The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a report that the media is trumpeting as yet more proof that there was no link between Saddam and al Qaeda. Thomas Joscelyn shows how easy it is to come to that conclusion. You just don't bother considering any of the evidence that contradicts your pre-established conclusion:
The testimony of another former senior Iraqi official is more starkly disturbing. One of Saddam's senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi's ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that "this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact."
This is not true. Hijazi's best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, "The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them."
Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just "boogie to Baghdad." Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.
There is a voluminous body of evidence surrounding this December 1998 meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden--yet there is not a single mention of it in the committee's report. THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked the staffers "Why not?" They replied that there was no evidence of the meeting in the intelligence or documents they reviewed.
That's hard to believe. Newspapers such as Milan's Corriere Della Sera and London's Guardian, and the New York Post reported on it. Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, approvingly cited several of these accounts (before his own flip-flop on the issue) in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes. Scheuer wrote that Saddam made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors," including al Qaeda.
All of this obviously contradicts Hijazi's debriefing; none of it is cited in the committee's report.
There's a good bit more in the article, but from what I can determine, it seems that there was no relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda except for the numerous coordinating meetings that took place all through the 90's between IIS agents and al Qaeda operatives, including with bin Laden himself.... plus the training camps for al Qaeda terrorists that Saddam set up in Iraq, which included aircraft fuselages for hijacker training...plus the Iraqi technical leadership and other involvement with the chemical weapons plants in the Sudan which were run for al Qaeda's purposes...plus the safe haven for Islamist terrorists in Baghdad...plus the financial, logistical and rhetorical support for Islamist terror supplied by Saddam for many years...plus the existence in Iraq of an al Qaeda cell as early as 2001...plus the many and varied other connections cited for the past three years in the reporting of Mr. Joscelyn and Stephen Hayes, (organized here for your convenience.)
UPDATE 9/14: An assistant Iraqi Prime Minister testified yesterday to links between Saddam's Iraq and the al Qaeda organization.
Posted by dan at September 12, 2006 9:02 PM