Against Selected Enemies (Richard Miniter on Clarke)

The Wall Street Journal ^ | April 1, 2004 | RICHARD MINITER

[hocndoc]

Thanks for pointing me to this (bump for later focus)

[kcvl]

Direct Links Detailed
Three Prisoners in N. Iraq Outline Links Between Al Qaeda and Iraq



Al Qaeda Members Met With Saddam

Abu Iman al-Maliki was convicted of spying on the Kurds as an Iraqi intelligence officer. He says he worked as such for 20 years. Al-Maliki chain-smoked Marlboros as we talked, sitting on a metal chair in a T-shirt advertising a martial arts school that strained against his bulk. He is, simply put, a huge man. Abu Iman al-Maliki was an Iraqi intelligence officer for 20 years. (ABCNEWS.com)


"The U.S. believes Iraq has had contact with al Qaeda," I said, "Do you know that to be a fact?"

"Yes. In '92, elements of al Qaeda came to Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein and among them was Dr. Al-Zawahiri."

Ayman Al-Zawahiri, you may recall, has been identified as a top lieutenant of bin Laden's, and is widely thought to be a mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"There is a relationship between the governments of al Qaeda and the Iraqi government," he continued. "It began after the events of Kuwait approximately. That is when the relationship developed and many delegations came to Baghdad. There are elements of al Qaeda training on suicide operations, assassinations, explosions, and the making of chemical substances, and they are supervised by a number of officers, experts from the Iraqi intelligence, the Explosives Division, the Assassinations Division, different specialties."

Al-Maliki's specialty is somewhat more disturbing. He says he was part of a group of officers ordered by Saddam to hide chemical weapons throughout the Iraqi countryside. When I asked him if the U.N. weapons inspectors might find anything if they return, he smiled and said, "No. They will find nothing."

'I Killed' for Iraqi Intelligence and Al Qaeda

As midnight approached, I was introduced to Muhammad Mansour Shihab Ali, a man who, if you believe his confession, is a cold-hearted killer with a deep hatred for the United States. Muhammad Mansour Shihab Ali is behind bars for murdering an Iraqi dissident. (ABCNEWS.com)

His explanation of wanting to talk to an American journalist is the most perplexing of all: he had absolutely nothing to gain by doing so that I could tell. I asked him numerous times about his motives for giving us so much detailed information and his mumbled response, as gleaned by the translator, was that he thought I could do something to help his children whom he'd left behind with bin Laden's people in Afghanistan. It became obvious that he thought I was an American intelligence agent, and no amount of denial on my part could convince him otherwise.

Shihab Ali is in prison for the murder of an Iraqi dissident who had been living in Iran. He was captured at a Kurdish checkpoint and found in his possession were some photographic negatives which, when developed, were a full-color record of the grisly deed. When confronted in court with the photos, he confessed all. He's still confessing.

"Killing is something I did. I killed. This was for the Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda."

Shihab Ali told me he has done numerous operations for al Qaeda and Iraq over the years, including numerous assassinations and smuggling drugs and guns. Two years ago, he says he was hired by an Iraqi intelligence officer, Othman Salman Daoud, to smuggle 30 refrigerator "motors" — which I took to mean "compressors" — from Iraq to Iran, where they were handed over to men he describes as Afghan members of al Qaeda. He was paid $10,000 each for the items, which usually contain the refrigerant gas Freon, but, in this case, contained something more mysterious. Shihab Ali was warned it was dangerous to himself, and to any children he might hope to have.

We have no way of knowing what was in those compressors, or what their ultimate destination was. "Only God knows what was in them," he says. Which is not entirely true; he says the compressors were ordered by the man Shihab Ali met five days later in Afghanistan — bin Laden.

There were nine other operations he was expected to work on, he said, at the time he was caught, but he was reluctant to give away the details. Finally, I convinced him to tell me about one that was supposed to have happened last year. He says he and a partner were given $16 million to go to the Gulf and buy some large ships, equip them with 500 kilos of high-explosive, and set sail under Iranian flags. The crews would slip away in motorboats after being replaced with men willing to commit suicide, who would then enter Kuwaiti waters, according to Shihab Ali, and ram the ships into American tankers or military vessels.

"The only reason this didn't happen is because you were captured?" I asked him as my mind filled with the mental image of the extent of death and damage such an attack might have caused.

"Yes, if I hadn't been arrested, I would have done it."


http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:pcbNfzSpuiAJ:abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/DailyNews/alqaeda_iraq020927.html+Ansar+al-Islam,+with+links+to+al+Qaeda&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[windchime]

"the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda."

"In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan"


It has been nagging at me that within a week of the completion of the Bush administration's plan.....Al Queda struck.

[kcvl]

Ansar al-Islam takes on the USA

By Ed Blanche

Abderrazak Mahdjoub is the man every intelligence officer in Western Europe wants to talk to these days. The 30-year-old Algerian known as 'the Sheikh' is being held by German authorities who believe he heads a continent-wide terrorist operation for Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam), an Iraqi Kurdish fundamentalist group that is rapidly becoming a major adversary of the USA and the cutting edge of the Iraqi resistance.

There is mounting evidence that Ansar al-Islam has links with Al-Qaeda and the USA believes it has been behind many of the suicide attacks against their troops in Iraq and probably the devastating twin suicide bombings in Iraqi Kurdistan on 2 February 2004 that killed more than 100 people, including key leaders of the pro-USA Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

By all accounts, Mahdjoub is providing his European interrogators with a detailed picture of a clandestine network that authorities say smuggles would-be suicide bombers to Iraq for the jihad against the occupation forces. At the same time, European governments are becoming increasingly fearful that they will become targets themselves as the terrorist networks proliferate. In December 2003, the EU police agency, Europol, warned: "The fact that no Islamic extremist attack has been committed in the EU [since October 2002] should not be considered as a diminution or an absence of threat."

