The Iraqi Connection to Terrorism

[Ryan Ruck]

Thread for the discussion of Iraq's ties to terrorism.

Original threads found here:

• Iraq-Al Qaeda connection
• The Saddam Connection to Terror and 9/11

[Ryan Ruck]

The Mother Of All Connections

From the July 18, 2005 Weekly Standard issue: A special report on the new evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.

by Stephen F. Hayes & Thomas Joscelyn
07/18/2005, Volume 010, Issue 41

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."

U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

FOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States" and ran blaring headlines like the one on the June 17, 2004, front page of the New York Times:"Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie."

But this was woefully imprecise. It assumed, not unreasonably, that the 9/11 Commission's conclusion was based on a firm foundation of intelligence reporting, that the intelligence community had the type of human intelligence and other reporting that would allow senior-level analysts to draw reasonable conclusions. We know now that was not the case.

John Lehman, a 9/11 commissioner, spoke to The Weekly Standard at the time the report was released. "There may well be--and probably will be--additional intelligence coming in from interrogations and from analysis of captured records and so forth which will fill out the intelligence picture. This is not phrased as--nor meant to be--the definitive word on Iraqi Intelligence activities."

Lehman's caution was prescient. A year later, we still cannot begin to offer a "definitive" picture of the relationships entered into by Saddam Hussein's operatives, but much more has already been learned from documents uncovered after the Iraq war. The evidence we present below, compiled from revelations in recent months, suggests an acute case of denial on the part of those who dismiss the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.

There could hardly be a clearer case--of the ongoing revelations and the ongoing denial--than in the 13 points below, reproduced verbatim from a "Summary of Evidence" prepared by the U.S. government in November 2004. This unclassified document was released by the Pentagon in late March 2005. It details the case for designating an Iraqi member of al Qaeda, currently detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an "enemy combatant."

1. From 1987 to 1989, the detainee served as an infantryman in the Iraqi Army and received training on the mortar and rocket propelled grenades.
2. A Taliban recruiter in Baghdad convinced the detainee to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban in 1994.
3. The detainee admitted he was a member of the Taliban.
4. The detainee pledged allegiance to the supreme leader of the Taliban to help them take over all of Afghanistan.
5. The Taliban issued the detainee a Kalishnikov rifle in November 2000.
6. The detainee worked in a Taliban ammo and arms storage arsenal in Mazar-Es-Sharif organizing weapons and ammunition.
7. The detainee willingly associated with al Qaida members.
8. The detainee was a member of al Qaida.
9. An assistant to Usama Bin Ladin paid the detainee on three separate occasions between 1995 and 1997.
10. The detainee stayed at the al Farouq camp in Darwanta, Afghanistan, where he received 1,000 Rupees to continue his travels.
11. From 1997 to 1998, the detainee acted as a trusted agent for Usama Bin Ladin, executing three separate reconnaissance missions for the al Qaeda leader in Oman, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
12. In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars.
13. Detainee was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Khudzar, Pakistan, in July 2002.

Interesting. What's more interesting: The alleged plot was to have taken place in August 1998, the same month that al Qaeda attacked two U.S. embassies in East Africa. And more interesting still: It was to have taken place in the same month that the Clinton administration publicly accused Iraq of supplying al Qaeda with chemical weapons expertise and material.

But none of this was interesting enough for any of the major television networks to cover it. Nor was it deemed sufficiently newsworthy to merit a mention in either the Washington Post or the New York Times.

The Associated Press, on the other hand, probably felt obliged to run a story, since the "Summary of Evidence" was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP itself. But after briefly describing the documents, the AP article downplayed its own scoop with a sentence almost as amusing as it is inane: "There is no indication the Iraqi's alleged terror-related activities were on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government, other than the brief mention of him traveling to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi intelligence." That sentence minimizing the importance of the findings was enough, apparently, to convince most newspaper editors around the country not to run the AP story.

It's possible, of course, that the evidence presented by military prosecutors is exaggerated, maybe even wrong. The evidence required to designate a detainee an "enemy combatant" is lower than the "reasonable doubt" standard of U.S. criminal prosecutions. So there is much we don't know.

Indeed, more than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.

We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

All of this is new--information obtained since the fall of the Hussein regime. And yet critics of the Iraq war and many in the media refuse to see it. Just two weeks ago, President Bush gave a prime-time speech on Iraq. Among his key points: Iraq is a central front in the global war on terror that began on September 11. Bush spoke in very general terms. He did not mention any of this new information on Iraqi support for terrorism to make his case. That didn't matter to many journalists and critics of the war.

CNN anchor Carol Costello claimed "there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al Qaeda." The charitable explanation is ignorance. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knows better. Before the war he pointed to Zarqawi's presence in Iraq as a "substantial connection between Iraq and al Qaeda." And yet he, too, now insists that Saddam Hussein's regime "had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, it had nothing to do with al Qaeda."

Such comments reveal far more about politics in America than they do about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.

* * *

"Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al Qaeda."

Senate Intelligence Committee report, July 7, 2004

UNTIL SHORTLY BEFORE THE IRAQ WAR, the consensus view within the U.S. intelligence community was simple: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were natural enemies who, despite their common interests, would not work together. Daniel Benjamin, a senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration, summarized this view in a New York Times op-ed on September 30, 2002. He wrote: "Saddam Hussein has long recognized that al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime. Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them against their common enemy, the United States. This was the understanding of American intelligence in the 1990s."

Benjamin later elaborated in an interview with Mother Jones. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link [between] al Qaeda and Iraq. We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact."

Judith Yaphe, a longtime CIA analyst on the Middle East and Iraq, was only slightly less categorical in testimony before the House Armed Service Committee on April 21, 2004. "I know that there's a small number of people who say that Saddam was working cooperatively with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. I do not believe that. I know the intelligence is not there."

Yaphe was right about one thing: The intelligence was not there. The CIA's collection against the Iraqi target was abysmal. According to former CIA director George Tenet, the U.S. intelligence community never penetrated the senior ranks of the former Iraqi regime. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post explored this subject in his book on the Iraq war, Plan of Attack. Woodward interviewed "Saul," the chief of the Iraqi Operations Group, at the CIA.

Saul was discovering that the CIA reporting sources inside Iraq were pretty thin. What was thin? "I can count them on one hand," Saul said, pausing for effect, "and I can still pick my nose." There were four. And those sources were in Iraqi ministries such as foreign affairs and oil that were on the periphery of any penetration of Saddam's inner circle.

Woodward reports that the Iraqi Operations Group was known inside the CIA's Near East Division as "The House of Broken Toys." "It was largely populated with new, green [Directorate of Operations] officers and problem officers, or old boys waiting for retirement. . . . Past operations read almost like a handbook for failed and stupid covert action. It was a catalogue of doomed work--too little, too late, too seat-of-the-pants, too little planning, too little realism. The comic mixed with the frightening."

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee did not find it so amusing. The committee's bipartisan report was released last summer. Most of the attention at the time focused on the report's assessment of flaws in intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The lengthy section on "Iraq's Links to Terrorism" received considerably less attention. What emerges in the 66 pages of the report is a picture of an intelligence community with a woefully inadequate collection capability on the Iraqi target. In some ways more disturbing, though, was the lack of interest. In a stunning moment of candor, an "IC analyst" provided this characterization of the collection effort on Iraq: "I don't think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that."

So on the one hand we know that there was virtually no human intelligence on Iraq and terrorism. Yet the intelligence community, if this analyst is to be believed, was so confident in its assessment that Iraqi Intelligence was not in the terrorism business that collecting on that target was tantamount to cramming for a test.

The Senate report's conclusions were devastating:

Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al Qaeda. . . . The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not have a focused human intelligence (HUMINT) collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no [redacted] sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism.

It was not just reporting on Iraq that was inadequate. "The CIA had no [redacted] credible reporting on the leadership of either the Iraqi regime or al Qaeda, which would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship, if any did in fact exist."

This left policymakers in a bind. There was reporting on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, but much of it was secondhand. This reporting was supplemented by widespread coverage of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in "open sources," including the amnesiac American press. And contrary to the assessments coming from many analysts in the intelligence community, much of this reporting seemed to indicate a significant relationship.

The difference between most intelligence community analysts and Bush administration policymakers can be found in how they interpret the gaps. The analysts seemed to assume, despite the history of poor collection, that the many Iraq-al Qaeda contacts reported in intelligence products and open sources were anomalous. To them, the gaps in reporting simply reflected a lack of activity. Policymakers (and a small number of analysts) took a different view. The gaps in reporting on Iraq and al Qaeda were just that: gaps in reporting. To this group, the many reports of contacts, training, and offers of safe haven were indicative of a relationship that ran much deeper.

After September 11, the mere existence of a long relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda had to be considered an urgent threat.

* * *

"Attack them our beloved people. You are the glory of our nation. Attack them. . . . The Mother of all Battles is not the past."

Saddam Hussein, January 17, 1993

THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY was apparently not much concerned by Iraqi support for terrorism in the 13 years between the Gulf war and the Iraq war. To students of Iraq-U.S. relations that might seem bizarre. Saddam Hussein had used such asymmetric warfare for decades, against enemies foreign and domestic, real and imagined. What's more, he had demonstrated his willingness to use terrorism and terrorist surrogates against his enemies when confronted by superior conventional military forces during the Gulf war. By some accounts, more than 1,400 terrorists made their way to Baghdad in the final months of 1990 as he prepared to face the coalition assembled by the United States to oust him from Kuwait. He dispatched others to attack U.S. interests around the world. On January 18, 1991, one day after the Gulf war began, an Iraqi terrorist posing as a day laborer managed to plant 26 sticks of TNT in a flower box below a window of the U.S. ambassador's residence in Jakarta, Indonesia. The dynamite wasn't completely buried, and a gardener found it before the bomb exploded. The following day in the Philippines, two Iraqis blew themselves up in a plot known to CIA veterans as Operation Dogmeat, a botched attempt to bomb the U.S. Information Service headquarters at the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center in Manila. The failed attack on the U.S. government-run center received the active support of the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines.

Saddam Hussein openly encouraged these attacks. "It remains for us to tell all Arabs, all militant believers . . . wherever they may be that it is your duty to embark on holy war. You should target their interests wherever they may be," he said on January 20, 1991.

Iraq's use of terrorism was so widespread, in fact, that it became an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign, when Al Gore accused the first Bush administration of a "blatant disregard for brutal terrorism" practiced by Hussein and ignoring Iraq's "extensive terrorism activities."

Many Islamic radicals voiced opposition to Saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait. Sudan's Hasan al-Turabi was not one of them. Turabi's willingness to back Hussein gave the Iraqi dictator the Islamist street credibility he would exploit for years to come. In the debate over the former Iraqi regime's relationship with al Qaeda, it is often said that Saddam's secular Baathist regime could never work with Osama bin Laden's radical Islamist organization. It is a curious argument since Turabi, one of Saddam's staunchest allies, also happened to be one of the most influential Islamists of the past two decades. One of the principal architects of Sudan's Islamist revolution in 1989, Turabi was also the longtime mentor, friend, and host of Osama bin Laden during his stay in Sudan from 1992 until 1996.

Immediately after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden approached the Saudi regime and offered to lead Muslim forces in driving Saddam out of Kuwait. Many who downplay the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda point to this as an example of the hostility between Hussein and bin Laden. But Osama's spurned offer is only part of the story. While bin Laden's first instinct may have been to oppose the secular tyrant, his soon-to-be host in Sudan did not share these sentiments. According to an interview at the time with Turabi's cousin, Mudawi Turabi, the Sudanese leader met twice with Saddam Hussein before the Gulf war and "had appeared to be designing his own Islamic empire even then."

In October 1990, Turabi led a delegation of Islamists to Jordan to meet with Iraqi government officials. Bin Laden sent emissaries to this meeting as well. While it is not clear what bin Laden's emissaries or bin Laden himself thought of the meeting, it is clear that Turabi threw his full support behind Saddam. In a press conference after the meeting, Turabi warned "there is going to be all forms of jihad all over the world because it is an issue of foreign troops on sacred soil."

Turabi continued in his self-designated role as pan-Islamic leader by convening terrorist confabs in Khartoum known euphemistically as the Popular Arab Islamic Conference. Encouraged by Turabi, Saddam began hosting his own Popular Islamic Conference in Baghdad. The conferences shared a central purpose: to bring together Islamic and secular radicals from around the world to oppose U.S. involvement in the Gulf war and the continued presence of American troops on Saudi soil.

The Baghdad conferences, which were held annually until the regime fell, were filled with the rhetoric of jihad. A statement issued at the closing ceremony of the 1992 conference was a call to arms. The 500 Islamists in attendance affirmed "that maintaining and defending the unity of Iraq's land, people and sovereignty is an Islamic duty that must be performed because Iraq is the fortress of Islamic jihad targeted by the atheist forces." The statement called on Islamic groups "to meet and discuss the establishment [of] a free world front to confront the U.S. hegemony and its new world order."

Newsweek reporter Christopher Dickey attended a Popular Islamic Conference at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel and later recalled: "If that was not a fledgling al Qaeda at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it."

We do not yet know how many future al Qaeda leaders attended the conferences. (We do know that the conferences were carried on Iraqi state-run television and that the attendees signed the closing statements. A comparison of those lists with known al Qaeda terrorists would be an interesting and potentially productive undertaking, as would a careful review of any photographic evidence from the session.) By this time, however, it appears that Hussein had already forged relationships with the two men who would later lead al Qaeda.

An internal Iraqi Intelligence memo dated March 28, 1992, lists individuals Hussein's regime considered assets of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Osama bin Laden is listed on page 14. The Iraqis describe him as a Saudi businessman who "is in good relationship with our section in Syria."

At the same time, the Iraqis were cultivating a relationship with Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the current top deputy to bin Laden. According to Qassem Hussein Mohammed, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi Intelligence, Zawahiri visited Baghdad in 1992 for a meeting with Hussein. In a 2002 interview with the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg from a Kurdish prison in northeastern Iraq, the IIS veteran described his duties as a bodyguard for Zawahiri during his visit. This was not Zawahiri's only meeting with top Iraqi officials. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi Intelligence official, Zawahiri met with Iraqi Intelligence officials in Sudan several times from 1992 to 1995. A foreign intelligence service has corroborated that report, adding that at one of those meetings Zawahiri received blank Yemeni passports from an Iraqi Intelligence official.

In 1993, at Turabi's urging, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam Hussein that the al Qaeda leader and his followers would not engage in any anti-Hussein activities. The Clinton administration later included this development in its sealed indictment of bin Laden in 1998. According to the indictment: "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."

* * *

"Abdul Rahman Yasin, a fugitive of the [1993 World Trade Center] attack, is of Iraqi descent, and in 1993, he fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance."

Senate Intelligence Committee report

ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, a powerful bomb exploded in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. The attack killed six and injured more than 1,000. It could have been much worse. The bombers hoped to topple one tower into the other. The men responsible for the attack aimed to kill tens of thousands of Americans.

One of those men was Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who had come to the United States six months before the attack. In the days after the attack, Yasin was detained twice by the FBI. Although he admitted his role in the bombing and offered investigators details of the plot, he was inexplicably released. Twice. The second time the FBI even drove him home. According to the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, Yasin promptly "fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance." His travel was arranged by the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan. In 1994, a reporter for ABC News went to the home of Yasin's father in Baghdad and spoke with neighbors who reported that Yasin was free to come and go as he pleased and was "working for the government."

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the Iraqi regime denied any relationship with Yasin and any knowledge of his whereabouts. In an interview with PBS's Frontline that aired on October 29, 2001, Iraq's U.N. ambassador denied that Yasin was even in Iraq. "To my knowledge he is not, and there is not any relation with him." Pressed, the Iraqi diplomat went further. "Absolutely. I know that there is no relation with that guy. . . . We have no relations with these kind of guys, with all persons who are involved in terrorism."

Eight months later, on June 2, 2002, the Iraqi government abruptly changed its story. Tariq Aziz, for years the face of the Iraqi regime in the Western media, appeared on 60 Minutes and assured Lesley Stahl that Yasin had been imprisoned since his return to Iraq. Aziz claimed that the Iraqi regime held Yasin prisoner because they worried that the United States would blame Iraq for the attack if he was returned to America to face trial. Yasin himself appeared. He admitted to mixing the chemicals for the bomb. He showed viewers a scar on his leg that he claimed to have gotten preparing chemicals for the attack. He even apologized. Stahl did not ask about the Frontline interview or previous media reports that Yasin was living freely in Baghdad.

We now know more about Yasin's stay in Baghdad. "We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in '93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of '93," Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert in a September 14, 2003, appearance on Meet the Press. "And we've learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven. Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in '93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact."

Those documents are now in possession of the FBI. Despite requests for declassification of the documents from both Cheney's office and the Pentagon, the FBI refuses to release them. In March, The Weekly Standardrequested an interview with FBI officials to discuss the Iraqi intelligence documents and the status of the Yasin case. The request was denied last week. An FBI spokeswoman said FBI officials refuse to discuss Yasin. Yasin remains on the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" list and is believed to be still in Iraq. If there is a good reason to keep these historical documents classified, the FBI declined to provide it.

Just two months after the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the Iraqi Intelligence Service attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. The IIS recruited a male nurse from Najaf as a suicide bomber to kill the former president on a trip to Kuwait. The plot was foiled when Kuwaiti police, thinking they had broken up a smuggling ring, learned of the Iraqi plans. The Clinton administration responded by bombing an empty Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters at night.

* * *

"Cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

Internal Iraqi Intelligence memo on Iraq-al Qaeda cooperation, June 25, 2004, New York Times

THE RELATIONSHIP CONTINUED with high-level meetings throughout 1994 and 1995. The 9/11 Commission staff report that made headlines last year by declaring that such meetings between Iraq and al Qaeda "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship" also reported that the Sudanese government arranged for "contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda." The staff report continued: "A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

That senior Iraqi intelligence officer was Faruq Hijazi, former deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence and longtime regime liaison to al Qaeda. According to several Bush administration officials with access to his debriefings, as well as a top secret Pentagon summary of intelligence on Iraq and al Qaeda known as the Feith Memo, Hijazi described a face-to-face meeting with bin Laden that took place in 1994. The language in the Feith Memo corresponds closely to that in the 9/11 Commission staff report. "During a May 2003 custodial interview with Faruq Hijazi, he said in a 1994 meeting with bin Laden in the Sudan, bin Laden requested that Iraq assist al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured antiship limpet mines. Bin Laden thought that Iraq should be able to procure the mines through third-country intermediaries for ultimate delivery to al Qaeda. Hijazi said he was under orders from Saddam only to listen to bin Laden's requests and then report back to him. Bin Laden also requested the establishment of al Qaeda training camps inside Iraq."

