THE VISIBLE HAND
The Iraqi Connection
President Bush must win the war his father started.
OpinionJournal
Wall Street Journal Online
BY RICHARD MINITER
Monday, September 24, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
In President Bush's soaring, Reaganesque speech Thursday night, two
words were missing: Saddam Hussein.
Is America's Gulf War foe behind the attacks? Secretary of State Colin
Powell and other Bush administration officials say there is "no
evidence" of that. Yet veteran State Department watchers say that
"evidence" is a kind of Foggy Bottom shorthand for absolute proof--the
kind that lawyers would need to convict the Iraqi dictator in court.
Still, there is a strong circumstantial case that Iraq has backed Osama
bin Laden and has been waging a terrorist war of assassination plots and
bombings that had already killed hundreds of Americans before Sept.
11--from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS
Cole last year.
Israeli intelligence services reportedly met with CIA and FBI officials
in August and warned of an imminent large-scale attack on the U.S. There
"were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," a senior Israeli
official later told London's Daily Telegraph.
Bin Laden's Al Qaeda reportedly had representatives based in Baghdad. In
1997 he also set up training camps in Iraq, according to Canada's
National Post. Iraq has also reportedly delivered small arms and money
to bin Laden's organization over the past few years. Iraqi intelligence
agents have met repeatedly with bin Laden or his operatives in Sudan,
Turkey, Afghanistan and an undisclosed site in Europe (evidently
Prague). Iraqi opposition leaders have also said that there is a long
history of contact between Iraq and the archterrorist.
Bin Laden is believed to have met repeatedly with officers of Iraq's
Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's
son Qusay. Bin Laden also seems to have ties to Iraq's Mukhabarat,
another one of its intelligence services.
Perhaps the most dramatic meeting occurred in December 1998, when Farouk
Hijazi, a senior officer in the Mukhabarat who later became ambassador
to Turkey, journeyed deep into the icy Hindu Kush mountains near
Kandahar, Afghanistan. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden
asylum in Iraq," according to a 1999 report in the Guardian, a British
newspaper.
That same year, an Arab intelligence officer, who knows Saddam
personally, predicted in Newsweek: "Very soon you will be witnessing
large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis." The Arab official
said these terror operations would be run under "false flags"
--spook-speak for front groups--including bin Laden's organization. And
Iraqi intelligence agents were in contact with bin Laden in the days
leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence sources told the
Washington Times' Bill Gertz.
A Saddam-bin Laden partnership would offer both sides advantages. The
Iraqi dictator would gain an energized terrorist network, whose actions
he could plausibly deny. Bin Laden would gain expertise and the
world-wide logistical support that only a client state can offer.
Certainly, bin Laden has need of Saddam's skills--developed with the aid
of the Soviets and East Germans--for planning covert operations, forging
false documents and coordinating large campaigns over vast areas. Given
their personal history, several of the hijackers needed false papers and
concealment skills to enter and remain in the U.S. The FBI has
acknowledged that it was searching unsuccessfully for two of the
hijackers two weeks before the attacks.
"It's clear that the Iraqis would like to have bin Laden in Iraq,"
Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterintelligence
efforts, told Knight Ridder in 1999. He added that "the Iraqis have all
the technological elements, the tradecraft that bin Laden lacks, and
they have Abu Nidal," the notorious Palestinian bomb expert.
Most of all, bin Laden needs money. His Al Qaeda organization operates
in some 50 countries. Informed estimates put bin Laden's personal wealth
at perhaps $30 million--not the $300 million usually cited in the
press--and this probably is not enough to sustain a global terror
network over many years. Bin Laden told an Arab reporter that he lost
$150 million in Sudanese investments. What's left of his fortune is tied
up in real estate in Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere or has been frozen by
various governments in the past few years. Sanctions notwithstanding,
Saddam is far more liquid. Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $7
billion.
Iraq doesn't shrink from financing terrorism. Baghdad has two
intelligence services that have funded and planned terrorist campaigns
carried out by independent organizations, starting in 1969 in eastern
Iran.
Saddam and bin Laden share a powerful hate for America, and both cite
the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat and
subsequent sanctions crippled the Iraqi economy and stymied its buildup
of nuclear and biological weapons. Upon learning of the first President
Bush's 1992 election defeat, Saddam joyously fired his pistol into the
sky and declared on Iraqi radio: "The mother of all battles continues
and will continue."
Bin Laden called Saudi Arabia's alliance with the U.S. during the Gulf
War "treason." He regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against
Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on
holy sands of Arabia.
Bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998, call for jihad lists three grievances: that
U.S. warplanes use bases in Saudi Arabia to patrol the skies of Iraq,
that United Nations sanctions have caused grievous suffering in Iraq,
and that America's Iraq policy is designed to divert attention from
Israel's treatment of Muslims. In short, bin Laden's call to arms reads
as if it was issued from Baghdad.
