Posted on 03/04/2004 5:59:22 AM PST by JohnGalt
Hussein ties to al Qaeda appear faulty
The administration's case on ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda relied on intelligence that was weaker than that on Iraq's illegal weapons programs.
By WARREN P. STROBEL, JONATHAN S. LANDAY AND JOHN WALCOTT
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda -- one of the administration's central arguments for a preemptive war -- appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.
Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Hussein's links with al Qaeda, and several key parts of the administration's case have either proved false or seem increasingly doubtful.
Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Hussein's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league. At most, there were occasional meetings.
Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community never concluded that those meetings produced an operational relationship, American officials said. That verdict was in a secret report by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence that was updated in January 2003, on the eve of the war.
''We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al Qaeda,'' a senior U.S. official acknowledged.
The administration's allegations that Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction have been the subject of much greater public and political controversy than its suggestions that Iraq and al Qaeda were in league. They were based on the Iraqi leader's long history of duplicity regarding such weapons, which appeared to be confirmed by spy satellite photographs, information from defectors and electronic eavesdropping.
But the evidence of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda was always sketchy, based largely on testimony of Iraqi defectors and prisoners, with limited reports from foreign agents and electronic eavesdropping.
Much of the evidence that's now available indicates that Iraq and al Qaeda had no close ties, despite repeated contacts between the two; that the terrorists who administration officials claimed were links between the two had no direct connection to either Hussein or bin Laden; and that a key meeting between an Iraqi intelligence officer and one of the leaders of the Sept. 11 attacks probably never happened.
A Knight Ridder review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's links to terrorism and what's now known about the classified intelligence has found that administration advocates of a preemptive invasion frequently hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to help make their case. Twice they neglected to report information that painted a less sinister picture.
The Bush administration has defended its prewar descriptions of Hussein and is calling Iraq ''the central front in the war on terrorism,'' as the president told U.S. troops two weeks ago.
But before the war and since, Bush and his aides made rhetorical links that now appear to have been leaps:
• Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio in January that there was ''overwhelming evidence'' of a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda. Among the evidence he cited was Iraq's harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Cheney didn't mention that Iraq had offered to turn over Yasin to the FBI in 1998, in return for a U.S. statement acknowledging that Iraq had no role in that attack. The Clinton administration refused the offer, because it was unwilling to reward Iraq for returning a fugitive.
• Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered him safe haven in Iraq.
They left out the rest of the story, however. Bin Laden said he would consider the offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later made available to the CIA, the al Qaeda leader told an aide afterward that he had no intention of accepting Saddam's offer because ``if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours.''
• The administration linked Hussein to a terrorism network run by Palestinian Abu Musab al Zarqawi. That network may be behind the latest violence in Iraq, which killed at least 143 people Tuesday.
But U.S. officials say the evidence that Zarqawi had close operational ties to al Qaeda appears increasingly doubtful.
Asked for Cheney's views on Iraq and terrorism, vice presidential spokesman Kevin Kellems referred Knight Ridder to the vice president's television interviews Tuesday.
Cheney, in an interview with CNN, said Zarqawi ran an ''al Qaeda-affiliated'' group. He cited an intercepted letter that Zarqawi is believed to have written to al Qaeda leaders, and a White House official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity said the CIA has described Zarqawi as an al Qaeda ``associate.''
But U.S. officials say the Zarqawi letter contained a plea for help that al Qaeda rebuffed.
• Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.
• Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell made much of occasional contacts between Hussein's regime and al Qaeda, dating to the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in the Sudan. But intelligence indicates that nothing ever came of the contacts.
Prague Revisited The evidence of an Iraq/al-Qaida connection hasn't gone away.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2003, at 9:58 AM PT
Well, yes I do place worth in his comment in what it made me realize, and it's really okay that its "worth escapes" you. And 'NO', there hasn't been the "smoking gun" found and so far, the "forbidden systems" were not really that - but some vague, shadowy deceit program Hussein used to dupe the world; the examination of those "component" systems reveal no connection to toxic weapons systems apart from anything that isn't available in almost any market. Look, if you wish the US to spend resource after resource looking for something that may never be concretely proven, that's your business. I prefer to move along. I've taken at face value the President said WMD's were there because he was given and he believed the faulty intelligence and am ready to put it behind me.
Likewise, it's not imperative (to me) to have documents, photos, or minutes outlining meetings between OBL and SH to realize, along Iraq's chain of command, there may be a link to Al Queida somewhere. Some fuzzy report of a document that has a name scrubbed through that "could possibly" be OBL in connection with SH is a far more baseless assumption of fiction as fact. I've questioned why this proported "document" surfaced at the hands of a reporter and not those of highly trained investigative teams.
Do you have a source for that? A May 2003 NewsMax article does not not mention that. A search under "Khodada, INC translator" comes up with 6 articles and none of them mention that. Another NewsMax article states:
The former Iraqi agent, codenamed Zeinab, told the paper that one of the highlights of Salman Pak's six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. Like the Sept. 11 hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five, he explained.
Zeinab's story has since been corroborated by Charles Duelfer, the former vice chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons inspection team, which actually visited the Salman Pak camp several times. "He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors," the Observer reported. "The Iraqis, he said, told UNSCOM it was used by police for counterterrorist training."
"Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer explained. "I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect?"
< snip >
Though the Bush administration has been largely silent about Salman Pak, former CIA Director James Woolsey is apparently convinced it was used to rehearse Sept. 11-style hijackings.
In late November he told Fox News Channel's Laurie Dhue:
"We know that at Salman Pak, on the southern edge of Baghdad, five different eyewitnesses - three Iraqi defectors and two American U.N. inspectors - have said - and now there are aerial photographs to show it - a Boeing 707 that was used for training of hijackers, including non-Iraqi hijackers trained very secretly to take over airplanes with knives."
Another intriguing coincidence: Salman Pak's hijacking school reportedly opened for business in 1995, the same year al-Qaeda agents in the Philippines hatched a plot to hijack 12 airliners and slam some of them into U.S. landmarks.
So...are Duelfer, Woolsey, and the other unidentified UN inspector with the INC as well? I think not.
From another article:
At U.S. Central Command in Qatar, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Marines raided the complex using information obtained from captured foreign fighters of various nations, including Egypt and Sudan. "The nature of the work being done by some of those people we captured, their inferences about the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak," Brooks said Sunday.
So...is Gen. Brooks a liar as well?
Newsmax did not mention the problem with the source? And neither did Benador Associate James Woosley? I'm shocked! I mean after all that sober reporting on Russian missiles set to fire because of the Y2K bug.
Please tell me you require a higher standard of proof than this propaganda to justify the death of your countrymen.
04 November 1998: "In addition, 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," the indictment said.
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said Sunday that he'd seen "lots of intelligence" that ties Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.2003-08-10: Bin Laden turned to Bagdad after concluding al-Qaida could not produce weapons, says prisoner"There's lots of intelligence and it's additive as you go along, of meetings between Iraqi military and intelligence officials and members of al Qaeda," the top House Democrat told ABC's "This Week."
The House leader, who broke ranks with fellow congressional Democrats last week to support President Bush's policy of preemptive action against Iraq, explained, "Your standard of proof of what you're looking for here has to go down, given that we live in a world of terrorists and terrorism."
Unfortunately, it is.
Beginning in 2000, Iraq coalesced their oil-for-food slush funds, sanctions-busting blackmarket, arms deal with N. Korea and agreement with AQ.
No one denies this, but the debate has been focused on "smoking guns" and "credible sources" in order for D's and anti-interventionists to belittle the case made by R's.
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