An internal Iraqi Intelligence document obtained by the New York Times provides a window into the state of the relationship during the mid-1990s. A team of Pentagon analysts concluded that the document "appears authentic." The memo reports that a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in 1994 and reported that Bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan. As a consequence, according to the Iraqi document, bin Laden was "approached by our side" after "presidential approval" for the liaison was given. The former head of Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with bin Laden on February 19, 1995. The document further states that bin Laden "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative."

But the absence of a formal relationship hardly precludes cooperation, as the document makes clear. Bin Laden requested that Iraq's state-run television network broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda; the document indicates that the Iraqis agreed to do this. The al Qaeda leader also proposed "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. There is no response provided in the documents. When bin Laden leaves Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, the Iraqis seek "other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location." The IIS memo directs that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

There are other reports of varying reliability of Iraqi support for al Qaeda during the mid-1990s. One senior al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody since 1995, Wali Khan Amin Shah, told FBI interrogators that an al Qaeda leader named Abu Hajer al Iraqi maintained a good relationship with Iraqi Intelligence. Abu Hajer al Iraqi ran al Qaeda's WMD procurement operation until his capture in 1998 and was described by another al Qaeda member as Osama bin Laden's "best friend." According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Wali Khan testified that he had knowledge of two "direct meetings" between the leadership of Iraqi Intelligence and Abu Hajer al Iraqi.

According to the presentation at the United Nations Security Council by Colin Powell on February 5, 2003, an al Qaeda member named Abu Abdullah al Iraqi received training in chemical and biological weapons in Iraq beginning in 1997. The information comes from another high-ranking al Qaeda detainee named Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, who ran bin Laden's notorious Khalden Camp outside of Kandahar. Said Powell: "The support that [al-Libi] describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates, beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdullah al-Iraqi characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as 'successful.'" Al-Libi's reporting also formed the basis of several statements from CIA Director George Tenet.

Al-Libi has since recanted some of the information he provided. The debate about whether to give more credence to his original statement or his retraction continues. But the Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that the terrorism section of Powell's speech "was carefully vetted by both terrorism and regional analysts" and that it did not differ "in any significant way" from earlier published CIA assessments.

* * *

"To gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden, the Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him."

Internal Iraqi Intelligence memo describing the goal of meetings with an al Qaeda envoy, February 19, 1998

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda intensified in 1998. The Iraqis were growing more obdurate in their confrontation with the U.N. weapons inspectors, at times simply refusing to grant access to suspected weapons sites. The United States was losing patience--both with Iraq and with U.N. fecklessness. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, had found a home in Afghanistan and was turning out terrorists from its camps by the thousands.

On February 3, 1998, Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, came to Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi leaders. The visit came as Islamic radicals gathered once again in the Iraqi capital for another installation of Hussein's Popular Islamic Conferences. Iraqi vice president Taha Yasin Ramadan welcomed them on February 9 with the language of jihad:

The Islamic nation's ulema, advocates and preachers, are called upon to carry out a jihad that God wants them to carry out through honest words in order to expose the U.S. and Zionist regimes to the world peoples, to explain facts, and to say what is right and to call for it. This is their religious duty. The Muslim ulema are called upon before Almighty God to act among the Muslim ranks to confront the infidel U.S. moves and to raise their voices against the U.S.-Zionist evil.

We do not have reporting on when, exactly, Zawahiri left Baghdad. But we do know from an interrogation of a senior Iraqi Intelligence official that he did not leave empty-handed. As first reported in U.S. News & World Report, the Iraqi regime gave Zawahiri $300,000 during or shortly after his trip to Baghdad.

On February 17, 1998, Bill Clinton traveled the short distance from the White House to the Pentagon to prepare the nation for a confrontation with Iraq. The symbolism was obvious, the rhetoric belligerent. Clinton explained why "meeting the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is important to our security in the new era we are entering." He warned about the threats from the "predators of the 21st century," rogue states working with terrorist groups. "There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq." War seemed imminent.

Two days later, on February 19, the Iraqi Intelligence Service finalized plans to bring a "trusted confidant" of bin Laden's to Baghdad in early March. The revelation came in documents discovered after the Iraq war by journalists Mitch Potter of the Toronto Star and Inigo Gilmore of the Sunday Telegraph. The U.S. intelligence community is now in possession of these documents and has assessed that they are authentic. The documents--a series of communiqués between Iraqi Intelligence divisions--provide another window into the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. The following comes from the Telegraph'stranslations of the documents.

The envoy is a trusted confidant and known by them. According to the above mediation we request official permission to call Khartoum station to facilitate the travel arrangements for the above-mentioned person to Iraq. And that our body carry all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden, the Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.

A note at the bottom of the page from the director of one IIS division recommends approving the request, noting, "we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

Four days later, on February 23, final approval is granted. "The permission of Mr. Deputy Director of Intelligence has been gained on 21 February for this operation, to secure a reservation for one of the intelligence services guests for one week in one of the first class hotels," the Al Mansour Melia hotel in Baghdad.

That same day, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, joined by leaders of four additional Islamic terrorist groups, announced the formation of the World Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, soon to become better known as al Qaeda. The grievances in the fatwa focused on Iraq. The terrorist leaders decried the presence of U.S. troops on the Arabian Peninsula. They protested the "great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance." They cited American support for Israel and surmised that the United States sought to distract world attention from the killing of Muslims in Jerusalem. To support this claim, the fatwa turned once again to Iraq: "The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state."

The fatwa declared: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

The al Qaeda envoy to Iraq arrived in Baghdad on March 5, 1998. Notes in the margins of the Iraqi Intelligence memos indicate that Mohammed F. Mohammed stayed for more than two weeks in Room 414 of the Al Mansour Melia Hotel as the guest of Iraqi Intelligence. After extending his trip by one week, bin Laden's emissary departed on March 16.

Adding to the intrigue, the 9/11 Commission reported that "in March 1998, after bin Laden's public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence." Were there two separate al Qaeda trips to Iraq in March 1998? It's possible that the IIS documents and the 9/11 Commission report refer to the same meeting. But the Iraqi Intelligence documents refer to one al Qaeda envoy, the 9/11 Commission report mentions two--raising the possibility that two separate meetings took place.

* * *

"The consistent stream of intelligence at that time said it wasn't just al Shifa. There were three different [chemical weapons] structures in the Sudan. There was the hiring of Iraqis. There was no question that the Iraqis were there."

Interview with John Gannon, former chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, October 25, 2004

OPEN SOURCE REPORTING suggests the relationship continued throughout the spring and summer of 1998. William Safire of the New York Times and Yossef Bodansky, former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, have both reported the presence of an al Qaeda delegation at a birthday celebration for Saddam Hussein in April 1998. In a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22, 1998, President Clinton warned that our enemies "may deploy compact and relatively cheap weapons of mass destruction--not just nuclear, but also chemical or biological, to use disease as a weapon of war. Sometimes the terrorists and criminals act alone. But increasingly, they are interconnected, and sometimes supported by hostile countries." Hostile countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

Although Osama bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, many al Qaeda operatives stayed behind. According to testimony from several al Qaeda terrorists now in U.S. custody, al Qaeda operatives worked closely with Sudanese intelligence. Sudanese intelligence provided security for al Qaeda camps and safehouses. These agents intervened when local Sudanese authorities arrested al Qaeda members for exploding bombs at an al Qaeda farm, securing the release of the detained terrorists. Jamal al Fadl, an al Qaeda terrorist who later cooperated with U.S. prosecutors, testified that he was ordered by Sudanese intelligence to assassinate a political rival to Hassan al-Turabi. Even after bin Laden's departure, al Qaeda and Sudanese intelligence were virtually indistinguishable.

Shortly after Clinton's speech, the CIA produced an assessment of WMD proliferation that covered the first half of 1998. "Sudan," it said, "has been developing the capability to produce chemical weapons for many years. In this pursuit, Sudan obtained help from other countries, principally Iraq. Given its history in developing CW and its close relationship with Iraq, Sudan may be interested in a BW program as well." CIA assessments through 2002 included similar analyses. In July 1998, according to the 9/11 Commission report, "an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden." Referring to the March and July meetings between Iraq and al Qaeda, the Commission noted that "sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis." In a maddening omission, the report does not elaborate on the "ties" between al Qaeda's No. 2 and the Iraqi regime.

Trouble was clearly brewing. On July 29, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) warned of "possible Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear (CBRN) attack by UBL [Osama bin Laden]." But when the attack came, it was by conventional means: On August 7, al Qaeda terrorists struck the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224--including 12 Americans--and injuring more than 4,000. Almost immediately, the CIA assigned responsibility to terrorists affiliated with Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. response came two weeks later, on August 20, striking two targets. The first of these, al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, was uncontroversial. The second target--the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan--almost immediately gave rise to great controversy.

In justifying the strike on al Shifa, the Clinton administration pointed to several pieces of evidence: a soil sample indicating the presence of a precursor for VX nerve gas of Iraqi provenance; the presence of Iraqi chemical weapons experts at the plant; the long history of Iraq-Sudanese collaboration on chemical weapons; and telephone intercepts between senior Shifa officials and Emad Al Ani, the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program. The press treated these claims with great skepticism. But Clinton administration officials and many intelligence analysts would continue to defend the intelligence surrounding al Shifa for years. In a January 23, 1999, article in the Washington Post, National Security Council counterterrorism director Richard Clarke defended the president's choice of target and 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." In an email he sent on November 4, 1998, to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Clarke concluded that the presence of Iraqi chemical experts in Sudan was "probably a direct result of the Iraq-Al Qaeda agreement."

President Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, continued to defend the decision to strike al Shifa before the 9/11 Commission last year. Cohen explained that there were "multiple, reinforcing elements of information ranging from links that the organization that built the facility [al Shifa] had both with bin Laden and with the leadership of the Iraqi chemical weapons program."

In an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD last fall, 9/11 Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean said: "Top officials--Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, and others--told us with absolute certainty that there were chemical weapons of mass destruction at that factory, and that's why we sent missiles." Kean added: "We still can't say for certain that the chemicals were there. If they're right and there was stuff there, then it had to come from Iraq. They're the ones who had the stuff, who had this technology."

In fact, the Iraqis were openly involved with the al Shifa facility. Sudanese foreign minister Osman Ismail was in Baghdad when the plant was attacked. He told reporters the facility was nothing more than a pharmaceutical factory. As proof he pointed to the existence of a contract awarded to al Shifa through the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. But the contract raised questions even then. In the eight months between the signing of the $199,000 contract and the U.S. strikes on al Shifa, no goods were delivered. With the benefit of hindsight, we now understand that Saddam Hussein manipulated the Oil-for-Food program to reward friends and business partners willing to help him circumvent U.N. sanctions and rebuild his weapons programs. U.S. counterterrorism officials tell The Weekly Standard that relatively few Oil-for-Food contracts went to Sudanese companies, and that the contract with al Shifa stands out as troubling. There was reporting about an Iraqi presence at a number of facilities in Sudan. The Clinton administration chose al Shifa for destruction largely because it was outside of Khartoum and was thus unlikely to result in a large number of casualties. There were several other potential targets. "The consistent stream of intelligence at that time said it wasn't just al Shifa," says John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the time. "There were three different [chemical weapons] structures in the Sudan. There was the hiring of Iraqis. There was no question that the Iraqis were there."

As for the August 1998 Iraq-al Qaeda plots against the U.S. and British embassies in Pakistan, revealed in the Guantanamo Summary of Evidence obtained by the AP, we are left with more questions than answers. Has the detainee's story been corroborated? Were the attacks in Pakistan what the CIA's counterterrorism center warned about on July 29? Were they to have been carried out in tandem with the August 7, 1998, al Qaeda embassy bombings? Were they intended as a rejoinder to the U.S. strikes on al Shifa? A Pentagon spokesman says the government's policy against discussing detainees prevents him from providing any answers. Other Bush administration and intelligence officials contacted by The Weekly Standardeither did not know about the detainee or refused to discuss the case.

On August 27, 1998, Iraq's Babel newspaper, published by Uday Hussein, labeled Osama bin Laden an "Arab and Islamic hero."

***

"Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden have sealed a pact."

Milan's Corriere della Sera, December 28, 1998, as cited in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, p. 328

SADDAM HUSSEIN continued to defy U.N. weapons inspectors throughout the fall of 1998. Noncompliance was the norm. Confrontations about access to suspected WMD sites became almost a daily occurrence. Back in Washington, members of both parties urged President Clinton to increase the pressure on Iraq. Congress was considering legislation that would make "regime change" in Iraq official U.S. policy. The United States also began broadcasting anti-Hussein messages into Iraq via Radio Free Iraq. The broadcasts were housed in the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters in Prague. The first broadcast went out on October 30, 1998. The Iraqis were furious and threatened retaliation. On November 8, 1998, a commentator on Iraqi state television insisted the broadcasts would do nothing to affect the "jihad spirit" of the Iraqis. A statement three days later from Saddam's Baath party called on Muslims to be steadfast in the ongoing Mother of All Battles and to undertake "unprecedented heroisms" to fight the Zionists and Crusaders. And then, a call for attacks:

All living capabilities of the Arab nation should be toward the unity of the pan-Arab [world] and toward escalating the struggle to the highest levels of jihad. . . . The escalation of the confrontation and the disclosure of its dimensions and the aggressive intentions now require an organized, planned, influential and conclusive enthusiasm against U.S. interests.

This was not, apparently, just bluster. The Iraqi regime wired $150,000 to an account in Prague, according to Jabir Salim, the man on the receiving end. Salim was the Iraqi station chief in the Czech Republic and with the money he received an order: Recruit a young Islamic radical to blow up the headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Salim had difficulty finding someone to commit the martyrdom operation, he told British Intelligence after defecting to the West when the U.S. launched Operation Desert Fox--a series of cruise missile attacks on Iraqi targets--on December 16, 1998. Salim also told interrogators that the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship had intensified after the August 1998 embassy bombings and that the Iraqi Intelligence station in Pakistan served as the hub of Iraq-al Qaeda activity.

Operation Desert Fox would last four days. Saddam Hussein's response was revealing. On December 21, he dispatched one of his most trusted intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, to Afghanistan to meet bin Laden. Hijazi had met with both Zawahiri and bin Laden on many occasions earlier in the decade. On December 26, Osama bin Laden condemned the U.S.-led attacks. "The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders' decision to attack Iraq," bin Laden proclaimed. He added that this support made it the "duty of Muslims to confront, fight and kill" British and American citizens.

The meeting between bin Laden and Hijazi instigated a burst of intelligence reporting on Iraq and al Qaeda. One source reported that "the Iraqi regime was trying to broaden its cooperation with al Qaeda. Iraq was looking to recruit Muslim 'elements' to sabotage U.S. and U.K. interests."

These claims were not limited to sensitive intelligence reporting. In the weeks that followed the meeting, dozens of press outlets from around the world reported on it as well as several others. The reports indicated that Saddam had offered bin Laden safe haven, had already trained al Qaeda operatives, and was supporting bin Laden's efforts to attack Western targets.

The details reported were striking. On December 28 Milan's Corriere della Sera reported "Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden have sealed a pact." In its issue dated January 11, 1999, Newsweek quoted an anonymous "Arab intelligence officer who knows Saddam personally" as warning that "very soon you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis" against Western targets. The Iraqi plan would be run under one of three "false flags": Palestinian, Iranian, and the "al Qaeda apparatus." All of these groups, Newsweek reported, had representatives in Baghdad. The reports did not end there. Throughout February and March 1999, there was media speculation that bin Laden would relocate from Afghanistan to Iraq. Behind the scenes, Clinton administration officials were engaging in similar conjecture. According to the 9/11 Commission report, Richard Clarke sent an email to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger on February 11, 1999. Clarke told Berger that if bin Laden learned of U.S. operations against him, "old wily Osama will likely boogie to Baghdad." Days later Bruce Riedel of the National Security Council staff also emailed Berger, warning that "Saddam Hussein wanted bin Laden in Baghdad." Reports of Iraqi offers of safe haven, cooperation, and training continued throughout 1999.

* * *

"The Shakir in Kuala Lumpur has many interesting connections that are so multiple in their intersections with al Qaeda-related organizations and people as to suggest something more than random chance."

9/11 Commissioner John Lehman, July 22, 2004

TWO FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES believe that Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national who escorted a September 11 hijacker to the key planning meeting for those attacks in Kuala Lumpur, was working for Iraqi Intelligence: the Malaysians, who monitored Shakir's activities as he facilitated the travel for 9/11 hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar in January 2000, and the Jordanians, who detained Shakir for three months after the September 11 attacks.

Shakir began working as a VIP greeter for Malaysian Airlines in August 1999. He told associates he had gotten the job through a contact at the Iraqi embassy named Ra'ad al-Mudaris. In fact, al-Mudaris controlled Shakir's schedule--telling him when to report to work and when to take a day off. The Senate Intelligence Committee report reveals that "another source claimed that Mudaris was a former IIS officer."

Al-Mudaris apparently told Shakir to report to work on January 5, 2000, the same day September 11 hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar arrived in Kuala Lumpur. Shakir escorted al Mihdhar to a waiting car and then, rather than bid his guest farewell, jumped in the car with him. U.S. intelligence officials will not say whether Shakir was an active participant in the meeting, but with photographs provided by Malaysian intelligence, there is little doubt he was there. The meeting lasted from January 5 to January 8. Shakir reported to work twice after the meeting broke up and then disappeared.

