Posted on 01/14/2003 10:05:20 AM PST by Wallaby
�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Saddam and al Qaeda the link we've all missed; The conventional belief is that the Iraqi dictator and Bin Laden are still foes. Recent intelligence reports tell a different story
David Rose
The Evening Standard (London) Pg. 11
December 9, 2002
DESPITE their bitter divisions over possible war in Iraq, doves and many hawks on this side of the Atlantic share a common, often-stated belief: that there is "no evidence" of a link between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and Saddam Hussein's regime. In London and Washington, the Foreign Office, MI6, the State Department and the CIA have been spinning this claim to reporters for more than a decade, long before the attacks of 11 September last year.
Constant repetition of an erroneous position does not, however, make it true. Having investigated the denial of an Iraqi connection for more than a year, I am convinced it is false. The strongest evidence comes from a surprising source - the files of those same intelligence agencies who have spent so long publicly playing this connection down. According to the conventional wisdom, Saddam is a "secular" dictator, whose loathing for Islamic fundamentalism is intense, while Bin Laden and his cohorts would like to kill the Iraqi president almost as much George W Bush.
It is undisputed that Iraqi-sponsored assassins tried to kill George Bush senior on a visit to the Gulf in 1993. The same year, Abdul Rahman Yasin mixed and made the truck bomb which wrought destruction and killed six in the first New York World Trade Center attack - then coolly boarded a plane for Baghdad, where he still resides.
All reports of a link can be disregarded on this ground alone.
Though they may get scant attention, some of the facts of Saddam's involvement with Islamic terrorism are not disputed. Hamas, the fundamentalist Palestinian group, whose gift to the world is the suicide bomb, has maintained a Baghdad office - funded by Saddam - for many years.
"In the Cold War," says one of them, "often you'd draw firm conclusions and make policy on the basis of just four or five reports. Here there are almost 100 separate examples of Iraq-al Qaeda co-operation going back to 1992."
His intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, has a special department whose sole function is liaison with Hamas. In return, Hamas has praised Saddam extravagantly on its website and on paper.
SINCE his defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam's supposed secularism has looked decidedly thin.
Increasingly, he has relied on Islamist rhetoric in an attempt to rally the "Arab street". Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa justified its call for Muslims to kill American and Jewish civilians on the basis of a lengthy critique of US hostility towards "secular" Iraq.
It is also undisputed that Iraqi-sponsored assassins tried to kill George Bush senior on a visit to the Gulf in 1993. The same year, Abdul Rahman Yasin mixed and made the truck bomb which wrought destruction and killed six in the first New York World Trade Center attack - then coolly boarded a plane for Baghdad, where he still resides.
There is strong evidence that Ramzi Yousef, leader of both the 1993 New York bombing and a failed attempt two years later to down 12 American airliners over the Pacific, was an Iraqi intelligence officer. All this was known in the Nineties. Nevertheless, the "no connection" argument was rapidly becoming orthodoxy.
The 9/11 attacks were, selfevidently, a failure of intelligence: no one saw them coming. Awareness of this failure, and its possible consequences for individuals' careers, are the only reasons I can find for the wall of spin which the spooks have fed to the media almost ever since.
Not only had Havel not phoned Bush, the Czechs remained convinced that Atta did meet Al-Ani. They had been tracking him continuously because his predecessor had been caught red-handed - in a plot to detonate a terrorist bomb.
Iraq must have been more intensely spied upon than any other country throughout the 1990s. If the agencies missed a Saddam-al Qaeda connection, it might reasonably be argued, then many heads should roll.
My own doubts emerged more than a year ago, when a very senior CIA man told me that, contrary to the line his own colleagues were assiduously disseminating, there was evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda link.
He confirmed a story I had been told by members of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress - that two of the hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had met Mukhabarat officers in the months before 9/11 in the United Arab Emirates.
This, he said, was part of a pattern of contact between Iraq and al Qaeda which went back years.
Yet the attempts to refute the link were feverish. The best known example is the strange case of the meetings in Prague between Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 plot's alleged leader, and Khalil Al-Ani, a Mukhabarat sabotage expert.
For at least the third time, The New York Times tried at the end of October to rebut the claim that the Prague meetings ever happened, reporting that the Czech President Vaclav Havel had phoned the White House to tell Bush that it was fiction.
Barely had the paper hit the streets before Havel's spokesman stated publicly that the story was a "fabrication".
