By the way........aren't you one of the more vocal ones on the claim that
Saddam had `no' connection with al Qaeda?



Try again..........


Saddam's al Qaeda Connection


From the September 1 / September 8, 2003 issue: 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."





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*Durango b301 #PE*