."

Some of the reporting about the relationship throughout the mid-1990s comes from a source who had intimate knowledge of bin Laden and his dealings. This source, according to CIA analysis, offered "the most credible information" on cooperation between bin Laden and Iraq.

This source's reports read almost like a diary. Specific dates of when bin Laden flew to various cities are included, as well as names of individuals he met. The source did not offer information on the substantive talks during the meetings. . . . There are not a great many reports in general on the relationship between bin Laden and Iraq because of the secrecy surrounding it. But when this source with close access provided a "window" into bin Laden's activities, bin Laden is seen as heavily involved with Iraq (and Iran).

Reporting from the early 1990s remains somewhat sketchy, though multiple sources place Hassan al-Turabi and Ayman al Zawahiri (search), bin Laden's current No. 2, at the center of the relationship. The reporting gets much more specific in the mid-1990s:

8. Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti.

9 . . . Bin Laden visited Doha, Qatar (17-19 Jan. 1996), staying at the residence of a member of the Qatari ruling family. He discussed the successful movement of explosives into Saudi Arabia, and operations targeted against U.S. and U.K. interests in Dammam, Dharan, and Khobar, using clandestine Al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia. Upon his return, bin Laden met with Hijazi and Turabi, among others.

And later more reporting, from the same "well placed" source:

10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden¹s farm and discussed bin Laden¹s request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker‹especially skilled in making car bombs‹remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required.

The analysis of those events follows:

The time of the visit from the IIS director was a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing came on the third anniversary of a U.S. [Tomahawk missile] strike on IIS HQ (retaliation for the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait) for which Iraqi officials explicitly threatened retaliation.

In addition to the contacts clustered in the mid-1990s, intelligence reports detail a flurry of activities in early 1998 and again in December 1998. A "former senior Iraqi intelligence officer" reported that "the Iraqi intelligence service station in Pakistan was Baghdad's point of contact with Al Qaeda. He also said bin Laden visited Baghdad in Jan. 1998 and met with Tariq Aziz."

11. According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least twice, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan in 1999. . . .

14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior Al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.

That visit came as the Iraqis intensified their defiance of the U.N. inspection regime, known as UNSCOM, created by the cease-fire agreement following the Gulf War. UNSCOM (search) demanded access to Saddam's presidential palaces that he refused to provide. As the tensions mounted, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon on February 18, 1998, and prepared the nation for war. He warned of "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals" and said "there is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The day after this speech, according to documents unearthed in April 2003 in the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Saddam's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing coming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered by liquid paper that, when revealed, exposed a plan to increase cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda. According to that memo, the IIS agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The Al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might provide "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

Four days later, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden issued his now-famous fatwa on the plight of Iraq, published in the Arabic-language daily, al Quds al-Arabi: "For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples." Bin Laden urged his followers to act: "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies‹civilians and military‹is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

Although war was temporarily averted by a last-minute deal brokered by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, tensions soon rose again. The standoff with Iraq came to a head in December 1998, when President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox (search), a 70-hour bombing campaign that began on December 16 and ended three days later, on December 19, 1998.

According to press reports at the time, Faruq Hijazi, deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, met with bin Laden in Afghanistan on December 21, 1998, to offer bin Laden safe haven in Iraq. CIA reporting in the memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee seems to confirm this meeting and relates two others.

15. A foreign government service reported that an Iraqi delegation, including at least two Iraqi intelligence officers formerly assigned to the Iraqi Embassy in Pakistan, met in late 1998 with bin Laden in Afghanistan.

16. According to CIA reporting, bin Laden and Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in Dec. 1998.

17. . . . Iraq sent an intelligence officer to Afghanistan to seek closer ties to bin Laden and the Taliban in late 1998. The source reported that the Iraqi regime was trying to broaden its cooperation with Al Qaeda. Iraq was looking to recruit Muslim "elements" to sabotage U.S. and U.K. interests. After a senior Iraqi intelligence officer met with Taliban leader [Mullah] Omar, arrangements were made for a series of meetings between the Iraqi intelligence officer and bin Laden in Pakistan. The source noted Faruq Hijazi was in Afghanistan in late 1998.

18. . . . Faruq Hijazi went to Afghanistan in 1999 along with several other Iraqi officials to meet with bin Laden. The source claimed that Hijazi would have met bin Laden only at Saddam¹s explicit direction.

An analysis that follows No. 18 provides additional context and an explanation of these reports:

Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations.

Information about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq was so widespread by early 1999 that it made its way into the mainstream press. A January 11, 1999, Newsweek story ran under this headline: "Saddam + Bin Laden?" The story cited an "Arab intelligence source" with knowledge of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. "According to this source, Saddam expected last month's American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam's long-term strategy, according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift if formally."

Intelligence reports about the nature of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda from mid-1999 through 2003 are conflicting. One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, "said that the last contact between the IIS and Al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam¹s office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from Al Qaeda."

The bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim. One report states that "in late 1999" Al Qaeda set up a training camp in northern Iraq that "was operational as of 1999." Other reports suggest that the Iraqi regime contemplated several offers of safe haven to bin Laden throughout 1999.

23. . . . Iraqi officials were carefully considering offering safe haven to bin Laden and his closest collaborators in Nov. 1999. The source indicated the idea was put forward by the presumed head of Iraqi intelligence in Islamabad (Khalid Janaby) who in turn was in frequent contact and had good relations with bin Laden.

