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Official documentation of links between Hussein and Al Qaeda
Documentary proof of high-level official contacts between Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency and Al Qaeda has been found in Baghdad by The Telegraph. Here is an updated version of the story and here is another. In 1998 an envoy from Al Qaeda met in Baghdad for a week with Iraqi officials, discussing the possibility of an Iraq–Al Qaeda alliance against the United States and a visit by Osama bin Laden to Baghdad. The meeting took place one month after bin Laden had issued his fatwa against all Americans: “To kill Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim.” The discovery (probably the first of many to come) explodes the conventional wisdom that the secular Hussein regime would have had nothing to do with religious fanatics like bin Laden. It also provides further confirmation for Michael Ledeen’s controversial, often mocked, thesis that various Muslim regimes (whom he calls the Terror Masters) have been part of an ongoing mutual support network with non-state terrorist groups, even those with very different ideologies from their own. There is some lively discussion of the story at Lucianne.com. I particularly liked this comment:
Michael Savage is right. Liberalism is a mental illness. I doubt that any liberal, including Dan Rather, Brokaw, Jennings or CNN will spend much time reporting or listening to this. Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 27, 2003 02:06 AM | Send Comments
On Sunday Junkyardblog (Junkyardblog. blogspot.com) had an even weider take on this Saddam-al Qaeda link. Chris connects many of the dots among Clinton, the State Department, Sudan, Iraq and 9/11. It’s chilling. Posted by: Charles Rostkowski on April 29, 2003 8:44 AMAmazing. And yet, Neville Chamberlain arranged several meetings with Hitler, and Roosevelt and Churchill were on good terms with Stalin during World War Two. I suppose that means that Chamberlain was a fascist racist, and Roosevelt and Churchill supported state capitalism, dictatorship, and mass murder. It’s funny, I never really thought about it that way… Posted by: Owen on April 29, 2003 7:44 PMThanks to Owen for one of the most specious examples of moral equivalency ever posted at VFR. What possible connection is there between, on one hand, the discovery of a secret terrorist alliance between Hussein and bin Laden, and, on the other hand, Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler over the Sudetenland and Churchill’s public alliance with Stalian against Hitler? The burning issue in the present case has been WHETHER a tie between Hussein and bin Laden existed. Many people said a war on Iraq was only justified IF there had been cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda, while they quickly added that the very idea of such cooperation was absurd, because secular socialist Baathists would supposedly have nothing to do with Muslim fundamentalists. The new evidence both demonstrates the Iraq-Al Qaeda cooperation and lends support to the larger thesis of a network joining Muslim states with non-state terrorist groups. It thus strengthens the idea that if we are to defeat the Muslim terrorist groups, we must also change the behavior—or the regimes—of those terror-supporting states. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on April 30, 2003 9:06 AMIsn’t it a bit strange that reporters from a British newspaper should have free run of the Iraqi intelligence HQ? Where are our intelligence people? Where they in the building before the Telegraph’s reporters? If so, why didn’t they discover these files? Posted by: Mitchell Young on April 30, 2003 10:10 AMMr. Young, My thoughts exactly. Even the most committed to the idea that Hussien and al-Qaeda are tied together, must admit the story is at least problematic. The Toronto Star, which simultaneously ran the same story as the Telegraph, rather explicitly stated that CIA operatives had already searched the alleged place of the find. Presumably this is the sort of thing the CIA would find most interesting. How did they miss it? Is the CIA staffed with clowns and ingnoramuses? The story as presented flies in the face of common sense. “How did they miss it?” I can easily see missing one document (in the sense of not having found it yet) in an entire intelligence compound. The odd thing isn’t so much that the CIA didn’t find it yet as that reporters did. No doubt there are too many places in a country the size of Iraq to guard everything that might be of intelligence value from reporters; but the actual headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service? It is an odd story. Again, I recommend Junkyardblog and an article from Mansoor Ijaz in National Review Online both of whom put the discovery of this intelligence in context. We are only beginning to unravel the ball of “spaghetti strings” that tied al Qaeda and the Baathists together. Posted by: Charles Rostkowski on May 1, 2003 9:59 AM |