He was arrested in Doha, Qatar, on September 17, 2001. He had been employed by the Qatari government in its Ministry of Religious Development. Authorities found what Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman described as a "treasure trove": contact information--both on Shakir and back at his apartment--for several high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists. They include: Zaid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Abu Hajer al Iraqi, the Iraqi national alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's "best friend"; and Ibrahim Suleiman, a Kuwaiti native whose fingerprints were found on the bombmaking manuals authorities say were used in preparation for the 1993 Trade Center bombing. We also know that in January 1993, shortly before the first attack on the World Trade Center, Shakir had received a phone call later traced to the New Jersey safehouse that served as the headquarters for that operation.
Despite this, the Qataris released Shakir. (The Qatari government has not responded to numerous interview requests.) But he was detained again on October 21, 2001, this time by Jordanians in Amman, where he was to have caught a flight to Baghdad. The Jordanians held him for three months. The Iraqi regime repeatedly contacted the Jordanian government and pressed for his release. The Jordanians, who had concluded that Shakir was working for Iraqi Intelligence, devised a plan and presented it to the CIA. The Jordanians proposed releasing Shakir, but only after extracting from him a promise to report back on the activities of Iraqi Intelligence from inside Iraq. Perhaps mindful of the woeful lack of human sources in Iraq, the CIA approved. The Jordanians set him free in late January 2002, at which point he returned to Baghdad.

He was never heard from again.

The Weekly Standardasked 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman about Shakir last year, shortly after the commission's final report was released. "The Shakir in Kuala Lumpur has many interesting connections that are so multiple in their intersections with al Qaeda-related organizations and people as to suggest something more than random chance," he said. We clarified: "With respect to both al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime?"

"Yes. Both."

* * *

"Following the expulsion of al Qaeda from Afghanistan and their arrival in northern Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi (a senior al Qaeda figure) was relatively free to travel within Iraq proper and to stay in Baghdad for some time. Several of his colleagues visited him there."

The Butler Report, July 14, 2004

TEN DAYS BEFORE September 11, 2001, a small group of Islamic radicals came together in the northern, Kurdish-controlled area of Iraq. They would quickly come to be known as Ansar al Islam. Their ranks swelled as hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists fled the U.S. assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It quickly became clear to many policymakers and intelligence analysts that the Ansar camps were fallback zones for al Qaeda.

In time, one of Ansar's leaders would become the face of not only the Iraqi insurgency, but also of al Qaeda. Abu Musab al Zarqawi is, besides Osama bin Laden, perhaps the best known al Qaeda terrorist on the planet. He and his followers have been linked to terrorist plots the world over: from a plot in Jordan at the turn of the millennium, to the assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in October 2002, to the Madrid train bombing on March 11, 2004. His personal role in the beheadings of hostages in Iraq has provided a stark reminder of the brutality of the jihadists.

As the war in Iraq approached, the Bush administration cited Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad from May to July 2002--allegedly, for medical treatment--as evidence that Saddam harbored and aided al Qaeda terrorists. This claim was met with a remarkable degree of skepticism.

Prior to September 11, there was nary a mention of Zarqawi. It appears that the intelligence community did not pay much attention to him until after 9/11, when, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, "an ongoing collection" became "aggressively worked." Thus, there is much uncertainty concerning his origins and exactly when his relationship with Saddam's regime began.

Recently, Ayad Allawi, the first post-Saddam prime minister of Iraq, stated that Iraqi intelligence documents show that Zarqawi was in Saddam-controlled parts of Iraq in late 1999. The documents, according to Allawi, also show that Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells with the full knowledge of Saddam's intelligence services. If the documents are authentic, and we cannot offer a judgment one way or another, then they will put to rest any doubts about Zarqawi's involvement with Saddam's regime prior to the war.

There were many early reports that Iraqi intelligence officers were among Ansar's leadership and thus Zarqawi's cohorts. One of these was a man known by his nom de guerre, Abu Wael. Ansar's Kurdish enemies, and several IIS and al Qaeda detainees, claimed from the beginning that Abu Wael was an Iraqi Intelligence officer who managed the relationship between Ansar and Saddam's regime. The Kurds have also repeatedly claimed that he, as well as other IIS officers, supplied Ansar with funding and arms.

The case of Abu Wael remains unresolved, but the Kurds' claims that the Iraqi regime provided al Qaeda members with weapons and funding has been validated by other intelligence reporting. A May 2002 signals intelligence report, included in the Feith memo, stated that "an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance." Another report from the National Security Agency in October 2002 said that "al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons." It was this agreement that "reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq."

In addition to Saddam's support for al Qaeda in Kurdish-controlled territories, we also know that Zarqawi was not alone in Baghdad. According to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Report, the CIA "described a network of more than a dozen al Qaeda or al Qaeda-associated operatives in Baghdad" before the war.

The intelligence community has downplayed the possibility that the Iraqi regime supported Zarqawi's prewar activities, including the assassination of Laurence Foley. Intelligence community analysts, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, point out that "neither of the two suspects" in the shooting "provided any information on links between al-Zarqawi and the Iraqi regime."

But we also have testimony from one of the suspects in the murder that Zarqawi "directed and financed the operations of the cell" responsible "before, during and after his stint in Baghdad between May and July 2002." And both of the suspects have said that "one member of the al Zarqawi network traveled repeatedly between regime-controlled Iraq and Syria after March 2002."

Thus, many in the intelligence community implausibly assume that Zarqawi could have planned terrorist attacks from neo-Stalinist Baghdad and had one of his operatives travel in and out of Iraqi regime-controlled territory without Saddam's approval. The next question is obvious: If it is so easy for regime foes to maintain a long-term presence in Baghdad and to transit in and out of Iraq, why was it so difficult for the CIA to operate there? This assumption flies in the face of everything we know about Saddam and his control over Iraq.

* * *

"The CIA had no [redacted] credible reporting on the leadership of either the Iraqi regime or al Qaeda, which would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship, if any did in fact exist. As a result, the CIA refrained from asserting that Iraq and al Qaeda had cooperated on terrorist attacks."

Senate Intelligence Committee report, July 7, 2004

THE CONCLUSION of the Senate Intelligence Committee report--that the CIA did not have the type of intelligence reporting that "would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship"--was ignored by the press. We now have reporting that demonstrates the nature of the relationship. One day there will be much more. At a large warehouse in Doha, Qatar, the Defense Intelligence Agency is reviewing millions of pages of documents from the former Iraqi regime. That process is painfully slow due to a lack of resources and a lack of interest in pursuing the full story of Iraqi support for terrorism.

That lack of interest is not new. As the anonymous intelligence analyst told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "I don't think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS going out and pro-actively conducting terrorist attacks." That the intelligence community did not pay particular attention to Saddam Hussein's terrorist aspirations created a sizable blind spot.

Why wouldn't Saddam Hussein conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. interests? The United States regularly bombed targets in Iraq--at times almost daily--in support of the no-fly zones. We conducted more significant attacks in January and June 1993, and again in 1996 and 1998. The CIA attempted to foment a coup in 1996. The U.N. sanctions sought to deprive Saddam of the resources he needed to sustain a robust military. The weapons inspections occupied his top officials and hundreds of intelligence officers. From 1998 forward, after the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, the official policy of the United States was to end his regime. With that policy came support of Iraqi opposition groups who existed to remove him from power. For Saddam, then, the Gulf war never ended. He routinely accused the United States of "terrorism" and "genocide." The state-run Iraqi media threatened to exact revenge for more than a decade.

Further, Saddam had proven his willingness to use asymmetric means of retaliation time and again. He attempted to use his own intelligence service and terrorist surrogates against the United States during the first Gulf war. He assisted a fugitive from the 1993 World Trade Center attacks. He attempted to assassinate George H.W. Bush. He sought to blow up the U.S. government's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters. He openly supported terrorist activity in the region. "From 1996 to 2003," according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, "the IIS focused its terrorist activities on western interests, particularly against the U.S. and Israel."

We know that in the context of a decade-long confrontation with the United States, Saddam reached out to al Qaeda on numerous occasions. We know that the leadership of al Qaeda reciprocated, requesting assistance in its endeavors. We know that reports of meetings, offers of safe haven, and collaboration persisted.

What we do not know is the full extent of the relationship. But we know enough to know that there was one. And we know enough to know it was a threat.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection (HarperCollins). Thomas Joscelyn is an economist and writer living in New York.

[Ryan Ruck]

Iraq's Complicity in Terrorism

By Laurie Mylroie

In 1992, when Richard Clarke assumed the counterterrorism portfolio in the White House, terrorism was not a serious problem. Libya's downing of Pan Am flight 103 four years before had been the last major attack on a U.S. target. Yet when Clarke left his post in October 2001, terrorism had become the single greatest threat to America. Clarke would have us believe that this happened because of events beyond anyone's ability to control and, moreover, that the Bush administration has adopted a fatally wrong approach to the war on terror by targeting Iraq in its response to the September 11 attacks.

Clarke's tenure as America's top counterterrorism official is essentially contemporaneous with the Clinton administration. Before Bill Clinton took office, it was assumed that major terrorist attacks against the United States were state sponsored. Clinton turned a national security issue, focused on punishing terrorist states, into a law enforcement issue, focused on arresting and convicting individual perpetrators. That produced a certain gratification.

More terrorists were convicted in U.S. courts in the Clinton years than during any other administration. However, this approach was completely ineffectual and had, in fact, created a very serious vulnerability long before September 11, 2001. Clarke, essentially, seeks to blame the Bush administration for September 11, while exonerating Clinton (and therefore Clarke). The reality is quite the reverse.

TERRORISM REALITY

The February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center--one month into Clinton's first term in office--marked the start of what would become an audacious series of assaults, culminating in the September 11 attacks. This terrorism was said to be new because it was carried out by "loose networks" not supported by any state, or so it was claimed. This was the official line of Clinton's Justice Department, although the first person to articulate it publicly was a man of the political Right, journalist Steven Emerson, in an April 7, 1993, New York Times article, a few weeks after the Trade Center bombing.

Yet senior figures at the New York branch of the FBI, the lead investigative agency, including its director, Jim Fox, believed that Baghdad was responsible for the attack. As Fox wrote, "Although we are unable to say with certainty the Iraqis were behind the bombing, that is certainly the theory accepted by most of the veteran investigators" (italics added).

Fox's background was counterintelligence. To Fox, the ease of the arrests suggested a conspiracy masterminded by others, with the militants left behind to get caught and take the blame. Mohammed Salameh, the 26-year-old Palestinian who rented the van that carried the bomb, was detained as he returned to the Ryder agency to ask for his deposit on that van. Fox recognized that Salameh and his militant cohort could not themselves alone have made that bomb--which left a crater five stories deep in the basement floors of the North Tower in an attempt to topple that building onto its twin.

Several Iraqis hovered around the fringe of the plot. One, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is the sole remaining indicted fugitive. Born in the United States while his father was a graduate student here, Yasin was able to obtain a U.S. passport in June 1992. Yasin arrived in New York from Baghdad in September 1992. He returned there shortly after the Trade Center bombing, transiting through Jordan, where he stopped at the Iraqi embassy and quickly (within 24 hours) received a visa for his U.S. passport. Much later, U.S. authorities found documents in Iraq that showed Yasin was rewarded with a house and monthly stipend.

Ramzi Yousef was a second key figure in that attack. Like Yasin, Yousef arrived in New York in early September 1992. At Kennedy Airport, Yousef presented an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing that his trip began in Baghdad. The immigration inspector who processed him testified that Yousef's passport "appeared to be valid and unaltered." Yousef fled the night of the Trade Center bombing on a Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim. Karim was a real person, born and raised in Kuwait. He studied for three years in Britain, graduating from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returning to Kuwait, where he received a job in Kuwait's planning ministry and where he was on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded.

Yousef obtained Karim's passport by going to the Pakistani consulate with photocopies of Karim's 1984 and 1988 passports. Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new one to return home. The consulate did not like Yousef's papers, as he had no original documents. Nonetheless, it provided him a temporary passport.

A careful consideration of this material, available from court records as well as Karim's file in Kuwait (details of which were provided to this author by Kuwaiti officials), shows that Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent. Yousef's identity is the crucial issue. As Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over Yousef's two trials, stated at his sentencing hearing, "We don't even know what your real name is."

IRAQI AGENT

We call him Ramzi Yousef, but that is just the name on the passport he carried when he arrived in the United States. Nor is he Abdul Basit Karim, and therein lies the demonstration that Yousef is an Iraqi agent.

First, key pages from Karim's passports, as presented by Yousef to the Pakistani consulate, were altered.

- The signature in the 1984 passport is totally different from the signature in the 1988 passport.

- A Pakistani passport includes spaces for "permanent address in Pakistan" and "present address in Pakistan." A permanent address is a family's place of origin; by definition, it does not change. Yet Karim's 1984 passport shows one permanent address, in Karachi, and the 1988 passport shows another one, in Turbat, in Baluchistan province.

Second, a file containing details on Karim's life was tampered with to create a false identity, or "legend," for Yousef. Material is missing from Karim's file in Kuwait. It should have included copies of the front pages of his passport, with his picture, signature, and so on. The Kuwaitis attributed the omissions to the Iraqi occupation. But information was also added to Karim's file maintained by the Interior Ministry. It contains the notation that Karim and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, and traveled to Iraq and Iran, crossing at Salamcheh, on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now.

Yet there was no Kuwaiti government on August 26, 1990: Iraqi authorities had to have put that information into Karim's file. Moreover, a traveler does not give his entire itinerary when crossing a border; he states merely whence he came and where he is going directly. Finally, tens of thousands of people were trying to flee Kuwait and Iraq then; it is extremely unlikely that Iraqi officials were recording the flight plans of all those people. That notation was put into Karim's file for a reason.

Most significantly, Yousef's fingerprints are in Karim's file. Yet Yousef is not Karim. Yousef is six feet tall, but Karim was substantially shorter, according to his British teachers as his 1988 passport, issued when he was 20 years old and fully grown. Karim's teachers at Swansea do not believe their student is a terrorist mastermind. Indeed, the institute's principal and deputy principal both told the BBC after September 11 that they believed their student was murdered in Kuwait after Iraq invaded and his identity was assumed by another man.

Thus, the fingerprint card in Karim's file had to have been switched; the original one bearing Karim's prints was removed and replaced with one bearing Yousef's prints. Reasonably, only Iraq could have done so while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its agents.

This kind of deception is a well-known practice of Soviet-style intelligence agencies. Indeed, Allen Dulles, the CIA's first director, described this practice in his book The Craft of Intelligence. The Soviets might chose a city like Munich as the source of such "legends," Dulles explained, because it had been destroyed during bombings. Creating a legend involves a "thorough concealing" of the past, said Dulles, "under layers of fictitious personal history" that have to be "backstopped"--for example, several sources must appear to corroborate the identity. An agent so made over is known as an "illegal." Because he has assumed a new identity, it is very difficult to link him to the enemy state for which he works.

AL QAEDA AT WORK?

Since September 11, U.S. authorities have learned a great deal more about al Qaeda. They now understand that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Yousef's "uncle," masterminded the September 11 attacks. The principle paymaster for the hijackers was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, also known as Ammar al Baluchi, supposedly Yousef's first cousin and another of Mohammed's "nephews." Furthermore, two of Yousef's "older brothers" are also al Qaeda masterminds, capable of replacing Mohammed, who was captured in March 2003.

Thus, the official U.S. position is that a family lies at the core of the most lethal series of terrorist assaults ever inflicted on this country. That, however, is without precedent: no major terrorist organization has a family at its core. Yet all these identities, with the possible exception of Ali's, are based on Kuwaiti files that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation and are thus inherently unreliable.

Al Qaeda is a militant Islamist organization. That is the motivating factor for Osama bin Ladin and most others. Yet Yousef and Mohammed are not religious militants; they are Iraqi intelligence agents. Their genuine proclivities were exposed as a result of a failed plot in the Philippines to bomb a dozen U.S. airliners. The plot, in which Mohammed was also involved, misfired when Yousef accidentally started a fire while mixing explosives in his kitchen sink and they were forced to flee abruptly. Yousef and his cohort, it turned out, regularly frequented the nightclubs and brothels of Manila.

After Mohammed was captured, the Washington Post cited a U.S. intelligence official: "To be honest, it wasn't until recently that any of us even realized he was part of al Qaeda . . . The big problem nailing him down is that the informants that we relied on, especially before 9/11, were mujaheddin. They'd been in Afghanistan, in Sudan, back in Afghanistan. Khalid was never a part of any of that" (italics added).

These terrorists are all Baluchi, a Sunni group living in eastern Pakistan and western Iran. The United States has virtually nothing to do with the Baluchi, and most Americans have never heard of them. Saddam's Iraq, however, had extensive and deep-seated ties with the Baluchi on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border, according to Wafiq Samarrai, former head of Iraqi military intelligence, who defected after the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq used the Baluchi as spies and saboteurs against the Shia rulers of Iran, with whom it fought a lengthy war in the 1980s.

There is no evident reason for the Baluchi to attack the United States, save for their ties to Iraq. Indeed, a former deputy head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Gilboa, remarked that the identities of these al Qaeda masterminds are fabrications, produced by Iraqi intelligence while Iraq occupied Kuwait. Jim Fox called the question of Yousef's identity the "smoking gun." Israeli ambassador Itamar Rabinovich and Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar agreed.

Yet it is virtually impossible to get the U.S. government to move on this. The bureaucracies that accommodated Clinton's desire not to hear that Saddam was involved in attacking America then do not want to acknowledge their error now. They lack the grace to apologize. Only one colleague in the intelligence community made a halfhearted attempt after September 11: "I thought Saddam could never carry out such an attack, and even if he could, he wouldn't dare."

We went to war with Iraq because Baghdad was involved in September 11, as senior administration officials recognized. Almost certainly, President George W. Bush does not understand how easy it would be to demonstrate Iraq's involvement in those attacks, even as it is essential that the administration do so. A house divided cannot stand. We cannot expect some employees of the U.S. government, namely our soldiers, to risk life and limb in Iraq while other employees of the same government continue to engage in a posterior-covering exercise that denies to those soldiers, and to the American public, an understanding of why, exactly, we are fighting this war.

Laurie Mylroie was adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign and is author of Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror (HarperCollins).

[Ryan Ruck]

New Saddam Documents Detail Terror Training

The Bush administration is preparing to release never-before-seen documents captured when U.S. forces liberated Baghdad that chronicle the extensive training of thousands of radical Islamic terrorists by Saddam Hussein's regime.