Some of the most intriguing intelligence concerns an Iraqi named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir:

24. According to sensitive reporting, a Malaysia-based Iraqi national (Shakir) facilitated the arrival of one of the Sept 11 hijackers for an operational meeting in Kuala Lumpur (Jan 2000). Sensitive reporting indicates Shakir¹s travel and contacts link him to a worldwide network of terrorists, including Al Qaeda. Shakir worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport‹a job he claimed to have obtained through an Iraqi embassy employee.

One of the men at that Al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole.

25. Investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 by Al Qaeda revealed no specific Iraqi connections but according to the CIA, "fragmentary evidence points to possible Iraqi involvement."

26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior Al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an Al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two Al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training.

The analysis of this report follows.

CIA maintains that Ibn al-Shaykh's timeline is consistent with other sensitive reporting indicating that bin Laden asked Iraq in 1998 for advanced weapons, including CBW and "poisons."

Additional reporting also calls into question the claim that relations between Iraq and Al Qaeda cooled after mid-1999:

27. According to sensitive CIA reporting, . . . the Saudi National Guard went on a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist Al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia.

And then there is the alleged contact between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. The reporting on those links suggests not one meeting, but as many as four. What¹s more, the memo reveals potential financing of Atta's activities by Iraqi intelligence.

The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, [Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir] al Ani, on several occasions. During one of these meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office.

And the commentary:

CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague‹in Dec. 1994 and in June 2000; data surrounding the other two, on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001, is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by his information.

It's not just Gross who stands by the information. Five high-ranking members of the Czech government have publicly confirmed meetings between Atta and al Ani. The meeting that has gotten the most press attention ,April 9, 2001, is also the most widely disputed. Even some of the most hawkish Bush administration officials are privately skeptical that Atta met al Ani on that occasion. They believe that reports of the alleged meeting, said to have taken place in public, outside the headquarters of the U.S.-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, suggest a level of sloppiness that doesn¹t fit the pattern of previous high-level Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts.

Whether or not that specific meeting occurred, the report by Czech counterintelligence that al Ani ordered the Iraqi Intelligence Service officer to provide IIS funds to Atta might help explain the lead hijacker's determination to reach Prague, despite significant obstacles, in the spring of 2000. (Note that the report stops short of confirming that the funds were transferred. It claims only that the IIS officer requested the transfer.) Recall that Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but was denied entry because he did not have a valid visa. Rather than simply return to Germany and fly directly to the United States, his ultimate destination, Atta took pains to get to Prague. After he was refused entry the first time, he traveled back to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and caught a bus back to Prague. He left for the United States the day after arriving in Prague for the second time.

Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks:

31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said Al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to Al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of Al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that Al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for Al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for Al Qaeda personnel.

The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits the pattern of Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration:

References to procurement of false passports from Iraq and offers of safe haven previously have surfaced in CIA source reporting considered reliable. Intelligence reports to date have maintained that Iraqi support for Al Qaeda usually involved providing training, obtaining passports, and offers of refuge. This report adds to that list by including weapons and money. This assistance would make sense in the aftermath of 9-11.

Colin Powell, in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, revealed the activities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Reporting in the memo expands on Powell's case and might help explain some of the resistance the U.S. military is currently facing in Iraq.

37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close Al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi¹s procurements from the Iraqis also could support Al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere.

38. According to sensitive reporting, a contact with good access who does not have an established reporting record: An Iraqi intelligence service officer said that as of mid-March the IIS was providing weapons to Al Qaeda members located in northern Iraq, including rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-18 launchers. According to IIS information, northern Iraq-based Al Qaeda members believed that the U.S. intended to strike Al Qaeda targets during an anticipated assault against Ansar al-Islam positions.

The memo further reported pre-war intelligence which "claimed that an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al-Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance."

Critics of the Bush administration have complained that Iraq-Al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international terror; that links between Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden have been routinely "exaggerated" for political purposes; that hawks "cherry-picked" bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public.

Carl Levin, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made those points as recently as November 9, in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Republicans on the committee, he complained, refuse to look at the administration¹s "exaggeration of intelligence."

Said Levin: "The question is whether or not they exaggerated intelligence in order to carry out their purpose, which was to make the case for going to war. Did we know, for instance, with certainty that there was any relationship between the Iraqis and the terrorists that were in Afghanistan, bin Laden? The administration said that there's a connection between those terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Was there a basis for that?"

There was, as shown in the memo to the committee on which Levin serves. And much of the reporting comes from Clinton-era intelligence. Not that you would know this from Al Gore¹s recent public statements. Indeed, the former vice president claims to be privy to new "evidence" that the administration lied. In an August speech at New York University, Gore claimed: "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Usama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Really?

One of the most interesting things to note about the 16-page memo is that it covers only a fraction of the evidence that will eventually be available to document the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. For one thing, both Saddam and bin Laden were desperate to keep their cooperation secret. (Remember, Iraqi intelligence used liquid paper on an internal intelligence document to conceal bin Laden's name.) For another, few people in the U.S. government are expressly looking for such links. There is no Iraq-Al Qaeda equivalent of the CIA's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group currently searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, CIA and FBI officials are methodically reviewing Iraqi intelligence files that survived the three-week war last spring. These documents would cover several miles if laid end-to-end. And they are in Arabic. They include not only connections between bin Laden and Saddam, but also revolting details of the regime's long history of brutality. It will be a slow process.

So Feith's memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee is best viewed as sort of a "Cliff¹s Notes" version of the relationship. It contains the highlights, but it is far from exhaustive.

One example. The memo contains only one paragraph on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi facilitator who escorted two September 11 hijackers through customs in Kuala Lumpur. U.S. intelligence agencies have extensive reporting on his activities before and after the September 11 hijacking. That they would include only this brief overview suggests the 16-page memo, extensive as it is, just skims the surface of the reporting on Iraq-Al Qaeda connections.

