9/11 Report Reveals Iraq/Al-Qaida Connection
by John D. O’Connor
The loudly trumpeted conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report that there was no "collaborative operational" relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida does not put the question to rest of the Iraq/al-Qaida connection. Indeed, many facts in the report, as well as a few highly pertinent facts the report ignores, show a long-standing, friendly and intensifying, albeit covert, relationship between the parties, involving at the least cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida on lethal chemical and explosive weapons.
As a lawyer accustomed to carefully crafted wording, I know that "collaborative operational" can be limited to mean working side by side on an operation (for example, an attack). I also know that "evidence" can mean whatever the proponent deems it to mean and can (although it shouldn't) exclude circumstantial evidence and evidence the proponent simply doesn't believe.
So at first blush, the commission seems to have spent a lot of time and money telling us what we knew: There is no direct, hard evidence that Saddam Hussein helped put the Sept. 11 terrorists on the planes.
But most Americans don't know of the report's findings that al-Qaida didn't turn to direct violence (as opposed to terrorist support) until Ayman al Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad merged with al-Qaida around the time of the Feb. 23, 1998, fatwa. Or the report's finding that Zawahiri "had ties of his own" to the Iraqi government, which we know from numerous sources go back at least to Zawahiri's trip to Baghdad in 1992. Or that intelligence sources consider it a "lock" that Iraq paid Zawahiri $300,000 around Feb. 3, 1998, just days before the merger with al-Qaida, while Zawahiri and bin Laden were negotiating the merger and language for the pro-Iraq, anti-American fatwa, a fact the report ignores.
Nor does the public know, because the report didn't bother to quote it, that the main justification in this fatwa for killing all Americans was the United States' treatment of Iraq. Nor does the report mention that the fatwa followed by six days a bellicose anti-Iraq speech by President Clinton on Feb. 17, 1998, after a yearlong war of words over Saddam's flouting of the U.N. inspection regimen.
Was it coincidental that al-Qaida's turn to direct violence occurred in February 1998, the fiery Clinton speech was given in February 1998, the al-Qaida merger with the violent Zawahiri was concluded in February 1998 and Iraq's payment to Zawahiri occurred in February 1998? A reasonable juror in the court of public opinion might not think so. But in any case, for a group that supposedly hated the secularist Iraq, al-Qaida had a funny way of showing it.
The report does not cite a widely reported, internal and highly confidential memorandum of the Iraq Intelligence Service, copies variously dated Feb. 19, 23 and 24, 1998, detailing a top-secret upcoming meeting with bin Laden. The report does affirm the subsequent meeting between al-Qaida and Iraq in Baghdad in March of 1998 (which took 16 days) but ignores the attendance of al-Qaida officials for several days in April 1998 at Saddam's 60th birthday celebration, where they were graciously hosted by both Uday and Qusay Hussein, and ignores Qusay's remaining as al-Qaida's reported contact thereafter.
The report tells us of the East African Embassy bombings by al-Qaida on Aug. 7, 1998, but does not tell the public that they occurred just two days after the requested lifting of the anti-Iraq U.N. sanctions, so despised by Saddam, was rejected by the United Nations or that the only Arabic medium to praise the attack was Iraq's Babel, run by Uday Hussein.
A close reading of the report does show that, by its response to the Aug. 7, 1998, embassy bombings, the Clinton administration showed its belief of an Iraq/al-Qaida connection at least in the development and promulgation of chemical weapons of mass destruction. Richard Clarke worried in writing that bombing al-Qaida in Afghanistan might cause bin Laden to "boogie to Baghdad."
When the dual bombings were unleashed, they hit not only the Afghan al-Qaida training camp but also a chemical plant at al Shifa, Sudan, owned by bin Laden, which six Clinton administration officials claimed was manufacturing lethal, Iraqi-style VX in cooperation with the Iraq government. Electronic surveillance apparently caught numerous conversations between the Sudanese managers and Saddam's top VX experts, according to a report by John McWethy of ABC News (although the suggestion has been made that another Sudanese plant owned by bin Laden was more directly involved in the manufacture, the bombing of which likely would have caused collateral damage.)
In keeping with its practice of treating these matters criminally, the Clinton administration, through one of its best prosecutors, indicted bin Laden, including the following language in the indictment: "[Al-Qaida] ... reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."
Interestingly, the report also paints a picture of Richard Clarke as firmly imbued with the belief that Iraq and al-Qaida had been cooperating for years on chemical weapons of mass destruction, by offering Clarke's reaction to the above language in the indictment: "This passage led Clarke, who for years had read intelligence reports on Iraqi-Sudanese cooperation on chemical weapons, to speculate to Berger that a large Iraqi presence at chemical facilities in Khartoum was 'probably a direct result of the Iraq/al-Qaida agreement.' Clarke added that VX precursor traces found near al Shifa were the 'exact formula used by Iraq.'"