"The secret training took place primarily at three camps in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak," reports the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who adds that the operations began two years before the 9/11 attacks and were "directed by elite Iraqi military units."

The existence of these documents, and the nature of what they describe, has been confirmed to the Standard by eleven U.S. government officials, Hayes says.

If true, the documents represent a bombshell finding that shatters the claims of Iraq war critics who have maintained for three years that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever to Islamic terrorism.

More intriguing still is the documentation on Salman Pak - a camp previously described by Iraqi defectors as the location of airline hijacking dress rehearsals that bear a striking resemblance to what took place on 9/11.

Hayes reports that the materials currently being reviewed for release include photographs, handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes and videotapes - plus information recovered from compact discs, floppy discs and computer hard drives.

Taken together, the material chronicles a massive operation that trained 2,000 terrorists to attack Western interests each year from 1999 to 2002.

The volume of material examined so far represents the tip of the iceberg. Of the 2 million items recovered from Saddam's regime, just 50,000 have been thoroughly translated and analyzed.

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information," the Standard says.

"According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents."

[Ryan Ruck]

Saddam's Terror Training Camps

The former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to The Weekly Standard by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.

"We had box-loads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"

How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people--Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq--that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don't know literally killing us?

ON NOVEMBER 17, 2005, Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra wrote to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Hoekstra is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He provided Negroponte a list of 40 documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan and asked to see them. The documents were translated or summarized, given titles by intelligence analysts in the field, and entered into a government database known as HARMONY. Most of them are unclassified.

For several weeks, Hoekstra was promised a response. He finally got one on December 28, 2005, in a meeting with General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence. Hayden handed Hoekstra a letter from Negroponte that promised a response after January 1, 2006. Hoekstra took the letter, read it, and scribbled his terse response. "John--Unacceptable." Hoekstra told Hayden that he would expect to hear something before the end of the year. He didn't.

"I can tell you that I'm reaching the point of extreme frustration," said Hoekstra, in a phone interview last Thursday. His exasperated tone made the claim unnecessary. "It's just an indication that rather than having a nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it's still a lumbering bureaucracy that can't give the chairman of the intelligence committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can't even give me answers slowly."

On January 6, however, Hoekstra finally heard from Negroponte. The director of national intelligence told Hoekstra that he is committed to expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents. According to Hoekstra, Negroponte said: "I'm giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work."

Other members of Congress--including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts--also demanded more information from the Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection. Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop," says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. "There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it."

This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. "Cambone is the problem," says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. "He has blocked this every step of the way." In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.

Although Hoekstra, too, has been pushing hard for the quick release of all of the documents, he is currently focusing his efforts simply on obtaining the 40 documents he asked for in November. "There comes a time when the talking has to stop and I get the documents. I requested these documents six weeks ago and I have not seen a single piece of paper yet."

Is Hoekstra being unreasonable? I asked Michael Tanji, the former DOCEX official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, how long such a search might take. His answer: Not long. "The retrieval of a HARMONY document is a trivial thing assuming one has a serial number or enough keyword terms to narrow down a search [Hoekstra did]. If given the task when they walked in the door, one person should be able to retrieve 40 documents before lunch."

Tanji should know. He left DIA last year as the chief of the media exploitation division in the office of document exploitation. Before that, he started and managed a digital forensics and intelligence fusion program that used the data obtained from DOCEX operations. He began his career as an Army signals intelligence [SIGINT] analyst. In all, Tanji has worked for 18 years in intelligence and dealt with various aspects of the media exploitation problem for about four years.

We discussed the successes and failures of the DOCEX program, the relative lack of public attention to the project, and what steps might be taken to expedite the exploitation of the documents in the event the push to release all of the documents loses momentum.

TWS: In what areas is the project succeeding? In what areas is the project failing?

Tanji: The level of effort applied to the DOCEX problems in Iraq and Afghanistan to date is a testament to the will and work ethic of people in the intelligence community. They've managed to find a number of golden nuggets amongst a vast field of rock in what I would consider a respectable amount of time through sheer brute force. The flip side is that it is a brute-force effort. For a number of reasons--primarily time and resources--there has not been much opportunity to step back, think about a smarter way to solve the problem, and then apply various solutions. Inasmuch as we've won in Iraq and Saddam and his cronies are in the dock, now would be a good time to put some fresh minds on the problem of how you turn DOCEX into a meaningful and effective information-age intelligence tool.

TWS: Why haven't we heard more about this project? Aren't most of the Iraqi documents unclassified?

Tanji: Until a flood of captured material came rushing in after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom [in October 2001], DOCEX was a backwater: unglamorous, not terribly career enhancing, and from what I had heard always one step away from being mothballed.

The classification of documents obtained for exploitation varies based on the nature of the way they were obtained and by whom. There are some agencies that tend to classify everything regardless of how it was acquired. I could not give you a ratio of unclassified to classified documents.

In my opinion the silence associated with exploitation work is rooted in the nature of the work. In addition to being tedious and time-consuming, it is usually done after the shooting is over. We place a higher value on intelligence information that comes to us before a conflict begins. Confirmation that we were right (or proof that we were wrong) after the fact is usually considered history. That some of this information may be dated doesn't mean it isn't still valuable.

TWS: The project seems overwhelmed at the moment, with a mere 50,000 documents translated completely out of a total of 2 million. What steps, in your view, should be taken to expedite the process?

Tanji: I couldn't say what the total take of documents or other forms of media is, though numbers in the millions are probably not far off.

In a sense the exploitation process is what it is; you have to put eyes on paper (or a computer screen) to see what might be worth further translation or deeper analysis. It is a time-consuming process that has no adequate mechanical solution. Machine translation software is getting better, but it cannot best a qualified human linguist, of which we have very few.

Tackling the computer media problem is a lot simpler in that computer language (binary) is universal, so searching for key words, phrases, and the names of significant personalities is fairly simple. Built to deal with large-scale data sets, a forensic computer system can rapidly separate wheat from chaff. The current drawback is that the computer forensics field is dominated by a law-enforcement mindset, which means the approach to the digital media problem is still very linear. As most of this material has come to us without any context ("hard drives found in Iraq" was a common label attached to captured media) that approach means our great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this problem.

Dealing with the material as the large and nebulous data set that it is and applying a contextual appliqué after exploitation--in essence, recreating the Iraqi networks as they were before Operation Iraqi Freedom began--would allow us to get at the most significant data rapidly for technical analysis, and allow for a political analysis to follow in short order. If I were looking for both a quick and powerful fix I'd get various Department of Energy labs involved; they're used to dealing with large data sets and have done great work in the data mining and rendering fields.

TWS: To read some of the reporting on Iraq, one might come away with the impression that Saddam Hussein was something of a benign (if not exactly benevolent) dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to terrorism. Does the material you've seen support this conventional wisdom?

Tanji: I am subject to a nondisclosure agreement, so I would rather not get into details. I will say that the intelligence community has scraped the surface of much of what has been captured in Iraq and in my view a great deal more deep digging is required. Critics of the war often complain about the lack of "proof"--a term that I had never heard used in the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam--for going to war. There is really only one way to obtain "proof" and that is to carry out a thorough and detailed examination of what we've captured.

TWS: I've spoken with several officials who have seen unclassified materials indicating the former Iraqi regime provided significant support--including funding and training--to transregional terrorists, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam, Algeria's GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Did you see any of this?

Tanji: My obligations under a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from getting into this kind of detail.

Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.

Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."

The official continued: "[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can't tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I'm just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong."

STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage reads: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush administration officials knew that Saddam's regime was unlikely to work with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community's assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning that he specifically requested that it be declassified.

I thought of Levin's two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who's been living in Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin's sentences, for example, when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February 1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a camp in Iraq.

The account he gave in the courtroom was slightly less alarming than the description of the camp he had provided in 1989, on his written application for political asylum in the United States. In that document, Barodi described the instruction he received in Iraq as "guerrilla warfare training." And in an interview in February 2005 with Detective Scott Carr and special agent Sam Montana, both from the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, Barodi said that the Iraqi regime provided training in the use of firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and document forgery.

Barodi comes from Hama, the town that was leveled in 1982 by the armed forces of secular Syrian dictator Hafez Assad because it was home to radical Islamic terrorists who had agitated against his regime. The massacre took tens of thousands of lives, but some of the extremists got away.

Many of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama were welcomed next door--and trained--in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Spanish investigators believe that Ghasoub Ghalyoun, the man they have accused of conducting surveillance for the 9/11 attacks, who also has roots in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, was trained in an Iraqi terrorist camp in the early 1980s. Ghalyoun mentions this Iraqi training in a 2001 letter to the head of Syrian intelligence, in which he seeks reentry to Syria despite his long affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's hearing, "He used us and we used him."

Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law). According to Baram, "The Iraqi president initiated laws forbidding the public consumption of alcohol and introduced enhanced compulsory study of the Koran at all educational levels, including Baath Party branches."

Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, explained these changes in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, then head of the U.N. weapons inspection program. "The government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country," he said, adding, "Every party member has to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers."

And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression." One speaker praised "the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers." Another speaker said, "Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state." Dickey continued:

Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.

In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses. Shouldn't the senator instead use his influence to push for the release of Iraqi documents that will help establish what, exactly, the Iraqi regime was doing in the years before the U.S. invasion?

[Ryan Ruck]

Saddam and al-Qaeda

The proof has been right in front of you the entire time. Documents available on the internet, which pass the smell test and are probably genuine, show the link between Saddam and al Qaeda.

On October 11th, 2004 an online news service called CNSnews published 42 documents that they claimed came from the Iraq Survey Group. The documents supposedly came from an ISG official who claimed they were captured in Iraq. CNSnews provided this information along with testimony from experts who authenticated the documents to the best of their ability. The story can be found here.

I have no connection to CNSnews. I did not release these documents to anybody while working with ISG or at any other time. But I will now add my name to the list of those who authenticate the documents. I know there is a good chance that these documents are real for three reasons.

The first reason is that I saw thousands of these documents while with ISG, and these look right.

But more than that, I saw the original of one of these documents at the Combined Media Processing Center in Qatar. I can therefore validate one document as having been captured in Iraq – which increases the likelihood that they are all real.

The third reason is that I witnessed an investigation into who released these documents conducted at the CPMC by ISG. If these document were not authentic, why would an investigation have been conducted into who released them?

So what do the documents tell us?

I recommend that you review them, as they contain such interesting nuggets as a program by the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to hunt down and kill Americans throughout the Middle East and Africa.

But how does this connect Saddam to al-Qaeda?

Look at document 14.

Here is the condensed version. The document is from the IIS and details plans to meet with an official from the “Egyptian Al-Jehad” via a Sudanese official named Ali Othman Taha. He is called the Vice Chairman of the Islamic Front in Sudan in the memo.

I looked up Ali Othman Taha on wikipedia and it says that he is the Vice President of Sudan.

Who or what is the Egyptian al-Jehad (jihad)?

This from globalsecurity.org:

al-Jihad
Jihad Group
Islamic Jihad
Egyptian Islamic Jihad
New Jihad Group
Vanguards of Conquest
Talaa’ al-Fateh

Description:

Egyptian Islamic extremist group active since the late 1970s. Merged with Bin Ladin’s al-Qaida organization in June 2001, but may retain some capability to conduct independent operations. Continues to suffer setbacks worldwide, especially after 11 September attacks. Primary goals are to overthrow the Egyptian Government and replace it with an Islamic state and attack US and Israeli interests in Egypt and abroad.

Okay now we know the Egyptian al Jihad is also known as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a name you may have heard in connection to its leader:

Al-Sharif passed the Jihad leadership to Ayman al-Zawahri amid dissent within the movement in the mid 1980’s. The al-Zawahri faction subsequently formed an alliance with Al-Qaeda leading over time to the effective merger of the two groups operations inside Afghanistan.

Although al-Zawahri is frequently refered to as a ‘lieutenant’ or ‘second in command’ of Al Qaeda this description is misleading as it implies a hierarchical relationship. The modern Al Qaeda organization is the combination of Bin Laden’s financial resources with al-Zawahri’s ideological and operational leadership. – wikipedia

That’s right, Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the talking heads of al-Qaeda who treated us to a new video not so long ago. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization combined with Osama Bin Ladin’s supporters to form al-Qaeda.

The EIJ is neck deep in al-Qaeda. And this documents shows an EIJ official to be escorted to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein in 1993.

The Institute for Counterterrorism says this about the EIJ:

Since 1993 the group has not conducted an attack inside Egypt. However there have been repeated threats to retaliate against the United States, for its incarceration of Sheikh Umar Abd al-Rahman and, more recently, for the arrests of its members in Albania, Azerbaijan, and the United Kingdom.

In 1993, Sheikh Umar Abd al-Rahman directed the bombing of the world trade center. He is now imprisoned in the U.S.

Now look at document 28.

This document is a continuation of document 27 and in general talks about overturning the Egyptian government and “providing technical support” presumably to the EIJ in efforts against the Egyptian government and American non-military interests.

So let ’s put this in context. Here’s what the documents tell us:

• On February 26th, 1993 the first world trade center was attacked by al-Qaeda and the EIJ (really two organizations that cooperated in 1993 and eventually merged).
  
• A month later an official from EIJ was meeting with Saddam in Baghdad.
  
• We have a document showing Saddam authorizing the IIS to “provide technical support” to the EIJ, and by extension, al-Qaeda.
  
• And then al-Qaeda and the EIJ attacked the U.S. on September 11th, 2001 led by an Egyptian Jihadist, Mohammed Atta.
  

Now you have proof Saddam provided support to the EIJ and by extension al-Qaeda, both of which attacked us on 9/11.

[Malsua]

And the documents start to flow.

These are some of the first from the 48,000 boxes of materials. My understanding is it may take a few days before they start main-lining these things.

-Mal
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...1/975brvct.asp
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/pro...docex.htm#iraq
Post-Haste
The first batch of captured documents from pre-war Iraq and Afghanistan are now available online.
by Stephen F. Hayes
03/15/2006 11:34:00 PM

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has created a website(http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/pro...docex.htm#iraq) where it will post documents captured in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. The website is hosted by the Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center at Fort Leavenworth and will be updated continuously with new documents. The first batch of materials, released late Wednesday, includes nine documents captured in connection with Operation Iraqi Freedom and 28 documents previously released on February 14, 2006, in conjunction with a study of those documents conducted by analysts at West Point. Sources on Capitol Hill and within the intelligence community tell The Weekly Standard that hundreds of new documents will be made available in the coming days, including 50-60 hours of audiotapes from the Iraqi regime. ODNI officials will concentrate their early efforts on making available audiotapes and videotapes that have come from the former Iraqi regime. Twenty-five Arabic language translators will be hired to review these recordings for potentially sensitive information before they are posted. According to officials familiar with the DOCEX program, the U.S. government has in its possession more than 3,000 hours of recordings from the Iraqi regime. Among the collection: recordings of meetings between Saddam Hussein and other regime leaders; videotapes of speeches that Saddam thought would be important; audio and video of Saddam's meetings with foreign leaders; videotapes from conferences sponsored by the regime; and even videotapes of regime-sponsored brutality. Materials made public in the first wave of the release will be those least likely toraise objections from the intelligence community and U.S. allies. Negroponte plans to include many of the documents labeled "NIV"--for No Intelligence Value--in this first group of materials. But Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, insists that documents relevant to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 will be released in short order. "There may be many documents that relate to their WMD programs. Those should be released," says Hoekstra. "Same thing with links to terrorism." Among that next batch may be the approximately 700 documents that served as the foundation for a fascinating study by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Analysts from the Institute for Defense Analysis reviewed thousands of documents for that two-year study of the Iraq War from the perspective of Iraqis. Declassified excerpts of their final report were published in a highly illuminating article in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. And the full report will be published as a book in the coming months. It is hard to say what, exactly, to expect with the coming release of documents. There will be documents that lend support to those who opposed the war in Iraq and, to be sure, documents that bolster the case for those who supported the war. Importantly, after years of questions about the threat from the Iraqi regime, we will now be able to get some answers. How close were the French and the Russians to the former Iraqi regime? What kind of information was being passed to the Iraqis on the eve of war in early 2003? What is the real story of Iraq's WMD programs? Why did Saddam's military leaders and scientists fabricate their reports on the progress of those programs? Which terrorist groups had an active presence in Baghdad? How many Palestinian Liberation Front jihadists did the Iraqi regime train each year? How effective was Saddam Hussein in deceiving UN inspectors throughout the 1990s? What did Saddam Hussein privately tell Yasser Arafat when the Palestinian leader came to Baghdad? And what were the Western targets of the "Blessed July" martyrdom operation that was being planned as U.S. troops crossed into Iraq in March 2003?

There are still outstanding process questions that must be answered, too. Who determines which documents will be released and which ones will be kept secret? And what are the criteria for blocking the release of material thought to be sensitive? Another critical issue is authenticity. A caveat on the website reads: "The US Government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available." Determining which documents are authentic and which are not will be an incredibly important task. This will be difficult task too, since many of the documents have no known chain of custody. There was a bustling black market for forged documents in Baghdad after the war. How will we determine which documents are real and which documents are not? Some documents listed in the HARMONY database have warnings: "DIA suspects inauthentic." Will those documents be included in the release? Will the warnings? Will we learn why the DIA suspected that the document might not be authentic? Has forensic document authentication been done on any of the documents? Which ones?

In the end, the Iraqis themselves will provide answers to many of those questions. And Iraqis will probably be central to our understanding of these documents and the history they represent. This is true not only because they understand the language of the documents, but also because they understand better than anyone the culture that produced them.
In that spirit,we will be eager to hear from the "Army of Analysts"--particularly those who read Arabic--that former intelligence officer Michael Tanji wrote about here two days ago. If John Negroponte makes good on his promise of a comprehensive document release, then millions of papers, audiotapes, and other media will be posted in the coming months. As we've seen, that's an overwhelming amount for the U.S. government, to say nothing of a magazine.
Let's get started.

[Malsua]

Here's one. A freeper translated it apparently.