Other intelligence reports indicate that Shakir whisked not one but two September 11 hijackers - Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi - through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel where they met with Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the masterminds of the September 11 plot. The meeting lasted three days. Shakir returned to work on January 9 and January 10, and never again.

Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for its intelligence operations; in some cases, more than half of the alleged "diplomats" were intelligence operatives.) The Iraqi embassy, not his employer, controlled Shakir¹s schedule. He was detained in Qatar on September 17, 2001. Authorities found in his possession contact information for terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 `ck on the USS Cole, and the September 11 hijackings. The CIA had previous reporting that Shakir had received a phone call from the safe house where the 1993 World Trade Center attacks had been plotted.

The Qataris released Shakir shortly after his arrest. On October 21, 2001, he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was to change planes to a flight to Baghdad. He didn¹t make that flight. Shakir was detained in Jordan for three months, where the CIA interrogated him. His interrogators concluded that Shakir had received extensive training in counter-interrogation techniques. Not long after he was detained, according to an official familiar with the intelligence, the Iraqi regime began to "pressure" Jordanian intelligence to release him. At the same time, Amnesty International complained that Shakir was being held without charge. The Jordanians released him on January 28, 2002, at which point he is believed to have fled back to Iraq.

Was Shakir an Iraqi agent? Does he provide a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11? We don¹t know. We may someday find out.

But there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans

[igloo]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...ws/khodada.html

After your service in the army, you worked for a secret part of the Iraqi government?

Some of it is not very secretive. But there's another part, which has a lot to do with international terrorism and this kind of operation -- this is very secretive.

Maybe you could tell me what this section is called, and who runs it. And what did it do?

It's called the Division of Special Operations. ... This whole camp where their training is run by the Iraqi [security service]... The government organization [that] basically possesses or have control of the camp is the Iraqi intelligence. But different training people who come, they are headed or sent by different people in the Iraqi government.

You say that this is a secret camp. But what was it like? Was it something you drove by and could see on the highway? Did you need special clearance to go there? How would you describe this place, this location?

If you're driving on those farm roads, you could probably see the edges of the camp, but you wouldn't realize this is a special camp. The camp is huge. And the locations for the training are far from anybody can see them from the outside. But even when we have visitors, even at the level of a minister, or even higher than a minister in the Iraqi government, they will have to drive around the camp or be driven in the camp inside very specific type of a vehicle. They will sit on the back seat, for example, of this vehicle and they would have ... in addition to the shaded windows, they will have to pull down curtains and they snap those curtains on the bottom, to make sure nobody can see anything outside this vehicle while they're driven around.

This is even government officials [who] are not allowed to see this kind of training?

Yes. At the very highest level, they cannot see this training.

What kind of training went on, and who was being trained?

Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism.

The people being trained were Iraqis in one group, and non-Iraqis, or foreign nationals, in another?

Non-Iraqis were trained separately from us. There were strict orders not to meet with them and not to talk to them. And even when they conduct their training, their training has to occur at times different from the times when we conduct the Iraqis our own training.

Sabah Khodada was a captain in the Iraqi army from 1982 to 1992. He worked at what he describes as a highly secret terrorist training camp at Salman Pak (see Khodada's hand-drawn map of the camp), an area south of Baghdad. In this translated interview, conducted in association with The New York Times on Oct. 14, 2001, Khodada describes what went on at Salman Pak, including details on training hijackers. He emigrated to the U.S. in May 2001.[Editors Note, June 2004: A year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of Khodada's account of the activities at Salman Pak. It should also be noted that he and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE's attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein.]

So you were training Iraqis, Saddam's fedayeen, members of the militia in Iraq. And someone else, other groups, were training the non-Iraqis?

They were special trainers or teachers from the Iraqi intelligence and al-Mukhabarat. And those same trainers or teachers will train the fedayeen, the Iraqi fedayeen, and also the same group of those teachers will train the non-Iraqis, foreigners who are in the camp. Personally, my profession is not this kind of training. My profession is to train people on infantry, typical infantry training, such as training on machine guns, pistols, hand grenades, rocket launchers on the shoulder and this kind of training. The special training that I'm talking about, such as the kidnapping and so, is conducted by those trainers who are not from the army; they are from ... al-Mukhabarat.And there was a person who is very famous. They call him Al-Shaba. [ph]. This is Arabic word means "The Ghost," who was responsible for all the training, and those trainers or the teachers.

Why was he called the Ghost?

I don't know exactly why he's being called the Ghost. I came there and his name was the Ghost. But I know that he has conducted several terrorist operations in Lebanon and in other countries all over the world. And I know that he told us that he's been requested to be arrested by the Interpol. This is probably why he called himself the Ghost.

And the foreign nationals, the Arabs who are there, but who are not Iraqis -- what were they like? Were they Egyptians, Saudis? Do you know where they came from?

They look like they're mostly from the Gulf, sometimes from areas close to Yemen, from their dark skin and short bodies. And they also are Muslims. ...

Were they religious?

I don't know exactly because I saw them seldom very [briefly]. But some of them has beards, long beards, which is an indication of being a religious Muslim. ...

How long were you at this base, at this secret location?

Approximately six months.

What was your job?

Administrational things, such as providing food, leave of absence permissions, general training. Ammunition ... providing them with ammunition when needed.

How did you meet the Ghost? And what did he say?

I meet him several times a day. We usually meet in the morning when they go to training. We meet in the afternoon or the noontime when they come back from training. And several times, we'll meet at the evening to drink tea. And he will come, him and other teachers who always with him. They always talk about their operations proudly. For example, they were telling us about how they were able to penetrate the American forces during the 1990 Gulf War, where they went inside the Saudi Arabia territory, and they were able to bring exact coordinates of the Dharan airbase where it was hit by the Scud missiles and many Americans were killed.