Not only had Havel not phoned Bush, the Czechs remained convinced that Atta did meet Al-Ani. They had been tracking him continuously because his predecessor had been caught red-handed - in a plot to detonate a terrorist bomb.
As I reveal in Vanity Fair, earlier this year the Pentagon established a special intelligence unit to re-examine evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. After initially fighting the proposal, the CIA agreed to supply this unit with copies of its own reports going back 10 years. I have spoken to three senior officials who have seen its conclusions, which are striking.
"In the Cold War," says one of them, "often you'd draw firm conclusions and make policy on the basis of just four or five reports. Here there are almost 100 separate examples of Iraq-al Qaeda co-operation going back to 1992."
All these reports, says the official, were given the CIA's highest credibility rating - defined as information from a source which had proven reliable in the past.
At least one concerns Bin Laden personally, who is said to have spent weeks with a top Mukhabarat officer in Afghanistan in 1998.
THIS week, attention remains focused on the UN weapons inspectors, and the deadline for Iraq's declaration of any weapons of mass destruction. But the recent Security Council resolution also noted Iraq's failure to abandon support for international terror, as it had promised at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. If there were the political will - rather a big if, admittedly - this could constitute a casus belli every bit as legitimate as Iraqi possession of a nuclear weapon.
Ignoring Iraq's support for terror is a seductive proposition, which fits pleasingly with democracies' natural reluctance to wage war. But if we are serious about winning the war on terror, self-delusion is not an option.
An attempt to achieve regime change in Iraq would not be a distraction, but an integral part of the struggle.
David Rose is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine. His article on Saddam, al Qaeda and the Iraqis appears in the current issue.
We're at war now.
Walt
We (the USA) are now spending 50% of the money on defense world wide. I don't know what it was in 1990, but it was considerable.
I'm sure if we had applied the proper pressure back in that time frame, Saddam would have gotten the message, would not have attacked Kuwait, would not have tried to kill Bush Sr. back in '93 and would not have supported various other anti-American plots that are costing us plenty.
If all the people who've posted on this thread (maybe not you) think Saddam is not involved with 9/11, why are we getting ready to kick his butt and depose him?
Walt
They know that too.
Walt
And you base the fact that Saddam and Bin Ladin wouldn't work together because one is secular and the other is fundamentalist.
Yet, Hamas doesn't have a problem working with either Iraq or the PLO (marxist organization). And just like the Islamic Brotherhood or Islamic Jihad doesn't have a problem working with the PLO.
Or... that in the 1970's and 1980's the Soviets were very involved in the training and constituting of these "fundmentalist groups."
No, they don't like each other based on a deep seeded animosity grounded in the fact that one is not religious enough for the other. And because of that, they would never, ever work against a common enemy.
You stick with that...
I got "The High Cost of Peace" for Christmas. I've read some of it. It's a great book. I also have his "Target the West." I hear that his book on Bin Ladin is phenomenal. Which book have you read?
Dr. Laurie Mylroie's book "A Study of Revenge" provides the link impeccibly. Her research is faultless. I highly recommend this book.
"The reanalyzed C.I.A. material included the claim that Farouk Hijazi, one of the Mukhabarat's most senior agents, traveled to Afghanistan in 1998 to meet with Osama bin Laden, and details of journeys by two of the 9/11 pilots, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, to the United Arab Emirates, where they are said to have met with Iraqi intelligence officers. Both of these claims were first brought to light by the I.N.C. [Iraqi National Congress].""An Inconvenient Iraqi," David Rose, Vanity Fair, January 2003, p. 130.
My... aren't you clever...
Yeah, and Hitler was a white supremacist, so the idea that he was ever allied with Japan is preposterous nonsense.
Get your head out of the clouds. Saddam has been on a campaign of revenge against the US ever since Gulf War I. Al-Qaeda is his instrument. Why do you think al-Qaeda's chief cause celebre is getting US troops out of Saudi Arabia? What are those troops there for in the first place? Golly, could it be ... to defend against Iraq?
But they --weren't-- right!
Don't you recall the headlines from 9/TEN/01? Rumsfield was wailing about money for MISSILE DEFENSE being switched to anti-terrorism.
Just because the guy has a colonel carrying his brief case doesn't mean he knows squat. Rumsfield has shown us nothing yet. The rubber is about to meet the road though.
Walt
As the Arabs say, "me against my brother, my brother and me against my cousin, me, my brother, and cousin against the world."
Except for Bin Ladin and Saddam! No, no link there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.