If Iraq had NO ties to al Queda, please explain this...
as printed in todays NYpost
June 17, 2004 -- THE 9/11 Commission is in danger of going the way of the Warren Commission — a blue-chip panel investigating a national tragedy that foolishly ends up fueling controversy. And that's a shame.
Yesterday, the commission announced there was "no credible evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality, there's a wealth of evidence.
And by disputing the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, the commissioners are answering a question no one asked them. They were supposed to investigate 9/11, not al Qaeda as a whole. In an election year, this makes them look partisan.
The timing of the final report smells fishy, too: 500,000 copies are due in book stores on July 26 — the very day the Democratic convention begins in Boston. Again, not a credibility-enhancing move.
The 9/11 panel seems recklessly naive when it takes the word of the intelligence community as gospel. A wise commissioner would remember that everyone has an institutional interest, a bias. (E.g., for many in the intelligence community, conceding that Iraq could have been one of bin Laden's backers would be admitting that they were wrong for the past decade and wrong to oppose the Iraq war.) And a neutral commissioner would conclude that the jury is still out on Iraq-al Qaeda, not stamp it "case closed."
Yesterday's report itself casts doubt on the intelligence sector's long-held beliefs. Buried in it is an admission that bin Laden sought a partnership with Iraq (among other nations), though it maintains the relationship was never consummated. (How could they know?) This explodes two cherished myths of America's intelligence analysts: that secular dictators and Islamic terrorists would never team up and that al Qaeda is a "loose, stateless network," not a "cut out" for evil regimes. If the CIA's analysts were wrong about that, couldn't they also be wrong about a Saddam-bin Laden link?
A wealth of evidence on the public record — from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers — attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam.
* Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Yasin both a home and a salary.
* Bin Laden met eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and with Saddam's external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 6, 2003.
* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Powell.
* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid '90s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator.
* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2.
* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan — who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks — that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre."
* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad, where militants trained to hijack planes with knives — on a full-size Boeing 707.
* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
* The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time.
* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.
* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Wounded, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When he recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq.
* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" in Baghdad.
* CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document-forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. . . . This information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."
The 9/11 Commission's work is too important to squander on politics. The nation needs a full, frank assessment of the government-wide failures in the Clinton and Bush years that led to the terrorist attacks — and a sober judge, not a camera-mugging prosecutor. Let's hope the commissioners realize that before July 26.