He is an Iraqi, the Ghost?

Yes.

Did he explain what kind of training they were giving to the people who were there, especially to the non-Iraqis?

He tried not to talk about training as much as possible. I even, out of curiosity, asked him about those Arabs. Sometime he told me, "Don't ask about them. This is something we're not supposed to talk about."

So the Ghost said, "I can't talk to you about these Arabs who are training, or what we're training them in."

Yes.

So did you find out what kind of training was going on?

I don't necessarily know what kind of training they do, but they were trained exactly at the same locations, and they were trained by the same teachers who were training ... [the fighters for] Saddam. Training includes hijacking and kidnapping of airplanes, trains, public buses, and planting explosives in cities, sabotaging villages, sabotaging houses, assassinations.

And the training also included how to prepare for suicidal operations. For example, they will train them how to belt themselves around with explosives, and jump in a place and explode themselves out as part of the suicidal training. I think the trainings of the Arabs was much harsher, and much stricter, than the training of the Iraqis.

Why?

Because we know that Arabs, non-Iraqis who come to train in these kind of camps, are going to be sent to very dangerous and important operations outside Iraq; not inside Iraq. And they will be conducting very specific operations and dangerous operations in their own cities, or in their own countries, or other countries all over the world. Those Arabs are real volunteers. They come in small numbers, and they come with the intention to do some real suicidal operations. ...

There are other types of training, such as physical training, which we are all familiar with. But there's another kind of special training, which is called "self-confidence training." ... For example, a bunch of the fedayeen will be taken in a helicopter. They will fly them away to an unknown area, and they will be asked to jump out of the plane without knowing if there is underneath them a desert or a house or there's water. But they're supposed to jump. So, they will jump.

Another type of self-confidence training would be, for example, they will pull the pin of a hand grenade, and they will throw the hand grenade from one to another until the last one will throw it in the air and it will explode in the air. Another type of self-confidence training would be, they will put a hand grenade in a pipe, and they will pull the pin and throw it in the pipe, and stand near the pipe saluting the hand grenade until it explodes.

Other type of self-confidence training would be holding a rocket launcher, which is an Army GB-7, and holding it vertically, then shooting the rocket vertically, which is very unusual, but the backfire of this hand grenade will hit the ground next to you. And if you don't have self-confidence, you cannot do it. This is another kind of self-confidence training.

And they trained people to hijack airplanes?

Yes.

For what purpose?

... It has been said openly in the media and even to us, from the highest command, that the purpose of establishing Saddam's fighters is to attack American targets and American interests. This is known. There's no doubt about it.

All this training is directed towards attacking American targets, and American interests. The training does not only include hijacking of planes and sabotage. ... Some other people were trained to do parachuting. Some other areas were training on how to penetrate enemy lines and get information from behind enemy lines. But it's all for the general concept of hitting and attacking American targets and American interests.

Who controlled this operation?

In terms of training, they will train in this special camp. But after this training, they will go in small groups. These small groups are directly connected with Saddam, or to Saddam's son. For example, the Iraqi fighters, they will be spread all over the country. Occasionally those individual groups, very small groups, will be called for. They might encounter different kind of special training beyond this training on specific things. I'll give you an example. They were calling for some of these groups to train intensively to learn English language, Persian language, Hebrew language, to be sent out to different places of the world to conduct such kind of ... different kind of operations. I suspect that the higher level of training, or the additional training they encounter, has a lot to do with what happened. And there's a lot of similarity with what happened with New York and Washington on September 11.

That was your reaction on September 11 -- that some of these people might be involved?

I assure you, this operation was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam. And I'm going to keep assuring the world this is what happened.

Osama bin Laden has no such capabilities. Why? Because this kind of attacks must be, and has to be, organized by a capable state, such as Iraq; a state where they can provide high level of training, and they can provide high level of intelligence to do such training.

How could Osama bin Laden -- who's hiding in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan in small caves and valleys -- train people and gather information and send people to do such high-level operation? We all know this is a high-level operation. This cannot be done by a person who does not even own a plane in Afghanistan, who cannot offer such training in Afghanistan. This is definitely done by a mastermind like Saddam. ...

And the camp has a 707 that they train on?

Yes, there's a real whole 707 plane, a whole real plane, standing in the middle of the training area in this camp.

And they train people on how to get access to the cabin, to the crew?

Yes.

And how to take over the plane using weapons? How?

They will get trained on how to get weapons inside the plane. If there is a security weakness that they know of, they will prefer to get weapons. But I am sure that, before the attack of September 11, those people made a very thorough study. And they learned that getting weapons into the plane might not be a very good idea. But in this camp, I saw them getting trained on this kind of situations where security will not allow you to get weapons into the plane -- then what you need to do is to use all available methods and very advanced terrorizing method.

These methods are used to terrorize the passengers and the crew of the plane. They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane. ... They are trained how to plant horror within the passengers by doing such actions. Even pens and pencils can be used for that purpose they were trained. They can do it, and they can overcome any plane because they are very well physically trained, and they are very strong, and they can do it. They can overtake a plane in a very efficient manner. ...

Recently, here in Washington, you met with the FBI.

Yes.

Did you tell them all of this?

Yes.

What was their reaction? Did they say they already knew about this, or did they act like this was all new to them?

No, they do not know about it. But I told them everything I know, hoping that they can make it useful to them. I did that to protect the peace, not only for America; the peace in America and the peace of the world. People must know such training and such preparation for terror is happening in Iraq. Otherwise, it's going to happen again and again. And it's up to those people, meaning the FBI, to take action about it. ...