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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1597459/posts

The documents of pre-war Iraq were published this morning on the Pentagon website, I did a quick search and I found a very interesting document written in Arabic and not yet translated to English. I did the translation and I found the following:

This document is a letter written by a member of Saddam Intelligence apparatus (Al Mukabarat) on 9/15/2001 (shortly after 9/11/2001) where he addressed it to someone higher up and he wrote about a conversation between an Iraqi intelligence source and a Taliban Afghani Consul. In the conversation the Afghani Consul spoke of a relationship between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11/2001, and that the United States was aware of such a relationship and that there is a potential of US strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan if the destructive operations in the US (most probably he is referring to 9/11 attacks) were proven to be connected to Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban.

Below is a translation from Arabic to English of CMPC-2003-001488 document that was posted on Pentagon Website regarding the pre-war Iraq documents. (http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/pro...docex.htm#iraq).

Text of the document in English translated from Arabic.

In the Name of God the Merciful

Presidency of the Republic
Intelligence Apparatus

To the respectful Mr. M.A.M
Subject: Information

Our source in Afghanistan No 11002 (for information about him see attachment 1) provided us with information that that Afghani Consul Ahmad Dahestani (for information about him see attachment 2) told him the following:
1. That Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan are in contact with Iraq and it that previously a group from Taliban and Osama Bin Laden group visited Iraq.
2. That America has proof that the government of Iraq and Osama Bin Laden group have shown cooperation to hit target within America.
3. That in case it is proven the involvement of Osama Bin Laden group and the Taliban in these destructive operations it is possible that American will conduct strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
4. That the Afghani Consul heard about the subject of Iraq relation with Osama Bin Laden group during his stay in Iran.
5. In light of this we suggest to write to the Commission of the above information.

Please view… Yours… With regards

Signature:……, Initials : A.M.M, 15/9/2001

Foot note: Immediately send to the Chairman of Commission
Signature:………….

[Ryan Ruck]

Saddam's Philippines Terror Connection

Saddam Hussein's regime provided financial support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group.

The fax comes from the vast collection of documents recovered in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Up to this point, those materials have been kept from the American public. Now the proverbial dam has broken. On March 16, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February. Earlier last week, Foreign Affairs magazine published a lengthy article based on a review of 700 Iraqi documents by analysts with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Plans for the release of many more documents have been announced. And if the contents of the recently released materials and other documents obtained by The Weekly Standard are any indication, the discussion of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is about to get more interesting.

Several months ago, The Weekly Standard received a set of English-language
documents from a senior U.S. government official. The official represented this material as U.S. government translations of three captured Iraqi documents. According to this source, the documents had been examined by the U.S. intelligence community and judged "consistent with authentic documents"--the professionals' way of saying that these items cannot definitively be certified but seem to be the real thing.

The Weekly Standard checked its English-language documents with officials serving elsewhere in the federal government to make sure they were consistent with the versions these officials had seen. With what one person characterized as "minor discrepancies," they are. One of the three documents has been posted in the original Arabic on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A subsequent translation of that document is nearly identical to the English-language text that we were given.

These documents add to the growing body of evidence confirming the Iraqi regime's longtime support for terrorism abroad. The first of them, a series of memos from the spring of 2001, shows that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, despite the reservations of some IIS officials. The second, an internal Iraqi Intelligence memo on the relationships between the IIS and Saudi opposition groups, records that Osama bin Laden requested Iraqi cooperation on terrorism and propaganda and that in January 1997 the Iraqi regime was eager to continue its relationship with bin Laden. The third, a September 15, 2001, report from an Iraqi Intelligence source in Afghanistan, contains speculation about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and the likely U.S. response to it.

On June 6, 2001, the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines sent an eight-page fax to Baghdad. Ambassador Salah Samarmad's dispatch to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry concerned an Abu Sayyaf kidnapping a week earlier that had garnered international attention. Twenty civilians--including three Americans--had been taken from Dos Palmas Resort on Palawan Island in the southern Philippines. There had been fighting between the kidnappers and the Filipino military, Samarmad reported. Several hostages had escaped, and others were released.

"After the release of nine of the hostages, an announcement from the FBI appeared in newspapers announcing their desire to interview the escaped Filipinos in order to make a decision on the status of the three American hostages," the Iraqi ambassador wrote to his superiors in Baghdad. "The embassy stated what was mentioned above. The three American hostages were a missionary husband and wife who had lived in the Philippines for a while, Martin and Gracia Burnham, from Kansas City, and Guillermo Sobrero, from California. They are still in the hands of the Abu Sayyaf kidnappers from a total of 20 people who were kidnapped from (Dos Palmas) resort on Palawan Island." (Except where noted, parentheses, brackets, and ellipses appear in the documents quoted.)

The report notes that the Iraqis were now trying to be seen as helpful and keep a safe distance from Abu Sayyaf. "We have all cooperated in the field of intelligence information with some of our friends to encourage the tourists and the investors in the Philippines." But Samarmad's report seems to confirm that this is a change. "The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them."

Samarmad's dispatch appears to be the final installment in a series of internal Iraqi regime memos from March through June 2001. (The U.S. government translated some of these documents in full and summarized others.) The memos contain a lengthy discussion among Iraqi officials--from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Iraqi Intelligence Service--about the wisdom of using a Libyan intelligence front as a way to channel Iraqi support for Abu Sayyaf without the risks of dealing directly with the group. (The Libyan regime had intervened in an Abu Sayyaf kidnapping in 2000, securing the release of several hostages by paying several million dollars in ransom. Some observers saw this as an effort by Muammar Qaddafi to improve his image; others saw it as an effort to provide support to Abu Sayyaf by paying the ransom demanded by the group. Both were probably right.)

One Iraqi memo, from the "Republican Presidency, Intelligence Apparatus" to someone identified only as D4/4, makes the case for supporting the work of the Qaddafi Charity Establishment to help Abu Sayyaf. The memo is dated March 18, 2001.

1. There are connections between the Qaddafi Charity Establishment and the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines; meanwhile, this establishment is providing material support to them.

2. This establishment is one of the Libyan Intelligence fronts.

3. The Tripoli post has indicated that there is a possibility to form what connections are available with this establishment as it can offer the premise of providing food supplies to [Ed: word missing] in the scope of the agreement statement.

Please review . . . it appears of intelligence value to proceed into connections with this establishment and its intelligence investments in the Abu Sayyaf group.

The short response, two days later:

Mr. Dept. 3:

Study this idea, the pros and the cons, the relative reactions, and any other remarks regarding this.

That exchange above was fully translated by U.S. government translators. The two pages of correspondence that follow it in the Iraqi files were not, but a summary of those pages informs readers that the Iraqi response "discourages the supporting of connections with the Abu Sayyaf group, as the group works against the Philippine government and relies on several methods for material gain, such as kidnapping foreigners, demanding ransoms, as well as being accused by the Philippine government of terrorist acts and drug smuggling."

These accusations were, of course, well founded. On June 12, 2001, six days after Samarmad's dispatch, authorities found the beheaded body of Guillermo Sobrero near the Abu Sayyaf camp. Martin Burnham was killed a year later during the rescue attempt that freed his wife.

A thorough understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Abu Sayyaf (the name, honoring Afghan jihadi Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, means "Father of the Sword") will not come from an analysis of three months' correspondence between Manila and Baghdad in 2001. While it is certainly significant to read in internal Iraqi documents that the regime was at one time funding Abu Sayyaf, we do not now have a complete picture of that relationship. Why did the Iraqis begin funding Abu Sayyaf, which had long been considered a regional terrorist group concerned mainly with making money? Why did they suspend their support in 2001? And why did the Iraqis resume this relationship and, according to the congressional testimony of one State Department regional specialist, intensify it?

On march 26, 2003, as war raged in Iraq, the State Department's Matthew Daley testified before Congress. Daley, the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told a subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee that he was worried about Abu Sayyaf.

"We're concerned that they have what I would call operational links to Iraqi intelligence services. And they're a danger, they're an enemy of the Philippines, they're an enemy of the United States, and we want very much to help the government in Manila deal with this challenge," Daley told the panel. Responding to a question, Daley elaborated. "There is good reason to believe that a member of the Abu Sayyaf Group who has been involved in terrorist activities was in direct contact with an IIS officer in the Iraqi Embassy in Manila. This individual was subsequently expelled from the Philippines for engaging in activities that were incompatible with his diplomatic status."

This individual was Hisham Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi Embassy in Manila. And Daley was right to be concerned.

Eighteen months before his testimony, a young Filipino man rode his Honda motorcycle up a dusty road to a shanty strip mall just outside Camp Enrile Malagutay in Zamboanga City, Philippines. The camp was host to American troops stationed in the south of the country to train with Filipino soldiers fighting terrorists. The man parked his bike and began to examine its gas tank. Seconds later, the tank exploded, sending nails in all directions and killing the rider almost instantly.

The blast damaged six nearby stores and ripped the front off of a café that doubled as a karaoke bar. The café was popular with American soldiers. And on this day, October 2, 2002, SFC Mark Wayne Jackson was killed there and a fellow soldier was severely wounded. Eyewitnesses almost immediately identified the bomber as an Abu Sayyaf terrorist.

One week before the attack, Abu Sayyaf leaders had promised a campaign of terror directed at the "enemies of Islam"--Westerners and the non-Muslim Filipino majority. And one week after the attack, Abu Sayyaf attempted to strike again, this time with a bomb placed on the playground of the San Roque Elementary School. It did not detonate. Authorities recovered the cell phone that was to have set it off and analyzed incoming and outgoing calls.

As they might have expected, they discovered several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein's only contact with Abu Sayyaf.

"He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-Iraqi demonstrators," says a Philippine government source, who continued, "[Philippine intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking."

An analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an "established network" of terrorists in the country. Hussein had also met with members of the New People's Army, a Communist opposition group on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups, in his office at the embassy. According to a Philippine government official, the Philippine National Police uncovered documents in a New People's Army compound that indicate the Iraqi embassy had provided funding for the group. Hisham Hussein and two other Iraqi embassy employees were ordered out of the Philippines on February 14, 2003.

Interestingly, an Abu Sayyaf leader named Hamsiraji Sali at least twice publicly boasted that his group received funding from Iraq. For instance, on March 2, 2003, he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the Iraqi regime had provided the terrorist group with 1million pesos--about $20,000--each year since 2000.

Another item from the Iraq-Philippines files is a "security report" prepared by the Iraqi embassy's third secretary, Ahmad Mahmud Ghalib, and sent to Baghdad by Ambassador Samarmad. The report provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Iraqi Intelligence operation in the Philippines. A cover memo from the ambassador, dated April 12, 2001, gives an overview: "The report contain[s] a variety of issues including intelligence issues and how the Philippines, American and Zionist intelligence operate in the Philippines, especially the movements of the American intelligence in their efforts to fight terrorism and recruiting a variety of nationalities, particularly Arabs."

Ghalib's report is a rambling account of a phone conversation he had with an Iraqi intelligence informer named Muhammad al-Zanki, an Iraqi citizen living in the Philippines, who is referred to throughout the document as Abu Ahmad. The embassy official is looking for information on a third person, an informer named Omar Ghazal, and believes that Abu Ahmad might have some. (To review: Salah Samarmad is the Iraqi ambassador; Ahmad Mahmud Ghalib is the embassy's third secretary, most likely an Iraqi intelligence officer and author of the "security report"; Abu Ahmad is an Iraqi intelligence informer; and Omar Ghazal is another Iraqi intelligence informer.)

As the conversation begins, Abu Ahmad tells his embassy contact that he doesn't know where Omar Ghazal is and would have told the embassy if he did. He then tells the embassy contact that when he called Omar Ghazal's aunt to check on his whereabouts, she used a word in Tagalog--walana--which means "not here." But Abu Ahmad says its connotations are not good. "That word is used when you target one of the personnel who are assigned to complete everything (full mission). Then they announce that he is traveling and so on, and that's what I'm afraid of." The Iraqi embassy contact asks him to elaborate. "I have been exposed to that same phrase before, when I asked about an individual, and later on I found out that he was physically eliminated and no one knows anything about him."

The embassy official assures Abu Ahmad that Iraqi intelligence has also lost track of Ghazal, and became alarmed when he abruptly stopped attending soccer practice at a local college. Abu Ahmad fears the worst. "I'm afraid they might have killed him and I'm very worried about him," he says, according to the report. "The method that those people use is terrible and that's why I refuse to work with them."

The Iraqi embassy official interrupts Abu Ahmad. "Who are they? I would like to know who they are."

"Didn't I tell you before who they are?"

"No."

"The office group," says Abu Ahmad.

"Which office?" asks his Iraqi embassy handler.

"A long time ago the American FBI opened up an office in the Philippines, under American supervision and that there are Philippine Intelligence groups that work there. The goal of the office is to fight international terrorism (in the Philippines of course) and they have employees from various nationalities that speak of peace and international terrorism and how important it is to put an end to terrorism. The office also has other espionage affairs involving Arab citizens to work with them in order to provide them with information on the Arabs who are living in the Philippines and also for other spying purposes."

Abu Ahmad continues: "They also monitor diplomacy, and after I tried to lessen my amount of office work, I became aware that the office group was trying to get in contact with the person who is in charge of temporary work, Malik al-Athir, when he was alone."

Abu Ahmad tells his Iraqi embassy contact, Ghalib, that "the office" was trying to recruit an Arab to monitor Arab citizens in the Philippines. The Iraqi embassy contact suggests that Abu Ahmad volunteer for the job. Abu Ahmad says he had other plans. "I am leaving after I finish selling my house and properties and will move to Peshawar [Pakistan]. There I will be supplied with materials, weapons, explosives, and get married and then move to America. Do you know that there are more than one thousand Iraqi extremists who perform heroism jobs?" The speaker presumably means martyrdom operations.

The Iraqi embassy contact asks Abu Ahmad how he knows that those people are not "Saudis, Kuwaitis, Iranians."

Abu Ahmad replies: "They are bin Laden's people and all of them are extremists and they are heroes. Do you want me to give you their names?"

"Why not? Yes, I want them," says the Iraqi embassy contact.

"I will supply you with the names very soon. I will write some for you because I am in touch with them," says Abu Ahmad.

This report raises more questions than it answers. Who is Omar Ghazal and why did he disappear? What is the "office group" and how is it connected to Americans? What happened to Abu Ahmad? Were his stated plans--moving to Peshawar to obtain weapons and explosives and then moving to the United States--just bluster to impress his Iraqi embassy handler? A way to discontinue his work for the Iraqi regime? Or was he serious? Is he here now?

A second internal Iraqi file obtained by The Weekly Standard concerns relations between Iraqi Intelligence and Saudi opposition groups. The document was apparently compiled at some point after January 1997, judging by the most recent date in the text, and discusses four Saudi opposition groups: the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights, the Reform and Advice Committee (Osama bin Laden), People of al Jazeera Union Organization, and the Saudi Hezbollah.

The New York Times first reported on the existence of this file on June 25, 2004. "American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization." According to the Times, a Pentagon task force "concluded that the document 'appeared authentic,' and that it 'corroborates and expands on previous reporting' about contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan, according to the task force's analysis."

The most provocative aspect of the document is the discussion of efforts to seek cooperation between Iraqi Intelligence and the Saudi opposition group run by bin Laden, known to the Iraqis as the "Reform and Advice Committee." The translation of that section appears below.

We moved towards the committee by doing the following:

A. During the visit of the Sudanese Dr. Ibrahim al-Sanusi to Iraq and his meeting with Mr. Uday Saddam Hussein, on December 13, 1994, in the presence of the respectable, Mr. Director of the Intelligence Service, he [Dr. al-Sanusi] pointed out that the opposing Osama bin Laden, residing in Sudan, is reserved and afraid to be depicted by his enemies as an agent of Iraq. We prepared to meet him in Sudan (The Honorable Presidency was informed of the results of the meeting in our letter 782 on December 17, 1994).

B. An approval to meet with opposer Osama bin Laden by the Intelligence Services was given by the Honorable Presidency in its letter 138, dated January 11, 1995 (attachment 6). He [bin Laden] was met by the previous general director of M4 in Sudan and in the presence of the Sudanese, Ibrahim al-Sanusi, on February 19, 1995. We discussed with him his organization. He requested the broadcast of the speeches of Sheikh Sulayman al-Uda (who has influence within Saudi Arabia and outside due to being a well known religious and influential personality) and to designate a program for them through the broadcast directed inside Iraq, and to perform joint operations against the foreign forces in the land of Hijaz. (The Honorable Presidency was informed of the details of the meeting in our letter 370 on March 4, 1995, attachment 7.)

C. The approval was received from the Leader, Mr. President, may God keep him, to designate a program for them through the directed broadcast. We were left to develop the relationship and the cooperation between the two sides to see what other doors of cooperation and agreement open up. The Sudanese side was informed of the Honorable Presidency's agreement above, through the representative of the Respectable Director of Intelligence Services, our Ambassador in Khartoum.

D. Due to the recent situation of Sudan and being accused of supporting and embracing of terrorism, an agreement with the opposing Saudi Osama bin Laden was reached. The agreement required him to leave Sudan to another area. He left Khartoum in July 1996. The information we have indicates that he is currently in Afghanistan. The relationship with him is ongoing through the Sudanese side. Currently we are working to invigorate this relationship through a new channel in light of his present location.

(It should be noted that the documents given to The Weekly Standard did not include the attachments, letters to and from Saddam Hussein about the status of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. And the last sentence differs slightly from the version provided to the New York Times. In the Weekly Standard document, Iraq is seeking to "invigorate" its relationship with al Qaeda; in the Times translation, Iraq is seeking to "continue" that relationship.)

Another passage of the Iraq-Saudi opposition memo details the relationship between the Iraqi regime and the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR), founded by Dr. Muhammad Abdallah al-Massari. Once again, Dr. Ibrahim al-Sanusi, the senior Sudanese government official, was a key liaison between the two sides. Al-Massari is widely regarded as an ideological mouthpiece for al Qaeda, a designation he does little to dispute. His radio station broadcasts al Qaeda propaganda, and his website features the rantings of prominent jihadists. He has lived in London for more than a decade. The Iraqi Intelligence memo recounts two meetings involving Dr. al-Sanusi and CDLR representatives in 1994 and reports that al-Massari requested assistance from the Iraqi regime for a trip to Iraq.

