By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2003
This 16-page memo, dated last October 27, was sent from
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Chairman Pat Roberts
(R.-Kansas) and Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D.-W.Virginia) of the Senate
Intelligence Committee.
�Case Closed� banners the magazine�s cover, along with
photos of Saddam and Osama facing one another like evil twins co-joined at the
hate. This is the latest in a long series of articles asserting such linkage in
the widely respected neoconservative journal. The Weekly Standard article by Stephen
F. Hayes did not reveal how he obtained this classified
memo.
Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq have discounted any
link between Islamist fanatic bin Laden and secular Ba�athist socialist Hussein.
As a political matter, if Saddam has been in cahoots with Osama (the
psychopathic mastermind whose terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9-11-01) then
the legitimacy of President George W. Bush�s attack on Iraq would be as hard to
deny or defy as was his overthrow of the Taliban bin Laden pirate base of
Afghanistan.
But President Bush in recent months has also downplayed
any linkage between Hussein and al Qaeda, preferring instead to justify the
overthrow of Saddam on grounds that the dictator possessed or was about to
acquire weapons of mass destruction that would make him an intolerable threat to
the peace of the region and world.
This past weekend, while the Weekly Standard story reverberated on
network news discussion programs, the Department of Defense issued a press release.
The Pentagon release said: �News
reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with
respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate
Intelligence Committee are inaccurate�. The items listed in the classified annex
[to DoD Undersecretary Feith�s memo] were either raw reports or products of the
CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], the NSA [National Security Agency, aka �the
Puzzle Palace� of encryption and decryption], or, in one case, the DIA [Defense
Intelligence Agency]�.
�The classified annex was not an analysis of the
substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no
conclusions,� the Pentagon press release continued. �Individuals who leak or
purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national
security; such activity is
deplorable and may be illegal.�
The Department of Defense (DoD), a part of the Federal
Government�s Executive Branch, in other words said that assertions in the memo
reported by the Weekly Standard were
merely �raw� data from a variety of sources.
Note how deftly this press release implies that the data
and the Osama-Saddam linkage assertions are inaccurate � when all that the memo
actually says explicitly is that it is �inaccurate� to say the Pentagon had
�confirmed� all the new information in Undersecretary Feith�s memo.
But as logicians say, absence of absolute proof is not
proof of absence. Raw data is the ore from which refined data is
processed.
The liberal Washington Post on Sunday echoed the DoD
press release�s position concerning Feith�s memo annex, giving Leftists such as
Fox/National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams ammunition to shoot at the
growing evidence of Osama-Saddam links.
Why is the Bush Administration�s Department of Defense
appearing to distance itself from this new information? Having wrestled Leftist political
opponents and their allies in the media over hard-to-find Weapons of Mass
Destruction in Iraq, President Bush � once burned, twice shy � has adopted a
measure of his father�s cautious Presidential prudence. That prudence, as we
shall see, could pay winning political dividends in
2004.
Where the Saddam-Osama link is concerned, this memo and
other evidence makes clear that we are looking not only at a smoking gun � but a
smoking gun with a pile of expended shells as corroborating evidence littering
the ground all around it.
�There can no longer be any serious argument about
whether Saddam Hussein�s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot
against Americans,� concludes Weekly
Standard writer Stephen Hayes. The only remaining argument is over the
precise nature and danger of these undeniable links to the very terrorists who
planned the 9-11 attacks on America.
The memo�s thumbnail evidence distilled by Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes
makes a powerful case. Bin Laden purportedly first sent �emissaries to Jordan in
1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials,� beginning a relationship that
would last until 2003.
What Osama wanted from Saddam Hussein was high-level
training in terrorist weapons and techniques, a safe haven in Iraq, cash and
weapons � including, especially, surface-to-air missles and Weapons of Mass
Destruction. Despite Saddam�s secular nature, bin Laden also wanted a nominally
Muslim ally against the West, in accord with the ancient Arab saying �The enemy
of my enemy is my friend.�
The first quid pro
quo sought by Saddam was the same that has long brought bribes to Osama from
the Saudi royal family � a �non-aggression pact� in which al Qaeda would agree not to attack or undermine
Hussein�s Ba�athist dictatorship. Saddam later would seek al Qaeda help in
procuring embargoed weapons. And under pressure from both the U.S. and the U.N.,
Saddam was glad for a political and potential fighting ally such as al
Qaeda.
Did this evil alliance include Iraqi help in attacking
the U.S.S. Cole? At least a smidgen of evidence hints that
it did.
Did this alliance include Iraqi help to al Qaeda in its
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9-11? Evidence remains strong that an
intelligence officer/sabotage expert Ahmed Al-Ani of Iraq�s secret police agency
Mukhabarat met with Mohamed Atta in Prague, contrary to false stories spread in
the Leftist media (e.g., the New York
Times). Atta, it turns out, may have had as many as four trips to Prague for
such meetings with high level Iraqis, one as early as December 1994.
Our invading forces also confirmed what military and one
private satellite had seen � that at Salman Pak
(named, oddly, for the barber of the Prophet Muhammad) a terrorist training camp
included a rusting airliner fuselage. Aspiring skyjackers could use it to sharpen the kinds of deadly skills
Mohamed Atta and his al Qaeda team displayed on 9-11. Did other al Qaeda members
train there? Evidence suggests that
some did.
Iraqi embassies provided assistance, safe houses and
documents to al Qaeda members as far from Baghdad as the Philippines. Those
involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in
Africa, the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and at least two of the 9-11
terrorists all had contacts with Iraqi diplomatic facilitator Ahmed Hikmat
Shakir.