Clarke's staff, on Aug. 5, 1998, two days before the embassy bombings, had written that bid Laden "has invested in and almost certainly has access to VX produced at a plant in Sudan."
The report further explains that this deal had been "brokered" by the Sudanese strongman Turabi, whereby bin Laden would cease supporting anti-Saddam activities by Islamists in Kurdistan, in exchange for which bin Laden wanted "assistance in procuring weapons."
While the report claims no knowledge of whether Saddam fulfilled his end of the bargain, it states categorically that bin Laden "honored his pledge." And buried in a footnote, the report cites plentiful evidence that Saddam's bomb-making expert spent significant time in Sudan training al-Qaida, seemingly dismissing the evidence because the dates were "puzzling," in that the training allegedly occurred at or after the time that bin Laden left the Sudan, an understandable discrepancy in light of both the passage of time and bin Laden's peripatetic habits. In any case, there is plentiful evidence in the report that Saddam in fact made good on the deal to provide weapons and weapons training to al-Qaida, although the pieces of this evidence are scattered like so many needles in a densely footnoted 566-page haystack.
Moreover, after 9/11 a captured al-Qaida member described Iraqi weapons and poisons training, later recanting much, but the report doesn't tell us what or why, leaving us to discern which statements in fact were recanted and which were more likely true, as would be done when any criminal accomplice recants. How detailed and convincing were his original statements? The report leaves us in the dark.
While the report seems to downplay Saddam's willingness to deal with al-Qaida, pre-1998, it finds that, after mid-1998, following a period when bin Laden sent a number of feelers to Iraq offering cooperation, the "situation reversed," and Iraq "took the initiative" in the relationship; Iraqi officials took at least one trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden and the Taliban, and during 1999 meetings with bin Laden or aides, offered al-Qaida sanctuary.
Clearly, the relationship of the two parties was, as Commissioner John Lehman described it, one of "cooperation" that goes beyond mere "contacts." Even the report admits to "friendly contacts" based on "common themes" involving "hatred of the United States."
The bombings also reportedly encouraged Iraq's heightened involvement with al-Qaida, according to various intelligence reports, ignored by the report, resulting in numerous "contacts" between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaida in late 1998 and early 1999. On Jan. 11, 1999, Newsweek magazine, reporting on ties between Saddam and bin Laden, stated that an "Arab intelligence source who knows Saddam personally and stays in touch with his clandestine service" predicted that "very soon you will been seeing large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis."
According to the story, Saddam was outsourcing terrorism, using "false flags" so that he could maintain his deniability after an attack. Numerous sources, both from al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence, verified that it was Saddam's custom to increase support for a terrorist group such as the PLO once its lethality was demonstrated and that the Iraqi relationship with al-Qaida intensified after the successful embassy bombings.
In short, while the 9/11 Commission, striving for bipartisan consensus, avoids sensationalizing the Iraq/al-Qaida connection, its findings clearly outline a cooperative relationship centered around weapons that becomes more intense as the dispute between Saddam's Iraq and the United States becomes more bitter. Would Iraq ever directly cooperate with al-Qaida in an attack on the United States? While much has been made of the chasm between secularist Iraq and the Islamists, the report finds that, as to its local al-Qaida branch, Iraq "may have even helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy." If that is the case, why wouldn't Iraq cooperate with al-Qaida against its common enemy, the United States?
The evidence of Iraq participation in the 9/11 attack is admittedly far murkier than the clear evidence of weapons cooperation. We know, for example, that one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi working as a Kuala Lumpur airport greeter under the sponsorship of an employee of the Iraq Embassy there, attended the 9/11 planning meetings that occurred in Kuala Lumpur on Jan. 5-8, 2000, and that he was arrested on his way to Baghdad after the 9/11 attacks possessing contact information on both 9/11 plotters and 1993 World Trade Center bombing suspects.
We know as well that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a close associate of Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, the latter of whom the report found had never met bin Laden and was never a member of al-Qaida. The report describes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, like Youssef, as an "independent operative" who joined al-Qaida only after years of trying to persuade bin Laden to attack the United States. While the report dismisses the theory that Youssef was an Iraqi agent as being based on no "credible evidence," it fails to mention that both James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, and James Fox, former special agent in charge of the New York FBI, both believe Youssef to have been an Iraqi agent, which by association also would inculpate Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The Bush administration never based its invasion of Iraq on the premise that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attack. We just don't know, and we may never know. But the report clearly establishes, beyond any reasonable quibble, solid evidence that Iraq was cooperating with al-Qaida in weapons development, procurement and training. Shouldn't these findings at least bear on the debate over whether invading Iraq was a colossal error in judgment?
You would think so. But you also would think that our society's opinion leaders would read the text of the report and would not rely on a conclusion so carefully crafted by the staff of a commission publicly pledged to avoid controversy.
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the book, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.