Aside from Saddam's links to bin Laden and his known hostility to
America, there is a wealth of intriguing connections between Iraq and
this past week's attacks. Mohamed Atta, believed to be the commander of
the hijacking crew that smashed American Airlines flight 11 into the
World Trade Center, reportedly met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in
Europe a few months ago. U.S. intelligence reports from Southeast Asia
suggest that Iraq played a role in training the hijackers who attacked
America, according to Time magazine. An Iraqi intelligence operative,
Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani
authorities last October.
Certainly, Iraq seems to be acting strangely. Hours after the attacks,
Iraqi soldiers moved away from likely military targets, notes Neil
Partrick, a London-based analyst.
And Iraq, alone among the 22 members of the Arab League, failed to
condemn the atrocities of Sept. 11. Indeed, Baghdad celebrated them.
Saddam's government issued a statement, quoted widely in Al-Iraq and
other state-run papers, that said America deserved the attacks.
Perhaps Iraq's official response indicates nothing more than a
continuing hatred of America, but Mideast leaders who are no friends of
the U.S. acted differently. Iran sent its condolences. Yasser Arafat
expressed sorrow and gave blood. Even Libya's Moammar Gadhafi called for
Muslim aid groups to help Americans, adding that the U.S. had the "right
to take revenge."
For almost a decade, Saddam has waged a secret terror campaign against
Americans, according to terrorism experts, former government officials,
U.S. government reports and newspaper accounts from around the world.
That Iraqi-inspired terror campaign--working through Osama bin Laden and
others--is believed to include foiled assassination attempts against
President Bush père in Kuwait in April 1993 and against President
Clinton in the Philippines in November 1994. The terror campaign seems
to include the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; a 1995 bombing in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five American soldiers; a massive 1995
bombing of U.S. troop barracks at Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia,
which killed 19 Americans soldiers; the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224; and last
year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and
wounded 39.
Knowledgeable observers point to wide-ranging Iraqi terrorist activity.
James Woolsey, who served as director of central intelligence during the
Clinton administration, has repeatedly raised the issue of Iraqi
involvement in last week's attacks and past terrorist assaults. Laurie
Mylroie, author of "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War
Against America" and a Clinton Iraq adviser, presents a compelling case
that Iraqi agents were behind a string of bombings.
Iraq's secret war against America probably began with the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing. Iraq became involved, Ms. Mylroie believes, after
learning of the bomb plot from a terrorist holed up in Iraq who was an
uncle of one of the ringleaders. One of the perpetrators placed 46
calls--some more than an hour long--to that uncle in a single month
before the bombing, according to phone records collected by the FBI.
The two ringleaders both had connections to Iraq. The mastermind, Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and was known to his
associates as "Rashid the Iraqi." It was he who persuaded the bombers to
make their target the World Trade Center. The other man, Abdul Rahman
Yasin, fled to Baghdad, where, ABC News reported in 1994, he had been
put on the government payroll. He is believed to be still at large in
Iraq. "The majority of senior law-enforcement officers in New York
believe that Iraq was involved," Jim Fox, who ran the FBI's
investigation of the World Trade Center bombing, told Ms. Mylroie.
Egyptian and Saudi intelligence sources also told U.S. officials that
Iraq organized the bombing.
Iraqi agents, Ms. Mylroie persuasively argues, also supplied false
passports and escape routes. They may have also provided bomb-making
expertise and money. The hydrogen-cyanide gas that was supposed to be
spread by the explosion--luckily it was burned up instead--probably has
origins in Iraq's chemical-weapons program, Ms. Mylroie concludes. The
Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to
the Gulf War, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide
gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B.
The Iraqi terror campaign intensified in the mid-1990s, after bin Laden
and Iraqi intelligence became better acquainted, most likely in
Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. In that dusty city, Iraq ran an
extensive intelligence hub until the late 1990s, when Sudanese officials
allegedly told them to leave. Bin Laden was based in Khartoum until
1996, when Sudan kicked him out at the request of the U.S. government, a
representative of the Sudanese government told me. There are documented
meetings that occurred between bin Laden and Iraqi agents at the time.
After a June 1996 Arab League summit--the first since the Gulf
War--issued a communiqué in favor of maintaining sanctions against Iraq,
Iraq's government-controlled press seethed with anger. "Before it is too
late, the Arabs should rectify the sin they committed against Iraq," one
state-run paper warned. Saudi Arabia was the prime mover behind the Arab
League's bold statement. Two days after the meeting ended, a truck bomb
exploded outside the Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia. The U.S
government never publicly charged Iraq, but Gen. Wafiq Samarai, an Iraqi
defector, did. He said Saddam had asked him to join a secret committee
to commit terrorist acts against U.S. forces during the Gulf War. The Al
Khobar bombing was strikingly similar to the plans of that committee,
Mr. Samarai said.
