thestar.com.
`There's something here they don't want us to see'
Clumsy efforts made to conceal name Document found in intelligence centreTranslators used to confirm content Reporters convinced
MITCH POTTER - MIDDLE EAST BUREAU
BAGHDAD, Amir, our trusted interpreter, sat on the end of my hotel room bed yesterday scratching away on what seemed just another top-secret sheaf in the endless paper chase of postwar Iraq.
But this document was different. In three different places on the third and final page, someone had clumsily dabbed corrective fluid to conceal what was written beneath. They even went so far as to conceal the corrective fluid itself, scrawling over top with a pen.
In someone else's hands this vexing piece of paper might have been tossed aside on to history's scrap heap.
Only a few hours earlier, after all, it lay on the floor of a room in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's dreaded internal security service, left untouched by CIA operatives who had already combed the premises.
But Amir wasn't finished.
"I need a blade," he announced firmly, frustrated by his lack of progress by fingernail. "There's something here they don't want us to see."
Intrigued, I broke into the war bag, handing him a scalpel knife blade from the med kit.
It did the trick.
The corrective fluid began to break off in tiny, tidy chunks, revealing letter by letter the Arabic name beneath.
As the mystery slowly unravelled, Amir's eyes grew wider. Finally, he leapt from the bed in stunned disbelief. "What? What have you got," I asked.
"It says bin Laden. It says bin Laden," he bellowed, jumping in the air.
It was my turn to sit in stunned disbelief, as I watched Amir turn his head to the heavens and whisper "Thanks to God."
In the minutes to come, we regained composure, biting our lips as Amir worked away at the rest of the document with the knife blade, as if performing open-heart surgery. A second blob of corrective fluid came off, revealing another "bin Laden." And then a third.
Together with Inigo Gilmore, The Sunday Telegraph reporter with whom I have been working since we arrived together in Baghdad, we then gave ourselves a reality check.
No offence to Amir, we said, calling in another translator. And another. Each verified the words in our hands. A photographer was summoned and the images were digitally transmitted to our newspapers in Toronto and London, where another translator confirmed the text.
Next question to self: is this for real?
Opponents of war on Iraq, after all, had long dismissed the notion of an Osama-Saddam connection as the weakest of all canards, a late-breaking argument among the multiple-choice reasons for U.S. invasion designed for a domestic audience still traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks.
In other words, is it a plant?
We thought not. And after hours of further consideration, we are certain of it. The document in question is in every way possible entirely like the hundreds of others we've been poring over in our spare hours these many nights in the safety of our hotel room while intermittent gunfire pops away in the distance.
The Mukhabarat was indeed a scary place, but it also suffered from the clogged approvals-in-quadruplicate bureaucracy that was endemic under Saddam's Iraq.
The margin notes and counter-signatures throughout these pages from various mid- to high-level functionaries are virtually identical to the rest of the paper in our stack.
And the ham-fisted attempt to cover-up the link is entirely in keeping with the bumbling, chronically inefficient style of Iraqi officialdom so well known to those of us who spent time here in Saddam's day.
It is no surprise to us, given the gargantuan scale of the Mukhabarat facility, with so many of its more than a dozen buildings a bombed, burned and looted wreck, that this little sheaf failed to be fed into the Iraqi shredding machines as the regime suddenly fell.
Nor is it a surprise that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, whose spooks were the first to comb through the rubble, managed not to come up with this one among literally hundreds of thousands of remnant papers blowing over its vast, tree-lined grounds.
Especially considering its exact location. The document was pulled from box folders scattered inside what we believe to be the second-floor accounting office of one of the worst hit buildings on the grounds.
The six-floor concrete structure was so badly damaged by American air strikes its front entrance is no longer accessible.
If someone wishing to plant such a document wanted it found, why would it be in such an unlikely setting.
And why indeed would anyone bother fussing over something that took so much painstaking work to uncover, when the next paper is only a short reach away?
Anyone but the dogged Amir, that is.
We conclude that it is what it is, no more and no less. An envoy of Osama bin Laden did indeed visit Baghdad for talks in March of 1998, as a guest of Saddam's Iraq.
Whether those talks took place, or whether there were more to follow, it does not say.
Whether this is the tip of the iceberg ? or, in fact, the whole of it ? only time will tell.
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