Where is the camp located near? You could describe where it's geographically located.

Yes. It's southeast of Baghdad, about 25 kilometers from outside of Baghdad ... . I think the American government should have pictures of this camp from the air. I know for a fact that on January 1995, the United Nations came and took pictures of this camp. But they don't know -- neither the United Nations nor the American government -- what's going on inside this camp.

But they can see the 707, or the train?

On a Friday, which is equivalent to Sunday here, it's a holiday, was on January 1995. They came and the United Nations inspectors visited us. They went all the way inside the camp. They saw the plane, they saw the train, and they didn't care anything about it, because the story was, they told ... his commanders told the United Nation, "This is a camp to train police, anti-riots police."

Anti-riot police?

Yes.

And it really was a terrorist training camp?

Yes.

I can hear someone saying to me, "This is one person claiming that this happened. How are we going to check?" How do we prove or, if you will, test what you have to say?

... If you want to make sure about it, go back to pictures of your government, aerial pictures of your government, and go back all the documents that showed this camp is existing. And go back to my friend who is in Turkey, who could also tell you the same thing that I'm telling you now.

Addition to that, maybe you can find archives of Iraqi TV, showing on the Iraqi TV Saddam's fighters ... putting bombs belted on their bodies, wearing masks. Maybe you should be able to get these archives and see something what's shown openly on Iraqi TV.

The training of Saddam's militia was shown on Iraqi TV?

They will show some of their training. For example, they will show clips of their jumping from the helicopters. But there was also parades, military parades, and they will show off Saddam wearing this explosive around themselves with their masks on. ... I even heard it on Arabic BBC when they were saying, when they were describing them, not as Saddam's fighters -- they describe them as "the terrorists of Saddam" -- wearing explosives and looking like crocodiles, black crocodiles. I'm very surprised that you, in America, don't know about these things.

To you, then, the likely suspect here is the government of Iraq and Saddam in all this terrorism. And yet we're looking the wrong way?

I assure you, and I'm going to keep assuring you, that all these things are obvious. I don't know why you don't see it. When we were in Iraq, Saddam said all the time, even during the Gulf War, "We will take our revenge at the proper time." He kept telling the people, "Get ready for our revenge."

We saw people getting trained to hijack airplanes, to put explosives. How could anybody not think this is not done by Saddam? Even the grouping, those groups were divided into five to six people in the group. How about the training on planes? Some of these groups were taken and trained to drive airplanes at the School of Aviation, northern of Baghdad ... .Everything coincides with what's happening.

In addition to that, we heard in the news about meeting some of those hijackers with the Iraqi intelligence people in Prague, and even getting money to get trained on flying airplanes in the United States from the Iraqi intelligence.

[Did you hear that some of those training at the camp were working for] Osama bin Laden?

Nobody came and told us, "This is Al Qaeda people," but I know there were some Saudis, there were some Afghanis. There were some other people from other countries getting trained. They didn't tell us they were part of Al Qaeda; there's no such thing. ... In this camp, we know that those are Saudis, or Arabs are getting trained. Nobody will talk about Al Qaeda or any other organization.

They're just people.

Yes.

Who clearly wanted to ... or were interested in doing terror, becoming terrorists?

This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world. ...

In the conversations that you had with the Ghost and with others, was it clear that they were involved in international terrorism -- that that's what the object here was, to send people out to do missions?

They all say it. On January 1, 1996, we all met with Saddam personally. And he told us we have to take revenge from America. Our duty is to attack and hit American targets in the Gulf, in the Arab world, and all over the world. He said that openly. When you volunteer to become Saddam's fighter ... they will tell you the purpose of your volunteer[ing] is to attack American targets and American interests, not only in Iraq, not only in the Gulf, [but] all over the world, including Europe and America. That's how Saddam was able to attract those Arabs and Muslims who came to train, because that's exactly what they want to do.

I just wanted to understand that in the camp itself, when you were sitting down with the trainers and they were describing what they were doing, did they say they were getting people ready for missions in Europe, in the United States?

Those people who are in the camp ... do the training, and the rest will be conducted by the higher command. For example, after you finish the training, there will be groups of five to six people, sometimes four people, but most likely between five to six people, not exceeding six. Maximum number will be six people.

Or they would be able, for example, to call for a specific group for a specific purpose to Baghdad. And nobody knows what this group is going to do. They will go to Baghdad. They will be briefed on what they're going to do, or trained about something specific. They will be sent, and we don't know where they go, and they come back to us. That's how it works. It's not like the trainers in the camp know what's going on. The operations are headed directly from the top.

But when someone would hear about an incident, like there was an attack on the U.S. military in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia in 1995, or the Khobar barracks was blown up in Saudi Arabia, you didn't hear anyone say, "We took part in that," or, "That was one of ours," during this period of time.

They don't talk specifics. The only specific thing they talked about in front of me is ... location coordinates during the Gulf War. But I hear them talking about operations in Saudi Arabia, operations other places, in Lebanon. But I never hear the details from them.

Any evidence of biological or chemical warfare training?

This type of training, if it happened, it occurred outside our camp...

Can you explain what's on this map that you drew?

The surrounding area around this camp is an area for fitness training. This is a Boeing 707, where they trained how to hijack it. And also they were trained how to resist or stop hijacking operation.

Next to it, there's a double-decker bus in which they could do the same thing -- training, hijacking. And this is next to it, there is a village, built houses like a model of a village. They will train how to plant TNT and explosives. And very next to it, there's a single house, where they're trained how to enter it, or sabotage it or explode it.