In 1995, the Iraqis turned to another Saudi to facilitate their relationship with al-Massari. According to the Iraqi memo, Ahmid Khudir al-Zahrani was a diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington who applied for political asylum in the United States. His application was denied, and al-Zahrani contacted the Iraqi embassy in London, seeking asylum in Iraq. His timing was good. Al-Zahrani's request came just as Iraqis were stepping up efforts to establish better relations with the Saudi opposition. According to the Iraqi Intelligence memo:

A complete plan was put in place to bring the aforementioned [al-Zahrani] to Iraq in coordination with the Foreign Ministry and our [intelligence] station in Khartoum [Sudan]. He and his family were issued Iraqi passports with pseudonyms by our embassy in Khartoum. He arrived to Iraq on April 21, 1995, and multiple meetings were held with him to obtain information about the Saudi opposition.

These contacts were not, contrary to the speculation of some Middle East experts, simply an effort to keep tabs on an enemy. The memo continues, summarizing Iraqi Intelligence activities:

We are in the process of following up on the subject, to try and establish a nucleus of Saudi opposition in Iraq, and use our relationship with [al-Massari] to serve our intelligence goals.

The final document provided to The Weekly Standard is a translation of a memo from the "Republican Command, Intelligence Division," dated September 15, 2001. It is addressed to "Mr. M.A.M.5."

Our Afghani source number 11002 (his biographic information in attachment #1) has provided us information that the Afghani consul Ahmed Dahestani (his biographic information attachment #2) has talked in front of him about the following:

1. That Osama bin Laden and the Taliban group in Afghanistan are in communication with Iraq and that previously a group of Taliban and Osama bin Laden have visited Iraq.

2. That America has evidence that the Iraqi government and the group of Osama bin Laden have cooperated to attack targets inside America.

3. In the event that it has been proven that the group of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban planning such operations, it is possible that America will attack Iraq and Afghanistan.

4. That the Afghani consul heard of the relation between Iraq and the group of Osama bin Laden while he was in Iran.

5. In the light of what has been presented, we suggest to write to the committee of information.

This document is speculative in parts, and the information it contains is third-hand at best. Its value depends on the credibility of "source number 11002" and of Ahmed Dahestani and of the sources Dahestani relied on, all of which are unknown.

We are left, then, with three small pieces to add to a large and elaborate puzzle. We will never have a complete picture of the Iraqi regime's support for global terrorism, but the coming release of a flood of captured documents should get us closer.

A new and highly illuminating article in Foreign Affairs draws on hundreds of Iraqi documents to provide a look at the Iraq war from the Iraqi perspective. The picture that emerges is that of an Iraqi regime built on a foundation of paranoia and lies and eager to attack its perceived enemies, internal and external. This paragraph is notable:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Think about that last sentence.

[Malsua]

Here's some more fuel.

-Mal

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http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=29746

Saddam, Al Qaeda Did Collaborate, Documents Show

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 24, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/29746
CAIRO, Egypt - A former Democratic senator and 9/11 commissioner says a recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a "significant set of facts," and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

In an interview yesterday, the current president of the New School University, Bob Kerrey, was careful to say that new documents translated last night by ABC News did not prove Saddam Hussein played a role in any way in plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Nonetheless, the former senator from Nebraska said that the new document shows that "Saddam was a significant enemy of the United States." Mr. Kerrey said he believed America's understanding of the deposed tyrant's relationship with Al Qaeda would become much deeper as more captured Iraqi documents and audiotapes are disclosed.

Last night ABC News reported on five recently declassified documents captured in Iraq. One of these was a handwritten account of a February 19, 1995, meeting between an official representative of Iraq and Mr. bin Laden himself, where Mr. bin Laden broached the idea of "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. The document, which has no official stamps or markers, reports that when Saddam was informed of the meeting on March 4, 1995 he agreed to broadcast sermons of a radical imam, Suleiman al Ouda, requested by Mr. bin Laden.

The question of future cooperation is left an open question. According to the ABC News translation, the captured document says, "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what's open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation." ABC notes in their report that terrorists, believed to be Al Qaeda, attacked the Saudi National Guard headquarters on November 13, 1995.

The new documents suggest that the 9/11 commission's final conclusion in 2004, that there were no "operational" ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, may need to be reexamined in light of the recently captured documents.

While the commission detailed some contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 1990s, in Sudan and Afghanistan, the newly declassified Iraqi documents provide more detail than the commission disclosed in its final conclusions. For example, the fact that Saddam broadcast the ser mons of al-Ouda at bin Laden's request was previously unknown, as was a conversation about possible collaboration on attacks against Saudi Arabia.

"This is a very significant set of facts," former 9/11 commissioner, Mr. Kerry said yesterday. "I personally and strongly believe you don't have to prove that Iraq was collaborating against Osama bin Laden on the September 11 attacks to prove he was an enemy and that he would collaborate with people who would do our country harm. This presents facts should not be used to tie Saddam to attacks on September 11. It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States."

Mr. Kerry also answered affirmatively when asked whether or not the release of more of the documents captured in Iraq could possibly shed further light on Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda. The former senator was one of the staunchest supporters of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which made the policy of regime change U.S. law.

However, Mr. Kerry has also been a critic of how the administration has waged the campaign in Baghdad, which he calls the "third Iraq war," meaning that the period between the invasions of 1991 and 2003 was a prolonged military engagement.

The directorate of national intelligence with the U.S. Army foreign military studies office has begun to make over 50,000 boxes of documents and some 3,000 hours of audio tape captured in Iraq available on the Web at http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm. The release of these files comes after the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, threatened to introduce legislation that would force the federal government to make the new information available.

A reporter for the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayes, yesterday said he thought the memorandum of the 1995 meeting demolishes the view of some terrorism experts that bin Laden and Saddam were incapable of cooperating for ideological and doctrinal reasons.

"Clearly from this document bin Laden was willing to work with Saddam to achieve his ends, and clearly from this document Saddam did not immediately reject the idea of working with bin Laden," Mr. Hayes said. "It is possible that documents will emerge later that suggest skepticism on the part of Iraqis to working with bin Laden, but this makes clear that there was a relationship."

Mr. Hayes's story this week makes the case that the Iraqi embassy in Manila was funding and keeping close tabs on the Al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf.

[Ryan Ruck]

Saddam Regime Document: Iraqi Intelligence met with Bin Laden in 1995 (Translation)

In the Pentagon/FMSO document ISGZ-2004-009247 there is a clear report about the relation between Iraq and Bin Laden that dated back to 1995. This document contains a 9 page report from the Iraqi Intelligence Apparatus and it is titled “The Saudi Opposition and Achieving the Relation and Contact With Them”. In the report they talk about there meeting with Osama Bin Laden and that Bin Laden in 1995 and how to establish relations with him. In the meeting Bin Laden asked the Iraqis for joint operations with them against the Foreign forces (US military) in the land of Hijaz (Saudia or Saudi Arabia).

I did a partial translation of the report that is related to Osama Bin Laden

(Translation of Part of Page 1)

In the Name of God the Most Merciful and the Most Compassionate.

The Saudi Opposition and Achieving the Relation and Contact With Them

(Translation of part of Page 4)

2. The Commission of Reform and Advise

Lead by the Saudi Osama Bin Laden who belongs to a wealthy Saudi family with her roots go back to Hadramoot and connected strongly with the ruling family in Saudia, and he is one of the leaders of the Arab Afghan who volunteered for Jihad in Afghanistan, and after the expulsion of the Soviets he moved to stay in Sudan in the year 1992 after the arrival of the Islamists to power in Sudan.

And because of his stands against the Saudi Royal family because of the foreign presence inside it, the Saudi authorities made a decision to withdraw his Saudi citizenship, and we moved toward The Commission from our side and through the following:

Translation of page 5

A. During the visit of the Sudanese Dr. Abrahim Al Sanoosi to the country and his meeting with Mr. Uday Saddam Hussein on 13/12/1994 and with the presence of the respectful Sir the Director of the Apparatus he indicated that the opposition person Osama Bin Laden who is staying in Sudan and who was cautious and fears that he will be accused by his opponents that he became an agent for Iraq, is ready to meet with him in Sudan (The results of the meeting were written to the Honorable Presidency according to our letter 872 on 17/12/1994).

B. The approval of the Honorable Presidency was granted to meet with the opposition person Osama Bin Laden by the Apparatus according to letter 128 on 11/1/1995 (attachment 6) and the meting with him was completed by Mr. M.A ex-4th Directory in Sudan and with the presence of the Sudanese Dr. Abrahim AL Sanoosi on 19/2/1995 and a discussion occurred about his organization, and he requested the broadcasting of Sheikh Sleiman Al Awada (who has influence in Saudia and outside since he is a known and influential religious personality) and dedicate a program for them through the station directed inside the country and make joint operations against the forces of infidels in the land of Hijaz ( the Honorable Presidency has been notified with the details of the meeting according to our letter 370 in 4/3/1995 attachment 7).

Translation of page 6

C. The approval of Mr. President the Leader God protect him was granted to dedicate and program for them through the station directed and we leave to develop the relation and cooperation between the two sides what open in front of it in discussion and agreement through other cooperation doors. The Sudanese side was informed about the approval of the Honorable Presidency above through the representative of the respectful Sir the Director of the Apparatus our ambassador in Khartoom.

D. Due to the latest conditions in Sudan and accusing her harboring of supporting and harboring terrorism it was agreed with the opposition person the Saudi Osama Bin Laden to leave Sudan to another place where he left Khartoom in the month of July 1996 and the information indicate that he is Afghanistan at the present moment. There is still relation with him through the Sudanese side and we work in the present moment to activate this relation with him through a new channel in light of the current place where he stays.

[Sean Osborne]

Here is the bombshell we'va all been patiently waiting for.



March 2001 Document: Saddam Regime Recruits Suicide Terrorists to Hit US Interests (Translation)
Pentagon/FMSO Iraq Pre-War documents ^| April 5 2006 | jveritas


Posted on 04/05/2006 10:38:07 PM EDT by jveritas


Page 6 from document BIAP 2003-000654 is a Top Secret letter dated March/11/2001 six months prior to 9/11/2001, proves that not only Saddam Regime supported terrorists organization like Hamas and Al Qaeda as we have learned from other documents but also they were recruiting Suicide Terrorist Bombers to hit US interests. Saddam Regime was a TERRORIST REGIME and there was no other way but to destroy it after 9/11.


Beginning of the translation of page 6 from document BIAP 2003-000654

In the Name of God the Merciful The Compassionate

Top Secret

The Command of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base

No 3/6/104

Date 11 March 2001

To all the Units

Subject: Volunteer for Suicide Mission

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

Air Brigadier General
Abdel Magid Hammot Ali
Commander of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base

Air Colonel
Mohamad Majed Mohamadi.

End of translation of page 6

[Ryan Ruck]

Iraq's Terror Ties

It's only been weeks since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence started releasing captured documents from Iraq and Afghanistan. True, nobody has uncovered a smoking gun or sputtering explosive, much less a cache of weapons of mass destruction. But it's early in the process, and what we have seen so far clearly vindicates those who found Saddam Hussein's thugocracy unacceptable in a post-9/11 world.

The new material includes a kind of primer on Saddam's spy agency, Mukhabarat. It's a document in English off the Federation of American Scientists Web site. A cover page and notes in Arabic accompany the analysis: "You will find below some relevant information about the intelligence published on the Internet. It is clear that the information is somewhat old, but nevertheless it contains some important and accurate details . . . ."

Those details include a rundown on the Mukhabarat's manifold operations. One office tests and produces "weapons, poisons and explosives: for covert offensive operations." Another directorate works "outside Iraq in coordination with other directorates, focusing on operations of sabotage and assassination." And another sets up and trains "agents for clandestine operations abroad."

But that couldn't mean Saddam supported terrorism, could it? After all, aren't we repeatedly told that Saddam's Iraq had no ties to terrorists in general and al-Qaida in particular? Well, the same document mentions that "special six-week courses in the use of terror techniques are provided at a camp in Radwaniyah" and you don't find the Iraqi analyst writing "Liar, liar, pants on fire" in Arabic on the margins.

Moreover, other recently released documents reveal specific terror connections. In June 2001, for example, the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines sent an eight-page fax to Baghdad about Abu Sayyaf. That's the al-Qaida-connected terror group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law. The fax suggests Iraq was funding Abu Sayyaf through Libya until the jihadists started kidnapping tourists, including three Americans, and attracting international attention in June 2001. "The kidnappers were formerly . . . receiving money and purchasing combat weapons," the ambassador wrote. "From now on we are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them."

But Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law is one thing. Bin Laden himself is another. Didn't the 9/11 Commission tell us there was no "collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida? That's true, but the commission didn't say there was no relationship at all, and several of the commissioners said there was still more to learn.

Here's some of the more. ABC News and The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes have reported on one Iraqi document that was written sometime after January 1997. It discusses relations between Saddam's regime and bin Laden in the 1990s -- meetings between Saddam's representatives and bin Laden in Sudan, the al-Qaida leader's request for help (to broadcast a radical preacher's speeches and engage in joint operations against the foreign forces in Saudi Arabia) and Saddam's approval of the broadcasts and the exploration of future cooperation.

"Due to the recent situation of Sudan and being accused of supporting and embracing of terrorism, an agreement with the opposing Saudi Osama bin Laden was reached," Iraqi intelligence reported. "The agreement required him to leave Sudan to another area. He left Khartoum in July 1996. The information we have indicates that he is currently in Afghanistan. The relationship with him is ongoing through the Sudanese side. Currently we are working to invigorate this relationship through a new channel in light of his present location."

Now what could that have meant?

Of course, one document or a set of documents won't provide a clear picture of Saddam's terror ties. Regimes intent on invigorating relationships with terrorists don't always write down every detail. But the first findings from the U.S. government's document dump offer an instructive glimpse into the twilight world of Saddam and global terrorists. Happily it's a world we'll only experience through the archives now that coalition forces have dispatched Saddam's regime to the dustbin of history.

[Ryan Ruck]

Document: Iraqi Intelligence To Train Arab Feedayeen Terrorists In the Year 2000 (Translation)

Earlier we have seen the translation of document ISGP-2003-00028868 (see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1600367/posts ) where it talks about Training Non Iraqi Foreign Arab Terrorists in February 2003 to help the Iraqis in their war against the coalition forces. Some may have dismissed this document by saying that the Iraqis wanted every possible help on the eve of the war, and thus they argued that there was no connection between Saddam and terrorists. However now comes this Iraqi Intelligence document CMPC-2003-005935 that is dated November 22 1999 and it talks about the plan for the year 2000 and that includes the Training of Arab Feedayeens which mean training non Iraqi Foreign Arab Terrorists. Who are those Feedayeen Foreign Arab Terrorists? Are they Al Qaeda, Hamas, etc…? This document is another proof of Saddam great connection to Terrorism and dated back to the year 1999-2000, a long rooted connection to terrorism. Saddam Regime is a TERRORIST REGIME and we had all the rights to remove him after 9/11/2001.

Beginning of the translation of page 2 of document CMPC-2003-005935

In the Name of God the Most Merciful the Most Compassionate

The Presidency of the Republic

The Intelligence Apparatus

Mr: The Respected Director

Subject: Projects of a Plan

Below are projects of the plan for the year 2000 and according to the budget suggested for it in the spending budget of the year 2000 and as follow:

1. Prepare an armored brief case to protect the VIPs 180 days.

2. Study on the Epoxy used currently in preparing the IEDs and the possibility of finding another type that will not affect the explosive.

3. Studies and researches of the materials that increase the intensity of the explosive.

4. Prepare theoretical and applied lessons on the popular explosives 120 days.

5. Training of the Arab Feedayeens- within the plan of the year 2000.

Establish tournaments specialized in the explosives 30 days

Please review and your command with regards

Signature…

Khaled Ibrahim Ismail

Senior Chemist

22/11/99

End of page translation.

