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Bill Clinton Was Right...
From the July 5 / July 12, 2004 issue: There was a Saddam-Osama
connection and we're learning more every day.
by Stephen F. Hayes
07/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 41
Nearly two years ago, in the introduction to an hour-long PBS
documentary called Saddam's Ultimate Solution, former Clinton State
Department spokesman James P. Rubin said:
"Tonight, we examine the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Ten years after the Gulf Bill Clinton Was Right
From the July 5 / July 12, 2004 issue: There was a Saddam-Osama
connection and we're learning more every day.
by Stephen F. Hayes
07/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 41
War and Saddam is still there and still continues to stockpile weapons
of mass destruction. Now there are suggestions he is working with al
Qaeda, which means the very terrorists who attacked the United States
last September may now have access to chemical and biological weapons."
The documentary, broadcast on July 11, 2002, laid out in exhaustive
detail alleged Iraqi connections with al Qaeda. Rubin noted in his
introduction that the report contained "disturbing allegations, some of
which are hard to prove." But, he added, such allegations "are important
enough to be fully explored and investigated."
Last week, appearing on a cable talk show as a senior adviser to the
presidential campaign of John Kerry, Rubin sharply criticized the public
official who has most forcefully asserted that these allegations need to
be fully explored and investigated. Rubin went so far as to question
Vice President Dick Cheney's "fitness for office." Rubin, asked about
the documentary, then distanced himself from the film. "Was I the
producer of the documentary?" he asked. "I was the host,
producing--having a discussion about the documentary."
Fair enough. Rubin is right that as host he is not necessarily
responsible for everything in the hour-long program. Among the claims
made by investigative filmmaker Gwynne Roberts was this one:
"My investigation reveals much more--namely evidence of terrorist
training camps in Iraq and testimony that al Qaeda fighters have been
trained to use poison gas." But on the PBS program, Rubin spoke in a
manner that suggested he did, in fact, believe the evidence presented by
Roberts, pressing one interview subject about the possibility of
Saddam's passing weapons of mass destruction to "the al Qaeda people in
the film he's already trained."
Meanwhile the men at the top of the administration Rubin worked
for--Bill Clinton and Al Gore--have come down with an even more striking
case of political amnesia.
On June 24, Katie Couric interviewed President Clinton on NBC's Today
Show. She asked, "What do you think about this connection that Cheney,
that Vice President Cheney continues to assert between Saddam Hussein
and al Qaeda?" Clinton pleaded total ignorance. "All I can tell you is I
never saw it, I never believed it based on the evidence I had."
The same day, former Vice President Al Gore went much further in a
vitriolic speech at Georgetown University law school. "President Bush is
now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to
aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein. If he is not lying, if he genuinely believes that, that makes
them unfit in battle against al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy
scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or
too gullible? Take your pick."
Gore also distorted the significance of the recent 9/11 Commission Staff
Statement. He called the statement an "extensive independent
investigation by the bipartisan" 9/11 Commission that found "there was
no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind." In
fact, three 9/11 Commission sources tell The Weekly Standard that the
one paragraph of the staff statement about the relationship was not
intended to be a definitive pronouncement on the issue. In any case, "no
meaningful relationship" was never the view of the Clinton/Gore
administration.
On February 17, 1998, President Clinton, speaking at the Pentagon,
warned of the "reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of
terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals."
These "predators of the twenty-first century," he said, these enemies of
America, "will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals
of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver
them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear
example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
Later that spring, the Clinton Justice Department prepared an indictment
of Osama bin Laden. The relevant passage, prominently placed in the
fourth paragraph, reads:
Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al
Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular
projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would
work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.
Patrick Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney involved in the preparation of the
indictment, testified before the 9/11 Commission. He said the
intelligence behind that assertion came from Jamal al Fadl, a former
high-ranking al Qaeda terrorist who before the 9/11 attacks gave the U.S
intelligence community its first intimate look at al Qaeda. According to
Fitzgerald, al Fadl told his interrogators that bin Laden associate
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim (Abu Hajer al Iraqi) "tried to reach a sort of
agreement where they wouldn't work against each other--sort of the enemy
of my enemy is my friend--and that there were indications that within
Sudan when al Qaeda was there,
which al Qaeda left in the summer of '96, or the spring of '96, there
were efforts to work on jointly acquiring weapons."
Several months later, after al Qaeda bombed two American embassies in
East Africa, numerous Clinton officials cited an Iraq-al Qaeda
connection as the basis for retaliatory U.S. strikes against the al
Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
On August 24, 1998, the Clinton administration made available a "senior
intelligence official" who cited "strong ties between the plant and
Iraq." The following day, Thomas Pickering, undersecretary of state for
political affairs and one of a handful of Clinton officials involved in
the decision to strike al Shifa, briefed foreign reporters at the
National Press Club. He was asked directly whether he knew "of any
connection between the so-called pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum and
the Iraqi government in regard to production of precursors of VX" nerve
gas.
Yeah, I would like to consult my notes just to be sure that what I have
to say is stated clearly and correctly. We see evidence that we think is
quite clear on contacts between Sudan and Iraq. In fact, al Shifa
officials, early in the company's history, we believe were in touch with
Iraqi individuals associated with Iraq's VX program.