The railway track is where the train is. That's where they would have the same training for hijacking of a train. I would like to also tell you that this is a village where farmers would live. Those farmers, by the way, are employees by the Iraqi intelligence -- all of them. They look like normal families, but they are not as you think. They are employees of the Iraqi intelligence to put cover and protection to the base. ...

What's the method that's taught, in terms of hijacking? It's not just taking on weapons, is it?

Training will include the way they would sit in the plane, how they enter the plane, provided they got the right documents from the top levels of Iraqi Intelligence, such as passports. ... They will, for example, sit in two's, and they will assign who will sit to the right of the other guy, and who will sit to the other side. Two will sit in the front, two will sit in the back, and two will sit, for example, in the middle. They are trained to jump all at one time, and make a declaration that "We are going to take over the plane. And nobody [move], don't move, don't make any moves."

They will probably use a pencil or a pen, or even sunglasses or prescription glasses. Somebody will hold the crew members of the plane from their chins upward tightly, and you will pull it on his neck. He will think you are going to slaughter him and kill him. Including in this training is terrorizing by making very, very loud noises and screaming all over the plane. That will take over the planned horror, and will terrorize the plane, including the crew.

Why are you coming forward with this information?

I'd like to tell the whole world, and American people, that I wish peace ... in this world. And I want to tell you that what you have seen is very little from what we have seen done to the Iraqi people by Saddam. If somebody use chemical weapons such as in Halabja on his own people, what do you think he would do to different parts of the world? I call for the world and the Iraqi people and every Muslim not to believe the propaganda by Saddam and bin Laden. Those are murderers, and they have nothing to do with Islam.

Here in the United States, as a Muslim, I was never been harassed or treated badly, and nobody stopped me from my prayers, or stopped me from being a Muslim. So what Saddam is doing is exactly what's against Islam, against the world, and against peace of the world.

[igloo]

Saddam’s real WMD was terrorism

Paul Crespo (archive)

February 6, 2004 | Print | Send

David Kay, the former US weapons inspector, reported recently that despite the fact that every major Western intelligence agency and the UN believed Saddam Hussein still possessed them, his team has found no significant stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Yet, while there is still much more to say about that story, it may turn out that one of Saddam's greatest weapons of mass destruction was terror.

Contrary to the claims of prominent American Democrat politicians, such as Senator Ted Kennedy who flatly stated in October 2003 that: “Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism..." we have uncovered significant evidence tying Saddam Hussein to terrorism for over a decade. Considering the importance of these clear links, it is surprising that the Bush administration has not publicized them further.

Deroy Murdock, a Senior Fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, published Saddam Hussein’s Philanthropy of Terror, (http://www.hudson.org/files/publica...ddamarticle.pdf ) a well documented report highlighting Saddam’s ties to Islamic terrorism, in the Hudson Institute’s American Outlook magazine’s fall 2003 edition. In it he states: “Many critics of the war in Iraq belittle claims of Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorism. In fact, for years, he was militant Islam’s Benefactor-in Chief.â€

Murdock then describes in detail numerous high-profile Islamic terrorists who were captured or killed in Iraq prior to or after the US invasion. Others terrorists had Iraqi passports and some linked to Al Qaeda were given safe haven in Iraq or were observed being aided by Iraqi officials overseas.

Among the rabid, anti-American killers found in Iraq was Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, whose gang murdered 407 people (including ten Americans) and maimed 788 more in attacks in 20 countries; he reportedly “committed suicide†in August 2002 in Baghdad by shooting himself in the head four times. He had taken refuge in Iraq since 1999. Experts speculate that Saddam may have been cleaning up loose ends as the American government probed his terror links.

One of Abu Nidal Organization’s attacks included the bombing over the Ionian Sea of a TWA airliner flying from Israel to Greece in 1974 which killed all 88 people on board. His group was also famous for attacking a TWA ticket counter at Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport in 1986 and targeting Lt. Col. Oliver North for death in the mid-1980s.

Khala Khadar al Salahat, a member of ANO, surrendered to the First Marine Division in Baghdad on April 18, 2003. According to an August 25, 2002 report in the Sunday Times of London, a Palestinian source claimed that Salahat and Nidal had furnished Libyan agents the Semtex (plastic explosive) bomb that destroyed Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988. Among the 259 persons killed in the air and 11 killed on the ground were 35 American college students.

Another vicious terrorist found in Iraq was Abu Abbas, who was captured by US Special Forces just outside Baghdad on April 14, 2003. He had been living there under Iraqi protection since 2002. Abbas was the mastermind behind the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achilles Lauro in the Mediterranean.

We should recall that during that terrorist attack, Abbas’s men shot Leon Klinghoffer, a retired 69-year old American, in cold blood before rolling him in his wheelchair into the sea. Importantly, Italian authorities had detained Abbas briefly at the time but released him because he held an Iraqi diplomatic passport.

Ramzi Yousef, the Iraqi architect of the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing which killed six persons and wounded 1,042 others, entered America on an Iraqi passport before fleeing after the attack on Pakistani papers.

Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted for mixing the chemicals in that WTC bombing, and still on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, fled to Baghdad after the attack and lived there for years afterwards.

Murdock adds that according Richard Miniter, author of this year’s bestselling book, Losing Bin Laden, documents discovered by US forces in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, showed that the Iraqi government gave Yasin both a house and a salary.

Saddam’s terror links were most recently and openly on display in conjunction with Palestinian terror groups. In March 2002, Iraq’s former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz announced publicly at a meeting in Baghdad that Saddam Hussein would raise the reward given to the families of Palestinian “martyrs’ (i.e.; suicide bomb terrorists) from $10,000 per family to $25,000.