One of the most prominent al Qaeda operatives involved in
the U.S.S. Cole bombing, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, according to
investigator Laurie Mylroie, is himself secretly an Iraqi intelligence agent.
Mohammed�s nephew, reported Time
Magazine, gave $120,000 to Mohammed Atta and his fellow
soon-to-be-skyjackers.
(Strong evidence suggests
that 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, who also led a failed attempt
in 1995 to destroy 12 American airliners, was himself an Iraqi intelligence
agent. He reportedly
plotted as well, in �Project Bojinka,� to ram a fuel-loaded airliner into the
Pentagon.
)
The Feith memo annex laid out links between al Qaeda and
Saddam in 50 brief points. One CIA agent told British reporter David Rose that the agency had identified �almost 100 separate
examples� of cooperation between these terrorists and Saddam�s regime of
terror. What might some of those
detected near-100 connections be?
Here are a few random examples:
n
Palestinian terrorist Abu
Nidal (real name Sabri al-Banna), given sanctuary by Saddam in Iraq, was reportedly
murdered on Hussein�s order because he refused to help train a group of al
Qaeda terrorists in the country. This suggests that al Qaeda terrorists were
being trained in Iraq with official approval and
help.
n
Iraq reportedly
paid $300,000 to al Qaeda�s #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in
1998..
n
In addition to its
affiliated group Ansar al Islam and
its 600 to 700 fighters, at least �two dozen� al Qaeda agents were recently in
Iraq. That, anyway, is the number
captured in Iraq by U.S. forces, according
to Ambassador Paul Bremer at a September 26 press
briefing.
n
Saddam�s son Uday�s own Babil, the Babylon Daily Political
Newspaper, on November 14, 2002, reportedly
published a �List of Honor� that included �Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod,
intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the
Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.� This was easily done because Aswod was
Iraq�s Ambassador to Pakistan at the time. When this revelation of sensitive
information was noticed, copies of the newspaper at every newsstand and
subscriber home were rounded up.
n
Islamists arrested in London
with the deadly poison ricin had links
to both al Qaeda and Iraq.
n
Two of the 9-11 skyjackers,
Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, reportedly met months
earlier in 2001 in the United Arab Emirates with officers of the Iraqi secret
police agency Mukhabarat.
This list of specifics could easily be extended for
another 30 pages. Most can be
quibbled, but the cumulative effect of all of them leaves any reasonable reader
of the articles hotlinked herein saying �Where there�s this much smoke, there
must be fire.�
Saddam Hussein would work with an �unholy axis of
terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals,� said
President William Jefferson Clinton prophetically in a February 18, 1998,
speech.
�We have to defend our future from these predators of the
21st Century,� President Clinton continued. �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 day after President Clinton spoke, Iraqi intelligence
wrote a memo (now
captured, its message discovered beneath Liquid Paper whiteover) outlining a
plan for an al Qaeda operative to travel from Sudan to Iraq for a meeting, with
Mukhabarat picking up �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 [that would]�.relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin
Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.�
Days later, on February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued
a religious fatwa urging all faithful
Muslims to kill Americans in Muslim lands or who were attacking
Iraq.
One of the more interesting books of recent years is
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big
Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. It
ponders how ideas can languish for years, then suddenly achieve critical mass
and reverse the tilt of a scale, a poll, a political career, a judgment in the
court of public opinion.
Week by week, evidence in the scale continues to
accumulate that Saddam Hussein was part of an evil nexus with Osama bin Laden
and his terrorist group al Qaeda, the monsters who attacked America on September
11, 2001.
The American people are unfamiliar with most of this
evidence, which if released all at once would likely generate a �tipping point�
in the now-muddled Iraq debate all by itself. Forget about Weapons of Mass
Destruction, although these too could show up at any time as our investigators
continue to comb the country. Compelling evidence that Saddam might have been
much more directly connected to 9-11 than we knew would be sufficient all by
itself to justify the Iraq incursion a thousand times
over.
Unable to run against President Bush�s fast-improving
economy, and preempted in their usual issues such as education and healthcare by
Bush�s adroit initiatives, Democrats have fallen back to the Iraq war as the
issue on which their 2004 election chances are staked. This is why the provocative recent memo
was written by a Democratic staffer on the once-bipartisan Senate Intelligence
Committee, plotting how to politicize this committee vital to America�s survival
and use it in a desperate attempt to defeat incumbent President
Bush.
President Bush has not politicized the war. He has sought
bi-partisanship. He is also constrained by the need to protect intelligence
sources that could be compromised or killed by publishing what they have
divulged�.and to preserve their ability to help win the protracted war against
terror.
But leading Democratic Presidential candidates such as
Howard Dean have gone very, very far out on a limb in their strident, nasty
attacks against the Commander-in-Chief on the war
issue.
When the tipping point comes � and it very well could in
2004 � these Democrats might find themselves unable to get back before the
weight of new evidence against Hussein snaps that limb off. It�s not nice to bet
against your own country � to bet your chips so that for you to win, America
must lose. But that is precisely what extremist candidates such as Howard Dean
have done.
Saddam Hussein reportedly
required his officers to read the book �Black Hawk Down,� Mark Bowden�s book
about the downing of U.S. helicopters in Somalia during the Clinton
Administration, to show them how soldier deaths and media images of horror can
politically cause the United States to cut and run.
When Howard Dean, in effect, pledges that if he gets
elected in 2004 the U.S. will cut and run in Iraq, this is a huge message
billboard telling terrorists in Iraq to kill as many Americans as they can to
make the war unpopular with U.S. voters.
Dean does not regard himself as on the side of Osama bin Laden�s or Saddam Hussein�s terrorists, but they are on his side and want to help elect him. And they vote with bullets, not ballots.