[Sean Osborne]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...1/990ieqmb.asp


Saddam's Philippines Terror Connection

And other revelations from the Iraqi regime files.

by Stephen F. Hayes
03/27/2006, Volume 011, Issue 26

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq.An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The fax comes from the vast collection of documents recovered in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Up to this point, those materials have been kept from the American public. Now the proverbial dam has broken. On March 16, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February. Earlier last week, Foreign Affairs magazine published a lengthy article based on a review of 700 Iraqi documents by analysts with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Plans for the release of many more documents have been announced. And if the contents of the recently released materials and other documents obtained by The Weekly Standardare any indication, the discussion of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is about to get more interesting. Several months ago, The Weekly Standardreceived a set of English-language documents from a senior U.S. government official. The official represented this material as U.S. government translations of three captured Iraqi documents. According to this source, the documents had been examined by the U.S. intelligence community and judged "consistent with authentic documents"--the professionals' way of saying that these items cannot definitively be certified but seem to be the real thing. The Weekly Standardchecked its English-language documents with officials serving elsewhere in the federal government to make sure they were consistent with the versions these officials had seen. With what one person characterized as "minor discrepancies," they are. One of the three documents has been posted in the original Arabic on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A subsequent translation of that document is nearly identical to the English-language text that we were given. These documents add to the growing body of evidence confirming the Iraqi regime's longtime support for terrorism abroad. The first of them, a series of memos from the spring of 2001, shows that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, despite the reservations of some IIS officials. The second, an internal Iraqi Intelligence memo on the relationships between the IIS and Saudi opposition groups, records that Osama bin Laden requested Iraqi cooperation on terrorism and propaganda and that in January 1997 the Iraqi regime was eager to continue its relationship with bin Laden. The third, a September 15, 2001, report from an Iraqi Intelligence source in Afghanistan, contains speculation about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and the likely U.S. response to it. ON JUNE 6, 2001, the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines sent an eight-page fax to Baghdad. Ambassador Salah Samarmad's dispatch to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry concerned an Abu Sayyaf kidnapping a week earlier that had garnered international attention. Twenty civilians--including three Americans--had been taken from Dos Palmas Resort on Palawan Island in the southern Philippines. There had been fighting between the kidnappers and the Filipino military, Samarmad reported. Several hostages had escaped, and others were released. "After the release of nine of the hostages, an announcement from the FBI appeared in newspapers announcing their desire to interview the escaped Filipinos in order to make a decision on the status of the three American hostages," the Iraqi ambassador wrote to his superiors in Baghdad. "The embassy stated what was mentioned above. The three American hostages were a missionary husband and wife who had lived in the Philippines for a while, Martin and Gracia Burnham, from Kansas City, and Guillermo Sobrero, from California. They are still in the hands of the Abu Sayyaf kidnappers from a total of 20 people who were kidnapped from (Dos Palmas) resort on Palawan Island." (Except where noted, parentheses, brackets, and ellipses appear in the documents quoted.) The report notes that the Iraqis were now trying to be seen as helpful and keep a safe distance from Abu Sayyaf. "We have all cooperated in the field of intelligence information with some of our friends to encourage the tourists and the investors in the Philippines." But Samarmad's report seems to confirm that this is a change. "The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them." Samarmad's dispatch appears to be the final installment in a series of internal Iraqi regime memos from March through June 2001. (The U.S. government translated some of these documents in full and summarized others.) The memos contain a lengthy discussion among Iraqi officials--from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Iraqi Intelligence Service--about the wisdom of using a Libyan intelligence front as a way to channel Iraqi support for Abu Sayyaf without the risks of dealing directly with the group. (The Libyan regime had intervened in an Abu Sayyaf kidnapping in 2000, securing the release of several hostages by paying several million dollars in ransom. Some observers saw this as an effort by Muammar Qaddafi to improve his image; others saw it as an effort to provide support to Abu Sayyaf by paying the ransom demanded by the group. Both were probably right.) One Iraqi memo, from the "Republican Presidency, Intelligence Apparatus" to someone identified only as D4/4, makes the case for supporting the work of the Qaddafi Charity Establishment to help Abu Sayyaf. The memo is dated March 18, 2001. 1. There are connections between the Qaddafi Charity Establishment and the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines; meanwhile, this establishment is providing material support to them. 2. This establishment is one of the Libyan Intelligence fronts. 3. The Tripoli post has indicated that there is a possibility to form what connections are available with this establishment as it can offer the premise of providing food supplies to [Ed: word missing] in the scope of the agreement statement. Please review . . . it appears of intelligence value to proceed into connections with this establishment and its intelligence investments in the Abu Sayyaf group. The short response, two days later: Mr. Dept. 3: Study this idea, the pros and the cons, the relative reactions, and any other remarks regarding this. That exchange above was fully translated by U.S. government translators. The two pages of correspondence that follow it in the Iraqi files were not, but a summary of those pages informs readers that the Iraqi response "discourages the supporting of connections with the Abu Sayyaf group, as the group works against the Philippine government and relies on several methods for material gain, such as kidnapping foreigners, demanding ransoms, as well as being accused by the Philippine government of terrorist acts and drug smuggling." These accusations were, of course, well founded. On June 12, 2001, six days after Samarmad's dispatch, authorities found the beheaded body of Guillermo Sobrero near the Abu Sayyaf camp. Martin Burnham was killed a year later during the rescue attempt that freed his wife. A thorough understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Abu Sayyaf (the name, honoring Afghan jihadi Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, means "Father of the Sword") will not come from an analysis of three months' correspondence between Manila and Baghdad in 2001. While it is certainly significant to read in internal Iraqi documents that the regime was at one time funding Abu Sayyaf, we do not now have a complete picture of that relationship. Why did the Iraqis begin funding Abu Sayyaf, which had long been considered a regional terrorist group concerned mainly with making money? Why did they suspend their support in 2001? And why did the Iraqis resume this relationship and, according to the congressional testimony of one State Department regional specialist, intensify it? ON MARCH 26, 2003, as war raged in Iraq, the State Department's Matthew Daley testified before Congress. Daley, the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told a subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee that he was worried about Abu Sayyaf. "We're concerned that they have what I would call operational links to Iraqi intelligence services. And they're a danger, they're an enemy of the Philippines, they're an enemy of the United States, and we want very much to help the government in Manila deal with this challenge," Daley told the panel. Responding to a question, Daley elaborated. "There is good reason to believe that a member of the Abu Sayyaf Group who has been involved in terrorist activities was in direct contact with an IIS officer in the Iraqi Embassy in Manila. This individual was subsequently expelled from the Philippines for engaging in activities that were incompatible with his diplomatic status." This individual was Hisham Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi Embassy in Manila. And Daley was right to be concerned. Eighteen months before his testimony, a young Filipino man rode his Honda motorcycle up a dusty road to a shanty strip mall just outside Camp Enrile Malagutay in Zamboanga City, Philippines. The camp was host to American troops stationed in the south of the country to train with Filipino soldiers fighting terrorists. The man parked his bike and began to examine its gas tank. Seconds later, the tank exploded, sending nails in all directions and killing the rider almost instantly. The blast damaged six nearby stores and ripped the front off of a café that doubled as a karaoke bar. The café was popular with American soldiers. And on this day, October 2, 2002, SFC Mark Wayne Jackson was killed there and a fellow soldier was severely wounded. Eyewitnesses almost immediately identified the bomber as an Abu Sayyaf terrorist. One week before the attack, Abu Sayyaf leaders had promised a campaign of terror directed at the "enemies of Islam"--Westerners and the non-Muslim Filipino majority. And one week after the attack, Abu Sayyaf attempted to strike again, this time with a bomb placed on the playground of the San Roque Elementary School. It did not detonate. Authorities recovered the cell phone that was to have set it off and analyzed incoming and outgoing calls. As they might have expected, they discovered several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein's only contact with Abu Sayyaf. "He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-Iraqi demonstrators," says a Philippine government source, who continued, "[Philippine intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking." An analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an "established network" of terrorists in the country. Hussein had also met with members of the New People's Army, a Communist opposition group on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups, in his office at the embassy. According to a Philippine government official, the Philippine National Police uncovered documents in a New People's Army compound that indicate the Iraqi embassy had provided funding for the group. Hisham Hussein and two other Iraqi embassy employees were ordered out of the Philippines on February 14, 2003. Interestingly, an Abu Sayyaf leader named Hamsiraji Sali at least twice publicly boasted that his group received funding from Iraq. For instance, on March 2, 2003, he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the Iraqi regime had provided the terrorist group with 1million pesos--about $20,000--each year since 2000. ANOTHER ITEM from the Iraq-Philippines files is a "security report" prepared by the Iraqi embassy's third secretary, Ahmad Mahmud Ghalib, and sent to Baghdad by Ambassador Samarmad. The report provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Iraqi Intelligence operation in the Philippines. A cover memo from the ambassador, dated April 12, 2001, gives an overview: "The report contain[s] a variety of issues including intelligence issues and how the Philippines, American and Zionist intelligence operate in the Philippines, especially the movements of the American intelligence in their efforts to fight terrorism and recruiting a variety of nationalities, particularly Arabs." Ghalib's report is a rambling account of a phone conversation he had with an Iraqi intelligence informer named Muhammad al-Zanki, an Iraqi citizen living in the Philippines, who is referred to throughout the document as Abu Ahmad. The embassy official is looking for information on a third person, an informer named Omar Ghazal, and believes that Abu Ahmad might have some. (To review: Salah Samarmad is the Iraqi ambassador; Ahmad Mahmud Ghalib is the embassy's third secretary, most likely an Iraqi intelligence officer and author of the "security report"; Abu Ahmad is an Iraqi intelligence informer; and Omar Ghazal is another Iraqi intelligence informer.) As the conversation begins, Abu Ahmad tells his embassy contact that he doesn't know where Omar Ghazal is and would have told the embassy if he did. He then tells the embassy contact that when he called Omar Ghazal's aunt to check on his whereabouts, she used a word in Tagalog--walana--which means "not here." But Abu Ahmad says its connotations are not good. "That word is used when you target one of the personnel who are assigned to complete everything (full mission). Then they announce that he is traveling and so on, and that's what I'm afraid of." The Iraqi embassy contact asks him to elaborate. "I have been exposed to that same phrase before, when I asked about an individual, and later on I found out that he was physically eliminated and no one knows anything about him." The embassy official assures Abu Ahmad that Iraqi intelligence has also lost track of Ghazal, and became alarmed when he abruptly stopped attending soccer practice at a local college. Abu Ahmad fears the worst. "I'm afraid they might have killed him and I'm very worried about him," he says, according to the report. "The method that those people use is terrible and that's why I refuse to work with them." The Iraqi embassy official interrupts Abu Ahmad. "Who are they? I would like to know who they are." "Didn't I tell you before who they are?" "No." "The office group," says Abu Ahmad. "Which office?" asks his Iraqi embassy handler. "A long time ago the American FBI opened up an office in the Philippines, under American supervision and that there are Philippine Intelligence groups that work there. The goal of the office is to fight international terrorism (in the Philippines of course) and they have employees from various nationalities that speak of peace and international terrorism and how important it is to put an end to terrorism. The office also has other espionage affairs involving Arab citizens to work with them in order to provide them with information on the Arabs who are living in the Philippines and also for other spying purposes." Abu Ahmad continues: "They also monitor diplomacy, and after I tried to lessen my amount of office work, I became aware that the office group was trying to get in contact with the person who is in charge of temporary work, Malik al-Athir, when he was alone." Abu Ahmad tells his Iraqi embassy contact, Ghalib, that "the office" was trying to recruit an Arab to monitor Arab citizens in the Philippines. The Iraqi embassy contact suggests that Abu Ahmad volunteer for the job. Abu Ahmad says he had other plans. "I am leaving after I finish selling my house and properties and will move to Peshawar [Pakistan]. There I will be supplied with materials, weapons, explosives, and get married and then move to America. Do you know that there are more than one thousand Iraqi extremists who perform heroism jobs?" The speaker presumably means martyrdom operations. The Iraqi embassy contact asks Abu Ahmad how he knows that those people are not "Saudis, Kuwaitis, Iranians." Abu Ahmad replies: "They are bin Laden's people and all of them are extremists and they are heroes. Do you want me to give you their names?" "Why not? Yes, I want them," says the Iraqi embassy contact. "I will supply you with the names very soon. I will write some for you because I am in touch with them," says Abu Ahmad. This report raises more questions than it answers. Who is Omar Ghazal and why did he disappear? What is the "office group" and how is it connected to Americans? What happened to Abu Ahmad? Were his stated plans--moving to Peshawar to obtain weapons and explosives and then moving to the United States--just bluster to impress his Iraqi embassy handler? A way to discontinue his work for the Iraqi regime? Or was he serious? Is he here now? ASECOND internal Iraqi file obtained by The Weekly Standardconcerns relations between Iraqi Intelligence and Saudi opposition groups. The document was apparently compiled at some point after January 1997, judging by the most recent date in the text, and discusses four Saudi opposition groups: the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights, the Reform and Advice Committee (Osama bin Laden), People of al Jazeera Union Organization, and the Saudi Hezbollah. The New York Times first reported on the existence of this file on June 25, 2004. "American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization." According to the Times,a Pentagon task force "concluded that the document 'appeared authentic,' and that it 'corroborates and expands on previous reporting' about contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan, according to the task force's analysis." The most provocative aspect of the document is the discussion of efforts to seek cooperation between Iraqi Intelligence and the Saudi opposition group run by bin Laden, known to the Iraqis as the "Reform and Advice Committee." The translation of that section appears below. We moved towards the committee by doing the following: A. During the visit of the Sudanese Dr. Ibrahim al-Sanusi to Iraq and his meeting with Mr. Uday Saddam Hussein, on December 13, 1994, in the presence of the respectable, Mr. Director of the Intelligence Service, he [Dr. al-Sanusi] pointed out that the opposing Osama bin Laden, residing in Sudan, is reserved and afraid to be depicted by his enemies as an agent of Iraq. We prepared to meet him in Sudan (The Honorable Presidency was informed of the results of the meeting in our letter 782 on December 17, 1994). B. An approval to meet with opposer Osama bin Laden by the Intelligence Services was given by the Honorable Presidency in its letter 138, dated January 11, 1995 (attachment 6). He [bin Laden] was met by the previous general director of M4 in Sudan and in the presence of the Sudanese, Ibrahim al-Sanusi, on February 19, 1995. We discussed with him his organization. He requested the broadcast of the speeches of Sheikh Sulayman al-Uda (who has influence within Saudi Arabia and outside due to being a well known religious and influential personality) and to designate a program for them through the broadcast directed inside Iraq, and to perform joint operations against the foreign forces in the land of Hijaz. (The Honorable Presidency was informed of the details of the meeting in our letter 370 on March 4, 1995, attachment 7.) C. The approval was received from the Leader, Mr. President, may God keep him, to designate a program for them through the directed broadcast. We were left to develop the relationship and the cooperation between the two sides to see what other doors of cooperation and agreement open up. The Sudanese side was informed of the Honorable Presidency's agreement above, through the representative of the Respectable Director of Intelligence Services, our Ambassador in Khartoum. D. Due to the recent situation of Sudan and being accused of supporting and embracing of terrorism, an agreement with the opposing Saudi Osama bin Laden was reached. The agreement required him to leave Sudan to another area. He left Khartoum in July 1996. The information we have indicates that he is currently in Afghanistan. The relationship with him is ongoing through the Sudanese side. Currently we are working to invigorate this relationship through a new channel in light of his present location. (It should be noted that the documents given to The Weekly Standard did not include the attachments, letters to and from Saddam Hussein about the status of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. And the last sentence differs slightly from the version provided to the New York Times. In the Weekly Standard document, Iraq is seeking to "invigorate" its relationship with al Qaeda; in the Times translation, Iraq is seeking to "continue" that relationship.) Another passage of the Iraq-Saudi opposition memo details the relationship between the Iraqi regime and the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR), founded by Dr. Muhammad Abdallah al-Massari. Once again, Dr. Ibrahim al-Sanusi, the senior Sudanese government official, was a key liaison between the two sides. Al-Massari is widely regarded as an ideological mouthpiece for al Qaeda, a designation he does little to dispute. His radio station broadcasts al Qaeda propaganda, and his website features the rantings of prominent jihadists. He has lived in London for more than a decade. The Iraqi Intelligence memo recounts two meetings involving Dr. al-Sanusi and CDLR representatives in 1994 and reports that al-Massari requested assistance from the Iraqi regime for a trip to Iraq. In 1995, the Iraqis turned to another Saudi to facilitate their relationship with al-Massari. According to the Iraqi memo, Ahmid Khudir al-Zahrani was a diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington who applied for political asylum in the United States. His application was denied, and al-Zahrani contacted the Iraqi embassy in London, seeking asylum in Iraq. His timing was good. Al-Zahrani's request came just as Iraqis were stepping up efforts to establish better relations with the Saudi opposition. According to the Iraqi Intelligence memo: A complete plan was put in place to bring the aforementioned [al-Zahrani] to Iraq in coordination with the Foreign Ministry and our [intelligence] station in Khartoum [Sudan]. He and his family were issued Iraqi passports with pseudonyms by our embassy in Khartoum. He arrived to Iraq on April 21, 1995, and multiple meetings were held with him to obtain information about the Saudi opposition. These contacts were not, contrary to the speculation of some Middle East experts, simply an effort to keep tabs on an enemy. The memo continues, summarizing Iraqi Intelligence activities: We are in the process of following up on the subject, to try and establish a nucleus of Saudi opposition in Iraq, and use our relationship with [al-Massari] to serve our intelligence goals. The final document provided to The Weekly Standard is a translation of a memo from the "Republican Command, Intelligence Division," dated September 15, 2001. It is addressed to "Mr. M.A.M.5." Our Afghani source number 11002 (his biographic information in attachment #1) has provided us information that the Afghani consul Ahmed Dahestani (his biographic information attachment #2) has talked in front of him about the following: 1. That Osama bin Laden and the Taliban group in Afghanistan are in communication with Iraq and that previously a group of Taliban and Osama bin Laden have visited Iraq. 2. That America has evidence that the Iraqi government and the group of Osama bin Laden have cooperated to attack targets inside America. 3. In the event that it has been proven that the group of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban planning such operations, it is possible that America will attack Iraq and Afghanistan. 4. That the Afghani consul heard of the relation between Iraq and the group of Osama bin Laden while he was in Iran. 5. In the light of what has been presented, we suggest to write to the committee of information. This document is speculative in parts, and the information it contains is third-hand at best. Its value depends on the credibility of "source number 11002" and of Ahmed Dahestani and of the sources Dahestani relied on, all of which are unknown. We are left, then, with three small pieces to add to a large and elaborate puzzle. We will never have a complete picture of the Iraqi regime's support for global terrorism, but the coming release of a flood of captured documents should get us closer. A new and highly illuminating article in Foreign Affairs draws on hundreds of Iraqi documents to provide a look at the Iraq war from the Iraqi perspective. The picture that emerges is that of an Iraqi regime built on a foundation of paranoia and lies and eager to attack its perceived enemies, internal and external. This paragraph is notable: The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion. Think about that last sentence. Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

[Sean Osborne]

http://www.geostrategy-direct.com/geostrategy-direct/secure/2006/05_03/3.asp

Iraqi paper reveals names, locations of Saddam's international intelligence network

The Baghdad newspaper Al-Bayyinah recently published Iraqi intelligence service documents that revealed the names and locations of Saddam’s agents abroad.
The 101 agents include spies in several U.S. ally countries, including Poland, France, Turkey, Sweden, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Australia and Greece.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein listens to prosecutors at his trial. AFP/David Furst

Al-Bayyinah is a weekly published by the Hizbullah Movement in Iraq that is linked to the Shia Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. "Al-Bayyinah continues to publish the lists of names of those who cooperated with the Iraqi intelligence abroad who accepted to violate the dignity of man,” the newspaper reported April 6 in Arabic.
“We leave the reader to judge the weak-spirited Iraqis and Arabs who helped undermine the homeland."
The newspaper produced copies of the agent lists and other documents, including one dated June 7, 2000, from the Presidency Intelligence Service to heads of intelligence branches asking the spy chiefs to prepare a monthly report on plans "to meet with its targets and sources abroad.”
Another Aug. 8, 2000 document from the Presidency Intelligence Service to "M.M/40" requests approval to dispatch Officer Hasan Shihab Ahmad from the Al-Tamim Intelligence Department, a specialist in Turkoman issues within the Olympic Committee delegation known as the "Fencing Union" from Aug. 20 to Aug. 26, 2000 to meet with "collaborator" Barbarus Muhammad Muhammad Habiba.
A third document dated Sept. 11, 2000 is also from the Presidency Intelligence Service to M.M/40. It states that the intelligence branches nominated Officer Muhammad Kazim Muhammad to travel with the Fencing Union from Sept. 15 to 25, 2000 to meet with Falah Husayn Muhammad Rida in Amman.
Another document identified Falah Hasan Muhammad Rida al-Haydari as “a good collaborator with the London and UAE stations” who “gave good information about the agent Al-Da'wah Party activity in London and Ireland."
One document stated Salim Abub Husayn should be sent to Iran with the Iraqi Olympic Committee basketball delegation from July 27 to Aug. 4, 2000 to meet with agent Imad al-Sudani, who resides in Iran and works with "the Supreme Council clique" there.
A June 27, 2000 report stated that Amir Sadiq should go to Jordan to contact Mustafa Najm al-Jumayli, a Muslim Brotherhood Iraqi who "lives in Amman and works as a muezzin at Al-Nafurah Mosque."
Attached is a list of the names of officers dispatched abroad between June 1, 1999 and June 30, 2000 as published in the newspaper.