Next, Iraq seems to have played a role in bin Laden's plot to bomb two
U.S embassies in East Africa. Beginning on May 1, 1998, Iraq warned of
"dire consequences" if the U.N. sanctions were not lifted and the
weapons-inspection teams removed. Eight days later, bin Laden released
another statement calling for jihad against America. Throughout the
summer, Iraq's and bin Laden's threatening statements moved in lockstep.
Then Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors on Aug. 5. Two days later,
the bombs went off in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Dire
consequences, indeed.
Why didn't the Clinton administration follow up on the Iraqi connection?
Part of the answer is bureaucratic bungling. The New Jersey FBI office
released a suspect who was sought by the New York office in connection
with the 1993 twin towers bomb plot. There was little communication or
trust between the FBI and the National Security Agency. And the FBI
turned much of its evidence in the 1993 bombings to the defendants long
before America's national-security specialists saw it. During the
Clinton years, America's antiterrorist units suffered from the lowest
ebb of morale since the 1970s, according to a recent National Commission
on Terrorism report.
Another possibility is that administration officials didn't want to see
it, that they saw their job as containing Saddam, not confronting him.
Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Adviser, told the
Los Angeles Times in 1996 that dealing with Saddam was "little bit like
a Whack-a-Mole game at the circus: They bop up and you whack them down,
and if they bop up again, you bop them back down again."
To avoid targeting Iraq, Clinton administration officials blamed the
governments of Sudan and Afghanistan or a loose network of Islamic
extremists. Both explanations seem incomplete. Sudan and Afghanistan are
among the world's poorest nations; their governments cannot control
sizeable sections of their own territories. While both governments are
run by Islamic extremists and have long been havens for terrorists, they
lack the ability to act alone. Iraq has strong ties to both of these
nations.
The idea that loose networks of Islamic hardliners randomly come
together to plot attacks is also hard to credit. It takes organization,
money, patience and precision to carry out these attacks--qualities not
usually present in volatile, itinerant extremists. Clinton officials
should have noticed that the 1998 U.S. embassy bombs detonated within
nine minutes of each other and the perpetrators had false papers and
plane tickets for Pakistan.
They also should have grasped that the terrorists are political
extremists--not Islamic zealots. This is also true of the perpetrators
of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohammed Atta slugged down vodka like a sailor,
notes Time magazine. The night before the attacks, several men with
knowledge of the impending attacks are reported to have had a drunken
party at a Florida strip club--two major violations of Islamic law. Many
of the perpetrators lacked beards, which fundamentalists believe the
Koran instructs cannot be shaved. One disco-loving hijacker has been
traced to another Al Qaeda terrorist plot in the Philippines, where a
fellow terrorist lived with a non-Muslim girlfriend. A third terrorist
boasted of his sexual conquests, on a phone tapped by the Philippine
police. Audio files on the computer used by the 1993 World Trade Center
bombers contain numerous obscenities. And so on.
Even overlooking the Koran's injunctions against murder and killing of
women in war, the lifestyles of the Al Qaeda terrorists don't reflect
orthodox Islam. But the Clinton administration kept talking about a
shadowy network of Islamic extremists--not a campaign of terror by a
vengeful Saddam Hussein.
The scale of last week's devastation requires a sober look at America's
enemies, starting with Iraq. If Iraq is behind the Sept. 11 attacks and
the terrorist assaults of the past decade, then Americans will know that
they were not the victims of senseless hate, but malevolent calculation.
And President Bush will know that winning the war against terrorism will
require him to win the war his father began.
Mr. Miniter is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal
Europe. His column appears Fridays.
MORE LINKS
Saddam link to attacks: INTELLIGENCE has suggested the prime mover behind the attacks was Saddam
Sunday, September 23, 2001
(Melbourne Herald Sun)
The former head of Israeli's Mossad secret service, Rafi Eitan, and a former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, said there are clear indications that the Iraqi president played a leading role in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
"I have no doubt whatsoever that the mastermind of this atrocity is none other than the Iraqi dictator," said Mr Eitan, a security adviser to three Israeli governments and mastermind of the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in May 1960.
This week's revelation that Mohamed Atta, 33, an Egyptian suspected of hijacking the first plane to strike the World Trade Centre, met an Iraqi intelligence official in Europe earlier this year, adds weight to the theory.
Officials have also suggested bin Laden was in contact with Iraqi agents from his base in Afghanistan in the days before the attacks.