Five days after that, U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson appeared on CNN
and pointed to "direct evidence of ties between Osama bin Laden" and
Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation. "You combine that with Sudan
support for terrorism, their connections with Iraq on VX, and you
combine that, also, with the chemical precursor issue, and Sudan's
leadership support for Osama bin Laden, and you've got a pretty
clear-cut case."
Sandy Berger, then Clinton's national security adviser and now a top
adviser to the Kerry campaign, made the connection in an October 16,
1998, op-ed in the Washington Times. "To not have acted against this
facility would have been the height of irresponsibility," he argued. The
Clinton administration had "information linking bin Laden to the
Sudanese regime and to the al Shifa plant."
Berger explained that al Shifa was a dual-use facility. "We had physical
evidence indicating that al Shifa was the site of chemical weapons
activity," Berger wrote. "Other products were made at al Shifa. But we
have seen such dual-use plants before--in Iraq. And, indeed, we have
information that Iraq has assisted chemical weapons activity in Sudan."
Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism official under both Clinton
and Bush, confirmed this in an interview with the Washington Post on
January 23, 1999. Clarke said the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq was
behind the VX precursor produced at the factory. The story continued,
"Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance
was produced at al Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that
intelligence exists linking bin Laden to al Shifa's current and past
operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts, and the National Islamic Front
in Sudan."
More recently, former Clinton defense secretary William Cohen affirmed
the Baghdad-Khartoum connection in testimony before the September 11
Commission on March 23, 2004. Cohen told the panel that an executive
from al Shifa had "traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX
program."
Many of these same officials now disclaim any knowledge of an Iraq-al
Qaeda relationship. Daniel Benjamin, a top counterterrorism official on
Clinton's National Security Council, makes the strongest case that
intelligence cited by Clinton officials did not amount to a direct
Iraq-al Qaeda connection. Benjamin has pointed out that it is unclear
that the Iraqis knew the chemical weapons technology they provided to
the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation would end up in the hands
of al Qaeda or that al Qaeda knew that the assistance it was receiving
came from Iraq.
But now the New York Times--a newspaper heretofore dismissive of the
Iraq-al Qaeda connection--has revealed the contents of an Iraqi
Intelligence document that discusses the Iraq-bin Laden "relationship"
and plans for bin Laden to work with Iraq against the ruling family in
Saudi Arabia. The document states that "cooperation between the two
organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and
agreement." The Iraqi document, which refers to the period of the first
Clinton term, has been "authenticated by the U.S. government," according
to the front-page story in Friday's Times.
Taken together with other evidence of the close relationship between al
Qaeda and the Sudanese government, the information in the Times article
makes it less likely that Iraq and al Qaeda were unwitting allies. The
Times reported that a representative of the Sudanese government
approached the Iraqis at bin Laden's behest: "The Iraqis were cued to
make their approach to Mr. bin Laden after a Sudanese official visited
Uday Hussein, the leader's son, as well as the director of Iraqi
Intelligence, and indicated that Mr. bin Laden was willing to meet in
Sudan."
Virtually no one disputes the significant overlap between the government
in Sudan and al Qaeda. As President Clinton said last week, in an
interview on CBS: "Mr. [Hassan] al Turabi, the head of the Sudanese
government, was a buddy of bin Laden's. They were business partners
together."
According to al Fadl, the close associate of bin Laden who has
cooperated with the U.S. government since 1996, bin Laden himself said
his businesses were run in support of the government in Sudan. Al Fadl,
testifying at the trial of al Qaeda terrorists who plotted the 1998
embassy bombings, recalled in broken English a 1992 conversation he had
with bin Laden. "He say our agenda is bigger than business. We not going
to make business here, but we need to help the government and the
government help our group, and this is our purpose."
Al Fadl and other high-level al Qaeda detainees have described the
group's relationship with Sudan in detail. The relationship included: al
Qaeda terrorists assigned by the Sudanese government to assassinate
political opponents; al Qaeda's providing communications equipment and
arms--"Kaleshnikovs"--on behalf of Defaa al Shabi, a division of the
Sudanese Army fighting Christians in southern Sudan; training
exchanges--going both ways--between Sudanese intelligence and bin
Laden's group; and Sudanese intelligence providing perimeter security
for al Qaeda training facilities and safehouses.
Concerns that Iraq would work with al Qaeda against the Saudis did not
end when bin Laden left Sudan in 1996. According to a CIA report
summarized in a top-secret memo sent from the Pentagon to the Senate
Intelligence Committee in the fall of 2003: "The Saudi Arabian National
Guard went on a kingdom-wide heightened state of alert in late Dec 2000
after learning that Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S.
and U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia."
So the Clinton administration, based on the evidence it had, was right
to express concerns about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. We now know more.
And given the vast number of documents from the former Iraqi regime that
sit untranslated, we are certain to learn more still. It's an odd time
for the former president and his old advisers to be backing away from
what they once so confidently told us.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. Parts of this
article are drawn from his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda's
Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America
(HarperCollins).
Source:
www.netforcuba.org
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