[Sean Osborne]

http://www.geostrategy-direct.com/geostrategy-direct/secure/2006/05_03/3.asp

No	Officer Name	Source Name	Source Location	Approval Date	Travel Period	Meeting Place	Travel Date	Branch
1	Khalid Abd-al-Latif Muhammad	Uday Abbas Abd al-Ghani	Denmark	5 Dec 99	7 days	Poland	20 Dec 99	1
2	Muhammad Mahmud Najm	Taha al-Dawud + Imad Farid	Amman	9 Aug 99	7 days	Amman	13 Aug 99	1
3	Muhammad Mahmud Najm	Taha al-Dawud	Amman	28 Oct 99	7 days	Amman	1 Nov 99	1
4	Abd-al-Wahhab Kazim Mahmud	As'ad al-Ghariri	Amman	25 Aug 99	7 days	Amman	2 Sep 99	1
5	Abd-al-Wahhab Kazim Mahmud	Makki al-Rubay'i + Zuhayr al-Amiri + Sabah al-Lami	Amman	15 Mar 00	7 days	Amman	1 Apr 00	1
6	Sabah Shuja Sarhid	Falah Hasan Ajlan	Turkey	3 Sep 99	7 days	Turkey	23 Sep 99	1
7	Iyad Faysal Najm	Falah Hasan Ajlan	Turkey	3 Sep 99	7 days	Turkey	23 Sep 99	1
8	Ghanim Muhyi Abbas	Sayil Suhayl al-A'zami	London	12 Apr 00	7 days	Amman	23 Apr 00	1
9	Numayr Fahd Abd Salim + Mar'i Hasan	Muhammad Azzuz Turmahi al-Khuza'i + Rasim Husayn Abdallah al-Awadi + Sa'd Salih al-Juburi + Code 111	London + Amman + Paris	27 Jan 00	7 days	Paris	5 Mar 00	1
10	Kazim Mahmud Aydan	Ahmad Karim + Arakha Jadur + Hamid Bartu + Riwa al-Habasani	Prague	20 Aug 99	10 Days	Prague	20 Sep 99	1
11	Sa'di Shihab Ahmad	Suhayb Ali Lahmud	London	3 Sep 99	8 days	Morocco	7 Feb 00	1
12	Yunus Hamid Rashid	Habib Ali Lahmud	London	3 Sep 99	8 days	Morocco	7 Feb 00	1
13	Zafir Natiq Ibrahim	Ja'far al-Haffaf + Ali Hasan Abd-al-Rida + Abbas Abd-al-Bari	Amman	27 Mar 00	7 days	Amman	4 Apr 00	1
14	Abbas Abd-al-Amir Ibrahim	Abd-al-Qadir Khalaf + Midyin Ahmad Dhannun	Sweden	26 Feb 00	7 days	Sweden	28 Mar 00	1
15	Ala Husayn Ahmad	Hazim Katran al-Sha'lan	London	30 Mar 00	7 days	Morocco	28 Apr 00	1
16	Abd-al-Sattar Abd-al-Jabbar Alwan	Code 6803	Pakistan	31 Jan 00	7 days	Thailand	30 Mar 00	2
17	Abd-al-Sattar Abd-al-Jabbar Alwan	Sadiq Ja'far	Britain	6 Oct 99	9 days	France	6 Dec 99	2
18	Abd-al-Sattar Abd-al-Jabbar Alwan	To perform pilgrimage	Saudi Arabia	25 Jan 00	21 days	Saudi Arabia	21 Mar 00	2
19	Abd-al-Sattar Abd-al-Jabbar Alwan	Abu-Haydar al-Shaykh	Turkey	27 Jun 99	9 days	Turkey	30 Jul 99	2
20	Abd-al-Sattar Abd-al-Jabbar Alwan	Isam Ali Asghar	Sweden	15 Feb 00	7 days	Romania	26 Jun 00	2
21	Hasan Ahmad Mahjub	Sadiq Ja'far	Britain	6 Oct 99	9 days	France	6 Dec 99	2
22	Khalid Fulayyih	To perform pilgrimage	Saudi Arabia	25 Jan 00	21 days	Saudi Arabia	21 Mar 00	2
23	Shakir Mahmud Ahmad	Isam Ali Asghar	Sweden	15 Feb 00	7 days	Romania	26 Jun 00	2
24	Shakir Mahmud Ahmad	Abd-al-Amir Qasim	Germany	31 May 99	7 days	Paris	30 Jul 99	2
25	Ahmad Battal Husayn	5056	Britain	13 Sep 99	5 days	Tunisia	7 Oct 99	2
26	Ahmad Battal Husayn	5056	Britain	4 Jan 00	7 days	Sophia	7 Feb 00	2
27	Baha al-Din Ahmad Ghannam	Dharr al-Khafaji	Syria	23 Apr 00	7 days	Yemen	30 May 00	2
28	Baha al-Din Ahmad Ghannam	Abd-al-Rasul Abd-al-Karim	Syria	11 Mar 00	5 days	Amman	16 Mar 00	2
29	Aziz Salih Ahmad	Jamal Salman Sajit + Diya Abd-al-Qadir	Iran	22 Jul 99	10 days	Pakistan	7 Dec 99	2
30	Aziz Salih Ahmad	Diya Abd-al-Qadir	Iran	13 May 00	7 days	Pakistan	27 May 00	2
31	Ahmad Wa'il Ali	Code 8476	Sweden	22 Nov 99	7 days	Morocco	16 Dec 99	2
32	Khalid Fulayyih Hasan	Code 287	London	28 Aug 99	9 days	Paris	1 Nov 99	2
33	Tariq Isma'il	Code 287	London	28 Aug 99	9 days	Paris	1 Nov 99	2
34	Umar Abd-al-Razzaq Taha	Najm Abd-al-Rahman	UAE	1 Mar 00	7 days	UAE	24 Apr 00	2
35	Nasr Ubayd Hassun	Tha'ir Ramadan	Turkey	19 Sep 99	7 days	Turkey	14 Oct 99	2
36	Mu'awiyah Thabit Mahmud	Tha'ir Ramadan	Turkey	19 Sep 99	7 days	Turkey	14 Oct 99	2
37	Amir Sadiq Abd-al-Razzaq	Hudhayfah	Yemen	3 Jun 99	11 days	Yemen	13 Sep 99	2
38	Yusuf Salman Mahmud	Hudhayfah	Yemen	3 Jun 99	11 days	Yemen	13 Sep 99	2
39	Sadiq Abd-al-Hasan Kazim	Ali Muhyi al-Din al-Qara Daghi	Qatar	16 Oct 99	7 days	Qatar	14 Nov 99	3
40	Sadiq Abd-al-Hasan Kazim	Tariq Ahmad al-Dawudi + Nasir Tawfiq al-Birwari	Prague	3 Apr 00	7 days	Prague	10 Apr 00	3
41	Mahdi Dawud Sulayman	Mulla Abd-al-Ghani Taha Muhammad	Arbil	24 Oct 99	7 days	Turkey	30 Nov 99	3
42	Mahdi Dawud Sulayman	Kurdistan Islamic Union Delegation	Arbil	3 Jun 99	7 days	Turkey	11 Jun 99	3
43	Ahmad Anwar Shukur	Mulla Abd-al-Ghani Taha Muhammad	Arbil	24 Oct 99	7 days	Turkey	30 Nov 99	3
44	Kan'an Muhsin Ali	Siraj al-Din Sabir	New York	23 Jun 99	7 days	Tunisia	7 Jul 99	3
45	Salih Khalil Ibrahim	Siraj al-Din Sabir	New York	23 Jun 99	7 days	Tunisia	7 Jul 99	3
46	Nashwan Abd-al-Ghani Fattah	Jawhar Husayn Surji	London	28 Feb 00	7 days	Morocco	8 Apr 00	3
47	Ruhayyim Sa'dun Ali	Sayf-al-Din Muhammad Zahir	Sweden	7 Apr 00	7 days	Turkey	17 May 00	3
48	Aziz Husayn Muhammad	Sayf-al-Din Muhammad Zahir	Sweden	7 Apr 00	7 days	Turkey	17 May 00	3
49	Khalil Ibrahim	Muslih Hamzah Nuri	Arbil	20 Jun 99	7 days	Turkey	23 Jul 99	3
50	Abd-al-Wahhab Ahmad Mubarak	Kurdistan Islamic Union Delegation	Arbil	3 Jun 99	7 days	Turkey	11 Jun 99	3
51	Dawud Salman Hammadi	Suran Hasan Abdallah	Holland	30 Jan 00	7 days	Belgium	20 Mar 00	3
52	Sa'id Karim Hammadi	Binston Uthman Umar	Holland	30 Apr 00	7 days	Tunisia	24 May 00	3
53	Sabri Sarhan Abbas	Hamid Haj Ali	Holland	13 Sep 99	10 days	Morocco	23 Sep 99	3
54	Muhammad Hasan Alwan	Abdallah Kaka Rush	Jordan	22 Jun 99	5 days	Jordan	17 Dec 99	3
55	Salim Abd-al-Husayn Salim	Ghalib Sa'ud Shilal	Lebanon	30 Mar 00	7 days	Tunisia	28 Apr 00	4
56	Diya Isma'il Hamid	Ghalib Sa'ud Shilal	Lebanon	30 Mar 00	7 days	Tunisia	28 Apr 00	4
57	Salim Abd-al-Husayn Salim	Awn Husayn Khashluk	Greece	24 Aug 99	8 days	Romania	10 Sep 99	4
58	Muhammad Hadid Ali	Awn Husayn Khashluk	Greece	24 Aug 99	8 days	Romania	10 Sep 99	4
59	Adil Habib Ali	Izz-al-Din Muhammad Amin	Australia	14 Oct 99	7 days	Australia	26 Jan 00	4
60	Qasim Alwan Kazim	Izz-al-Din Muhammad Amin	Australia	14 Oct 99	7 days	Australia	26 Jan 00	4
61	Wamid Mundhir Jum'ah	Muhammad Ahmad Mahdi	Germany	7 Dec 99	7 days	France	24 Jan 00	4
62	Ali Abd-al-Rahman Makki	Faysal Abdallah Surji	Syria	25 Aug 99	5 days	Amman	1 Sep 99	4
63	Shukur Dawud Jawad	Faysal Abdallah Surji	Syria	25 Aug 99	5 days	Amman	1 Sep 99	4
64	Ziyad Salim Mahmud	Buraq Abbas + Barzan Ahmad	Germany + Holland	2 Oct 99	7 days	France	16 Nov 99	4
65	Qasim Muhammad Rida	Buraq Abbas + Barzan Ahmad	Germany + Holland	2 Oct 99	7 days	France	16 Nov 99	4
66	Karim Ali Dulaymi	Sattar Sami Lu'aybi	Denmark	11 Jul 99	7 days	Sweden	13 Sep 99	4
67	Yammi Nayif Rashid	Sattar Sami Lu'aybi	Denmark	11 Jul 99	7 days	Sweden	13 Sep 99	4
68	Layth Mushmin Hardan	Zaydun Tariq	Britain	16 Feb 00	5 days	Amman	20 Feb 00	4
69	Layth Taha Hiyari	Muhsin Muhan al-Imarah	Germany	7 Mar 00	7 days	Greece	19 Apr 00	4
70	Muhammad Qadduri Jabir	Muhsin Muhan al-Imarah	Germany	7 Mar 00	7 days	Greece	19 Apr 00	4
71	Jasim Muhammad Ibrahim	Ghanim Sa'dallah Sulayman	Sweden	1 Dec 99	8 days	Sweden	2 Jan 00	4
72	Abbas Muhammad Husayn	Samir Bunyan Hassun	Germany	29 Jan 00	13 days	Poland	22 Feb 00	4
73	Tahir Yunus Salih	Walid Sami Ajil	Jordan	26 Apr 00	5 days	Jordan	1 May 00	4
74	Qahtan As'ad Salih	Walid Sami Ajil	Jordan	26 Apr 00	5 days	Jordan	1 May 00	4
75	Tahsin Jasim Hammadi	Nizar Atu Khalaf	Sweden	3 Aug 99	8 days	Morocco	17 Sep 99	6
76	Tahsin Jasim Hammadi	Muhammad Nur al-Din Fakhri	Turkey	11 Apr 00	7 days	Turkey	8 May 00	6
77	Adil Abbas Abd	Shawkat Rashid Sa'dun	Turkey	11 Dec 99	7 days	Turkey	20 Jan 00	6
78	Safa Ibrahim Musallam	Muhammad Nur al-Din Fakhri	Turkey	1 Jul 99	14 days	Turkey	23 Aug 99	6
79	Salam Ahmad Muhammad	Nizar Atu Khalaf	Sweden	3 Aug 99	8 days	Morocco	17 Sep 99	6
80	Salah Nuri Muhammad	Ceyhan Port duty	Turkey	Feb 99	45 days	Turkey	18 Jan 00	6
81	Jamal Abd Hammadi	Aziz Barkhu	Sweden	15 Nov 99	7 days	Poland	8 Dec 99	6
82	Abd-al-Salam Ahmad Ali	--	Northern Region	25 Aug 99	9 days	Paris	13 Oct 99	6
83	Abd-al-Salam Ahmad Ali	... + William Sha'ul	Northern Region + USA	11 May 00	14 days	Amman + Paris	27 Jun 00	6
84	Abd-al-Salam Ahmad Ali	Zaduq Adam + Amir Huzayran	Northern Region	29 Feb 00	7 days	Turkey	13 Mar 00	6
85	Khalil Mahmud Talla	Zaduq Adam + Amir Huzayran	Northern Region	29 Feb 00	7 days	Turkey	13 Mar 00	6
86	Khalil Mahmud Talla	Romeo Huzayran	Northern Region	15 Apr 99	7 days	Turkey	23 Aug 99	6
87	Adil Salih Muhammad	Anwar Adam	Denmark	29 Jul 99	7 days	Poland	29 Sep 99	6
88	Husayn Hadi Malluh	Anwar Adam	Denmark	29 Jul 99	7 days	Poland	29 Sep 99	6
89	Sindi Shihab Ahmad	Habib Ali Lahmud	London	3 Sep 99	8 days	Morocco	7 Feb 00	1
90	Yunus Majid Rashid	Habib Ali Lahmud	London	3 Sep 99	8 days	Morocco	7 Feb 00	1
91	(?Kilmafu) Natiq Ibrahim	Artist Ja'far al-Khaffaf + collaborator Ali Hasan Abd-al-Rida + Abbas Abd-al-Bari Hankur	Amman	27 Mar 00	7 days	Amman	4 Apr 00	1
92	Husayn Jawad Kazim	State departments	--	--	--	--	--	3
93	--	--	--	10 May 00	6 days	Amman	21 May 00	3
94	Ra'd Majid Hassun	Sa'di Sadiq al-Marayani	Australia	14 Jan 00	7 days	Thailand	21 Mar 00	--
95	Ra'd Majid Hassun	Wajib Ikhtiraq [meaning penetration duty]	Amman	23 Apr 00	7 days	Amman	21 May 00	--
96	Ra'd Majid Hassun	Wajib Ikhtiraq	Amman	25 May 99	7 days	Amman	17 Jun 99	--
97	Hashim Uday Mahdi	Wajib Ikhtiraq	Amman	27 Apr 00	7 days	Amman	21 May 00	--
98	Khalid Abd-al-Latif Muhammad	Isam Ghazal + As'ad al-Ghariri	Amman	25 Aug 99	7 days	Amman	2 Sep 99	--
99	Adil Zaydan Khalaf	Hammudi al-Harithi	Holland	28 Mar 00	7 days	Belgium	13 May 00	--
100	Adil Zaydan Khalaf	Code 341	UAE	20 Dec 99	7 days	UAE	26 Dec 99	--
101	Mir'i Hasan + Adil Zaydan Khalaf	Muhammad Azzuz + Sa'd (?Annun)	London	16 May 99	7 days	Jordan	10 Jun 99	--

[Malsua]

Sean,

Where are any sites any the western hemisphere?

Mexico, Canada, USA, Cuba, etc.?

[Sean Osborne]

Sean,

Where are any sites any the western hemisphere?

Mexico, Canada, USA, Cuba, etc.?

Good question Mal, very good question in fact.

I know exactly where to go to seek the answer

Have you checked into Jayna Davis' "The Third Terrorist"



If not, here's a streaming audio link to whet your appetite. These links are all from the same exclusive NEIN podcast with Jayna on the 11th Anniversay of OKC. She reveals new information in this podcast. Powerful stuff about Iraqi sleepers here in the US.

http://www.kathleenkeating.com/secur...y/myWimpy.html

56K link:

http://www.kathleenkeating.com/041006hsw.mp3

28K link:

http://www.kathleenkeating.com/041006hswlow.mp3

[falcon]

Sean; Thank you for the tapes, really interestings how deep the left/commies has taken the news media. Not to say how far they have advanced into top Gov't positions.

I have had this feeling for a long time, the only thing I guess one can do is to have a good prep. plan and support those who are for the cause.