On March 12, 2003, just eight days prior to the US-led assault on Iraq, Knight-Ridder reported from Gaza City that at a ceremony organized by the Saddam-backed Arab Liberation Front, “the families of 22 Palestinians killed fighting the Israelis each received checks for $10,000 or more, certificates of appreciation and a kiss on each cheek—compliments of Saddam Hussein.â€

Hussein’s largesse proved increasingly deadly. According to Murdock, between March 2002 and March 2003 when the US forces closed own Saddam's "Terror, Inc.," 28 Palestinian homicide bombers killed 223 innocent people including 12 Americans, and injured 1,209 others.

And while Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boldly declared in October 2003 that: she “never believed the link between Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda, and Islamic terrorism,†clues to those links too have been confirmed.

Murdock shows that Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who previously ran an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and is currently at large, fled to Iraq and received medical care in Baghdad shortly after the Taliban fell. He then opened an Ansar al-Islam terrorist camp in northern Iraq and reportedly arranged the October 2002 assassination of US diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. He has since been liinked to terror attacks against American troops in Iraq.

Back in January of 2002 Nawaz al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Midhar (9-11 hijackers who slammed American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 216 people) reportedly met Iraqi diplomat and VIP airport greeter Ahmed Hikmat Shakir in Kula Lampur, Malaysia. Shakir reportedly then escorted them to an al Qaeda 9-11 planning meeting. Shakir was arrested in Qatar six days after 9-11. Authorities then discovered documents linking him to the 1993 WTC bombing and al Qaeda’s plot to blow up 12 American jets over the Pacific Ocean.

Significantly, a Clinton-appointed Manhattan federal judge, Harold Baer, recently ordered Saddam Hussein, his ousted regime, Osama bin Laden, and others to pay $104 million in damages to the families of the 2,750 victims of the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers. He found “by evidence satisfactory to the court, that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda.â€

There is therefore more than sufficient evidence pointing to Saddam Hussein as an important international terror-monger who aided in the murder and maiming of thousands of innocent civilians outside Iraq.

As Deroy Murdock notes: “The President and his National Security team should devote entire speeches and publications…to remind Americans and the world that Baathist Iraq was a general store for terrorists, complete with cash, training, lodging, and medical attention.†The sooner we all understand this, the better.

Paul Crespo is a former US Marine Corps officer and military attaché. Previously a member of The Miami Herald editorial board, he is now an occasional editorial contributor to the paper. An adjunct faculty member of politics at the University of Miami, he is also a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. ( www.defenddemocracy.org ). This article appears this week in Tiempos del Mundo.

[igloo]

I could keep going, but the AntoBushies and clueless left will never get it.....never did, never will, and as usual, will end up on the wrong side of history....

To repeat a past post of mine:

What I also find amazing is that every link or claim of Iraqi-terrrorism ties is diminished, devalued, discounted, or completely ignored by the left and the anti-Bushies.....irrespective of source, information, or proof.......to them, these are just conspiracy theories cooked up by the pro-war mongers...

Yet, when it came to "what Bush knew" prior to 9/11 in his 7 months of office.......they overblow and misrepresent information (i.e. August PDB), lob baseless accusations at Bush for "what he knew" , they point to the weakest, flimsiest data and cause absurd hysteria over it, outright lie, and they believe every conspiracy theory bomb thrown out by the Michael Moore clones.....

They want to kill Bush for connecting the dots in Iraq but kill Bush for not connecting the dots before 9/11 (when giving 8 years of Clinton a pass)...it is a fucking joke, made worse by the disgraceful behavior of the media...

And for those clueless wonders out there who still like to moan that Arab secularists and Islamic terrorists do not cooperate, I suggest you shut your fucking ignorant mouths and do some research.....plenty of examples where "my enemy is your enemy" prevails........read a fucking book jerkoffs instead of Yahoo headlines or recent AL Gore speeches (unless of course, you want to read AL Gore speeches during the 2000 campaign, when he continually spoke about Iraqi WMD, ties to terrorism, and Iraq is a grave threat to national security).

BTW brilliant anti-Bushies and lefties.....know much about that little AL Qaeda group based in Northern Iraq? The one talked about PRIOR to the war? You mean an Al Qaeda supported group can operate freely in the police state of Saddam Hussein? How can Al Qaeda work in Iraq, and at the same time, look to remove secular Arab governments?.....hmmm, do these two share a common enemy?

[xpyrate]

:blah::blah::blah:

[igloo]

:blah::blah::blah:

You have got to be the dumbest, most moronic imbecile on the face of the earth....seriously, STFU and go back to nursery school, where the environment is more conducive to your limited brain capacity....

Fucking retard

[jtk4]

That is alot of shit to read through can you try and give the main points. I personally don't think that jst because al qaida was in iraq means that iraq was involved. Those fuckers are all over the place.

Are you saying that the report that was recently done is wrong? Interesting

[mrmatas2277]

:blah:

you might think its a lot of "bla bla bla", but at least Igloo has supported his view with A LOT of articles backing up his claims...

[jtk4]

The problem is that that articles are pro bush, and I bet I could find 230498023948 anti-bush articles that say there are no links. That is why I try to find sources that have no agenda.

Yeah i am still looking. It just sucks that it is hard to find a news source that I can believe, or that is not exaggerating some facts and not reporting others to make things look a certain way.

[mrmatas2277]

Yeah i am still looking.

i figured....

[jtk4]

Yeah its hard to tell what the fuck is real and what is memorex.

With the amount of money involved in presidetial elections I think alot of "experts" get paid to say certain things. I am not aiming this at bush because it is both sides. It is like there is democrat experts and republican experts who say the opposite things.