On 23 October 2003, the Pentagon declared that Ansar al-Islam had become the principal 'terrorist adversary' of US forces in Iraq. Suspicions about its links to Al-Qaeda have hardened as the ferocity of suicide attacks against US and other targets in Iraq has intensified. This, Coalition intelligence believes, is the work of Ansar al-Islam.

The co-ordinated attacks in Irbil, the worst ever seen in Iraq since the war, were claimed by a group calling itself Jaish Ansar al-Sunna (Army of the Sunni Partisans), but they bore the stamp of Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam. The latter is believed to be the core of Jaish Ansar al-Sunna, which casts itself as the protector of Iraq's Sunni minority. The group is believed to have been responsible for the suicide bombing of the Turkish embassy in Baghdad on 14 October 2003, the 29 November ambush in which nine Spanish intelligence officers were killed and other such attacks, including the car bombing of a Mosul police station on 31 January 2004.

Ansar al-Islam was established after 11 September 2001 in an enclave in northeastern Iraq, near the porous border with Iran - an area outside of Saddam Hussein's control. In late March 2003, US-led forces attacked its mountain stronghold, a cluster of some 16 villages and a network of caves in the Halabja Valley. Some 200 of the 800 fighters were killed, according to the PUK. Many of those who survived fled into Iran.

After the Iraq war, the group reconstituted itself, exploiting the chaos that followed the invasion. Some Ansar al-Islam leaders, such as Abu Abdullah al-Shafei, Ayoub Afghani and Abu Wa'el, were seen in the Iranian border city of Sanandaj in June and July, regrouping their fighters and recruiting new men.

[kcvl]

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, Volume 009, Issue 24


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."

[Wolfstar]

One momentous Bush-era episode on which Mr. Clarke can shed some light is his decision to approve the flights of the bin Laden clan out of the U.S. in the days after 9/11, when all other flights were grounded.

Can someone explain the significance of this to me? I pay zero attention to Leftist/Dem/fringe-Right conspriacy theories, so haven't got a clue what the point of this is supposed to be. On 9/11/01, itself, other than military, Coast Guard, and possibly police aircraft, ALL flights were cancelled. However, in the "days after," I know it isn't true that ALL flights were grounded. In addition to military, Coast Guard, police, fire and rescue, and some government flights, a few civilian flights were permitted to move some VIP's when necessary — for example, ambassasors, high-profile foreign nationals, and so on. So, if it is true that bin Laden relatives were moved out of the country, why is this "momentous"?

[windchime]

Bump!

[neverdem]

Maybe "momentous" was a poor choice of adjectives, but it struck many people as more than curious that bin Laden's relatives were given this privilege of flight(literally) which was denied to the rest of the U.S. civilian population.

In particular, it was used by the hard left to imply that there was some sort of collusion that "Bush knew", when in reality it was probably provided as a favor to our erstwhile allies in Saudi Arabia, lest these relatives fall victim to physical violence from a mob of angry Americans wanting revenge, IMHO. If bin Laden's relatives and the White House had advance knowledge, then I think they would have left the U.S. prior to Sep 11, 2001.

[cyncooper]

From what I've read, the bin Laden family was flown within the U.S. border to a common gathering point during the time flights were grounded. They did not leave the country until the restriction was lifted.

As to why it's being brought up? The kitchen sink theory. They're flailing wildly and twisting events to suit their purposes.

Turns out this event which the left wants to use (I heard Joe Klein on Matthews' Sunday show 2 or 3 weeks ago say this WILL be an issue in the campaign) involved their new golden (ack) boy, Clarke.

[Eva]

I hate it when these good WSJ articles are posted at night because they never get the attention that they deserve. If this doesn't get some attention, I will repost it.

[mewzilla]

So has the 9-11 Commission called Miniter to get to the bottom of the discrepancies in Clarke's testimony? That is why Dr. Rice is being dragged back before the commission, isn't it?

[malia]

I think you give him too much credit!

[Howlin]

Bump!

[Howlin]

According to Vanity Fair, it was AFTER the restrictions were lifted; they were one of the first flights out. They were flown on FBI (?) planes to Tennessee, I believe.

[mewzilla]

Some journo ought to buttonhole every 9-11 panel member and ask him if he's read Miniter's book. If not, why not? And if so, what does he/they think about the discrepancies in Clarke's story than and now. Inquiring minds want to know...

[InterceptPoint]

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,

And I suppose the CIA didn't bother to show this guy a few thousand pictures that we now have of captured and killed al Qaeda types? I just don't believe that it is this simple. The CIA must know by know whether or not Salman Pak was used for training by any terrorist who eventually used that knowledge and training to attack the United States. You only need to verify ONE to justify the War in Iraq.

My main problem with Salman Pak is the near total silence of the United States Government on the subject. There is somehing rotten here but we don't know what.

[Howlin]

Newsflash: Condi to testify NEXT Thursday!!

And Bush is on right now, signing Laci and Connor's Law.

[neverdem]

If this doesn't get some attention, I will repost it.

I told cyncooper to do the same already. I have no problem as many good stories fade off into cyberspace much too quickly. They only maintain circulation by active pinging.

[LisaFab]

Watching right now--great stuff!

[prairiebreeze]

Condi will testify on Maundy Thursday. Just heading into the Easter weekend then. This actually might be a very good date. Let the media have it Thursday, not so many people watching Friday...etc.

Also, don't the congresscritters and Senate take a week or two off for Easter/Spring break? Is that going to happen during next week, anybody know?

Prairie