The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America
American Enterprise Institute
Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
The Iraq-al Qaeda connection has been at the center of much controversy. In his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (HarperCollins, June 2004), Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes draws on top-secret intelligence documents and interviews with high-ranking Bush and Clinton administration officials to uncover new information about how America's deadliest opponents worked together-a relationship that stretches back more than a decade and may include collaboration on terrorist acts, chemical weapons training, and sheltering some of the world's most wanted radicals.
Hayes describes what those links mean for the United States and examines why politicians, journalists, and intelligence experts-even in the face of mounting evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden collaboration-have shown themselves to be dangerously incurious. Please join us for a panel discussion of The Connection.
3:45 p.m. Registration
4:00 Introduction : Danielle Pletka, AEI
Presentation: Stephen Hayes, The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection
Discussants: Ken Pollack, Brookings Institution (invited)
R. James Woolsey, former CIA director
Moderator: Michael A. Ledeen, AEI
6:00 Adjournment
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II. WSJ, NEW EVIDENCE OF IRAQ-AL-QAEDA LINK
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Saddam's FilesNew evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Thursday, May 27, 2004 12:01 a.m.
One thing we've learned about Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein is that the former dictator was a diligent record keeper. Coalition forces have found--literally--millions of documents. These papers are still being sorted, translated and absorbed, but they are already turning up new facts about Saddam's links to terrorism.
We realize that even raising this subject now is politically incorrect. It is an article of faith among war opponents that there were no links whatsoever--that "secular" Saddam and fundamentalist Islamic terrorists didn't mix. But John Ashcroft's press conference yesterday reminds us that the terror threat remains, and it seems especially irresponsible for journalists not to be open to new evidence. If the CIA was wrong about WMD, couldn't it have also missed Saddam's terror links?
One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.
As others have reported, at the time of the summit Shakir was working at the Kuala Lumpur airport, having obtained the job through an Iraqi intelligence agent at the Iraqi embassy. The four-day al Qaeda meeting was attended by Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi, who were at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. Also on hand were Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, a high-ranking Osama bin Laden lieutenant and mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. Shakir left Malaysia on January 13, four days after the summit concluded.
That's not the only connection between Shakir and al Qaeda. The Iraqi next turned up in Qatar, where he was arrested on September 17, 2001, four days after the attacks in the U.S. A search of his pockets and apartment uncovered such information as the phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers' safe houses and contacts. Also found was information pertaining to a 1995 al Qaeda plot to blow up a dozen commercial airliners over the Pacific.
After a brief detention, our friends the Qataris inexplicably released Shakir, and on October 21 he flew to Amman, Jordan. The Jordanians promptly arrested him, but under pressure from the Iraqis (and Amnesty International, which questioned his detention) and with the acquiescence of the CIA, they let him go after three months. He was last seen heading home to Baghdad.
The reason to care goes beyond the prewar justification for toppling Saddam and relates directly to our current security. U.S. officials believe that American civilian Nicholas Berg was beheaded in Iraq recently by Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, who is closely linked to al Qaeda and was given high-level medical treatment and sanctuary by Saddam's government. The Baathists killing U.S. soldiers are clearly working with al Qaeda now; Saddam's files might show us how they linked up in the first place.