[igloo]

The problem is that that articles are pro bush, .

Dear God....and to my point that I made on this thread.....you schmucks will say anything to discount this type of information....

Now these articles must be untrue because they are somehow "pro-Bush".....

How about it simply is what it is....and why don't you read them, educate yourself, and do some further reserach....and LEARN something...

BTW Schmuck.....any thoughts on the 9/11 commission AL Qaeda-Iraq report (some members, not all) and how the media portrayed it, since you brought it up? .....OR are you like the rest of the schmucks who just go by headlines by ANTI-BUSH media elites?....

How do you think those same media outlets and their reckless reporting will treat this:

9-11 panel discovers Saddam-Osama link

Documents show Iraqi possibly plotted attacks on U.S.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted: June 21, 2004

1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

A member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks now admits a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings.

On Wednesday, the commission published a staff statement saying that contacts between the regime and al-Qaida "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship" and that, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."

But John F. Lehman, a member of the commission told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaida."

The Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare. The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. 11 attacks in January 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was also attended by two of the hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hamzi and senior al-Qaida leaders.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the presence of Shakir at the planning meeting last month and WND pointed it out as one of dozens of connections between the Hussein regime and al-Qaida last week.

Lehman said that commission staff members continued to work on the issue and experts cautioned that the connection might be nothing more than coincidence.

"Shakir is a pretty common name," said terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen, "and even if the two names refer to the same person, there might be a number of other explanations. Perhaps al-Qaida had penetrated Saddam's security apparatus."

Analysts say the Fedayeen was not an intelligence unit, but an irregular militia recruited from clans loyal to the regime in the capital, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit and in the surrounding Tigris valley area. Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank set up by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, described them to United Press International last year as "thugs and bumpkins."

He said the Fedayeen were "at the low end of the food chain in the security apparatus, doing street level work for the regime."

Nevertheless, the revelation seems sure to stoke the controversy over the extent of links between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime, links that were cited by the Bush administration as a justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Democratic panel member Richard Ben-Veniste agreed that the panel should study any more recent intelligence, "If there is additional information, we're happy to look at it, and we think we should get it."

The commission's two days of meetings last week marked their final public gatherings. They are to deliver a final report by July 26. Congress formed the commission to look into possible U.S. intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which some 3,000 people were killed after the hijacking of four jetliners than crashing the aircraft into buildings in New York and Washington and in rural Pennsylvania.

[jtk4]

Slow down schmuck, i am not anti-bush. As i said it is hard to find "real" info coming from either side. Just because it is posted on a website called worldnetdaily does not mean it is true. LIke i said there are a million websites on either side spouting info by "experts". People probably paid off from both sides of the election.

You really need to calm down and realize not everyone on here is not against bush, and for kerry. All I am doing is questioning the sources, maybe they are true, maybe they are not.

"9-11 panel discovers Saddam-Osama link

Documents show Iraqi possibly plotted attacks on U.S."

Iraq POSSIBLY plotted attcks on U.S. When they can take out the word possibly that is when they should write this article.

settle down take a coupe of deep breaths i am not against you, the U.S. or bush.

[igloo]

Slow down schmuck, i am not anti-bush. As i said it is hard to find "real" info coming from either side. Just because it is posted on a website called worldnetdaily does not mean it is true. LIke i said there are a million websites on either side spouting info by "experts". People probably paid off from both sides of the election.

You really need to calm down and realize not everyone on here is not against bush, and for kerry. All I am doing is questioning the sources, maybe they are true, maybe they are not.

"9-11 panel discovers Saddam-Osama link

Documents show Iraqi possibly plotted attacks on U.S."

Iraq POSSIBLY plotted attcks on U.S. When they can take out the word possibly that is when they should write this article.

settle down take a coupe of deep breaths i am not against you, the U.S. or bush.

Retard....no one is claiming you are anti Bush or pro-Kerry....I am a claiming you are a retard....

Stick your simpleton views and shove them back up your ass........

BTW----just because it appears in worldnetdaily, does not mean it is not true either retard...(as well as the multiple sources I posted on this thread jerkoff)...

BTW retard....I suggest you get an education on how words are used in the intelligence world, like "links", "ties", "possibly", and the like you fucking retard...

[jtk4]

So how smart do you have to be to cut and paste. You see i have a problem with using what happened on 9/11 as reason to invade iraq. The 9/11 problem is one of fanatical Islamic terrorism. There are a number of countries where this type of fanaticism was flourshing pre-9/11: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, etc. Iraq was not one of them. Saddam was a sicko fuckbag, but he was by no means a fanatical Islamist. In fact, he was keeping a tight lid on Islamic fanatacism in his country. Now we’ve gone and taken that lid off. And in the process, we’ve overextended our military, spent hundreds of billions of dollars that we can’t afford, and fomented an unprecedented level of anti-American hatred throughout the Islamic world. Not to mention the lives lost. And all for what?

More and more conservatives and bush supporters are realizing that Iraq was a monumental mistake concocted by a small group with fucked up views and a president with almost no knowledge of the world (I wonder if he’s gotten the difference between Sunni and Shia down yet ). I really wish you would take your blinders off and look beyond the slogans from right-wing radio, you might start to realize just what a horrendous tragedy this whole episode is for our country. We are less safe, weaker, and poorer and we have gained next to nothing. Could anyone really say, if they could turn back the clock, that we should go through this again? So come on and cut and paste some more of right wing bullshit. Oh and you "multiple sources "are all well known pro-bush right wingers.

Bush is not as bad as the liberals would have you beleve but he is not as good as the conservatives tout him as. I said I did not know if the shit on that site was right or wrong but from the tone and content of the site I will not believe it.