THIS STORY MUSTN'T DIE:
What to make of the Weekly Standard's publication of a leaked memo from neocon Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, to the Senate Intelligence Committee? Well, I'm not someone used to reading classified CIA documents and being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. But reading Stephen Hayes' summary of the document, I have to say this strikes me as a Big Deal. So far, the liberal media outlets seem to have ignored this, and it didn't help that the Weekly Standard's website was down for a while. Anti-war reporter Walter Pincus, in the Washington Post, has this mention of the memo:
Yesterday, allegations of new evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda contained in a classified annex attached to Feith's Oct. 27 letter to leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were published in the Weekly Standard. Feith had been asked to support his July 10 closed-door testimony about such connections. The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.
But reading Hayes' summary, you find plenty of CIA analysis of various bits of information, and assessments of varying reliability. Maybe the analysis isn't thorough or skeptical enough for Pincus but it sure exists - and seems to baldly contradict Pincus' piece. I don't trust Pincus anyway. He's about as reliable as David Sanger at the NYT: two anti-war partisans who have regularly spun their journalism to criticize the administration's conduct of the war. His Sunday story is based on notes from Anthony Cordesman - and flagged as the number one story on AOL. Why isn't the CIA's own analysis as valid? I guess it wouldn't buttress Pincus' agenda. So let's get other skeptics to show us why the data presented is faulty. Marshall? Pollack? Klein? Hersh? Until then ...
- 12:44:35 AM
... SADDAM LINKED UP WITH OSAMA: Here's my precis of Hayes' precis. The relationship between Saddam and the Islamofascists goes back a long way - right back to the fascist Egyptian Brotherhood (for a peerless account of their ideological pedigree, read Paul Berman's little masterpiece, "Terror and Liberalism"). Here's the Feith memo:
4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes.
No shit. There's more:
10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required.
The analysis of those events follows:
The time of the visit from the IIS director was a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing came on the third anniversary of a U.S. [Tomahawk missile] strike on IIS HQ (retaliation for the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait) for which Iraqi officials explicitly threatened retaliation.
Figures. These meetings strike me as far more significant than even the alleged Mohammed Atta meetings with Iraqi operatives in the run-up to September 11. They provide a far richer context for the nexus of terrorism with terrorist-sponsoring states that many anti-war advocates deny exist at all:
14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.
An analysis that follows No. 18 provides additional context and an explanation of these reports:
Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations.
Then we have the smoking vial, the intelligence that a link-up between the maniacs of al Qaeda with the resources of the Baathist terror-state was real, and that it could lead to attacks more devastating than 9/11:
26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training.
The analysis of this report follows.
CIA maintains that Ibn al-Shaykh's timeline is consistent with other sensitive reporting indicating that bin Laden asked Iraq in 1998 for advanced weapons, including CBW and "poisons."
Again, all this is amazing stuff: a phenomenally important story, if true.
DOING THE RIGHT THING: I cannot independently judge this material. But others can. All I know is that we shouldn't rest until the case debunking these claims has been effectively made. We need to be told: Why is this intelligence faulty? How? Has it been cherry-picked? By whom? Why? Above all, the blogosphere has to keep this story from being buried by the anti-war media establishment.
The cumulative weight of all this intelligence is stunning. Even if there are some holes in it, the broad picture it paints is unsurprising. The notion that the pragmatic Saddam, who had grown closer and closer to Islamism in the 1990s, would eschew any contacts with al Qaeda has always struck me as bizarre. The alliance is a natural. More important: you're in the administration after 9/11. All sorts of intelligence like this crosses your desk. You can't confirm all of it for absolutely sure. But just as surely, you cannot ignore it. The consequences of complacency are too horrifying for words. They still are. Yet today's 20/20 critics seem eager to claim that, even after 9/11, the administration should only have acted against Saddam if it had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he was indeed in league with al Qaeda. Well, they were wrong before this report. They are triply wrong now.
Thank God we have toppled Saddam. And thank God we had a president who, after so many years of complacency, weakness and denial, took the action that was vital to protect this country
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