Mr Eitan said bin Laden may have been a partner, or merely a pawn, in a plot by Baghdad to strike back following its Gulf War defeat and to show the world it is still capable of action despite 10 years' of crippling UN sanctions.
Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view
Jane's
Israel's military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman officers believe, were two of the world's foremost terrorist masterminds: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama Bin Laden.
Iraq suspected of sponsoring terrorist attacks
Septmber 21, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Osama bin Laden was in contact with Iraqi government agents from his base in Afghanistan in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to U.S. intelligence officials
THE IRAQ CONNECTION:
Blood Baath
by R. James Woolsey
Issue date 09.24.01
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks,
attention has focused on terrorist chieftain
Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible.
But intelligence and law enforcement officials
investigating the case would do well to at least
consider another possibility: that the attacks--whether
perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates
or by others--were sponsored, supported, and
perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.
CIA BEGINS TO EXAMINE IRAQI CONNECTION
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- For the first time, the Bush administration has acknowledged that Iraq is being examined as a sponsor of the Sept. 11 suicide attacks in New York and Washington.
HIJACKER MEETS IRAQI INTELLIGENCE
Bomber met Iraqi chief of intelligence
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 19 2001
The Times
FROM ROLAND WATSON AND DAMIAN WHITWORTH IN WASHINGTON
A LINK between Iraq and one of the World Trade Centre
attackers was disclosed last night amid British concerns that
Washington might use President Bush's war on terrorism as a
pretext to topple Saddam Hussein.
American intelligence officials said that Mohammed Atta, who is
believed to have been at the controls of the first jet to crash, met
the head of Iraqi intelligence this year.
Hijacker met with Iraqi official
Source: Washington Times
Published: 9/19/01 Author: Bill Gertz
Posted on 09/18/2001 23:24:11 PDT by kattracks
An Iraqi intelligence official met secretly with one of the airline hijackers a year ago, raising the likelihood of Iraqi government involvement in last week's terrorist attacks in the United States, officials said yesterday.
The unidentified Iraqi intelligence official met with Mohamed Atta, whom U.S. officials believe to have been the leader of a terrorist cell linked to Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden. Atta traveled regularly between the United States and several countries, including Germany and Spain.
Atta is believed to have been aboard the first commercial airliner that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
Suspected Hijacker Met Iraqi
Intelligence- Source
Tuesday September 18 2:43 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mohamed Atta,
suspected of being one of the hijackers aboard
the first plane that struck New York's World
Trade Center last week, met earlier this year
with an Iraqi intelligence official in Europe, a
U.S. government source said on Tuesday.
CBS News first reported that Atta had met
with the head of Iraqi intelligence. But sources
pointed out that just because Atta met with an
Iraqi intelligence official did not necessarily mean that the government of
Iraq had supported the attacks that demolished the World Trade Center
and damaged the Pentagon (news - web sites).
IRAQ BEHIND RAMZI YOUSEF AND 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING
Saddam's Fingerprints on N.Y. Bombings
The Wall Street Journal
By Laurie Mylroie
June 28, 1993
Military retaliation from Baghdad was the main administration concern following Saturday's strike on Iraq. Yet U.S. officials should start thinking seriously about the question of retaliation through terror. It is quite possible, for example, that there was a connection between Saddam and recent attempts to blow up Manhattan. It is quite possible that New York's terror is Saddam's revenge
U.S. warned in 1995 of plot to hijack planes, attack buildings
September 18, 2001 Posted: 1:54 PM EDT (1754 GMT)
By Maria Ressa
CNN Correspondent
MANILA, Philippines (CNN) -- The FBI was warned six years ago of a terrorist plot to hijack commercial planes and slam them into the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters and other buildings, Philippine investigators told CNN.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB: Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters (1993)
Source: The National Interest
Published: Winter, 1995/96 Author: Laurie Mylroie
Posted on 09/12/2001 07:17:34 PDT by JeanS
ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26,
1993 was meant to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had the attack gone as planned,
tens of thousands of Americans would have died. Instead, as we know, one tower did not fall on the other, and, rather than
vaporizing, the cyanide gas burnt up in the heat of the explosion. "Only" six people died.
Few Americans are aware of the true scale of the destructive ambition behind that bomb, this despite the fact that two years
later, the key figure responsible for building it--a man who had entered the United Stares on an Iraqi passport under the name of
Ramzi Yousef--was involved in another stupendous bombing conspiracy. In January 1995, Yousef and his associates plotted to
blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terrorist rage. The bombs were to be made of a liquid
explosive designed to pass through airport metal detectors. But while mixing his chemical brew in a Manila apartment, Yousef
started a fire. He was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained the information that led to his arrest a month later
in Pakistan. Among the items found in his possession was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were
not released. It claimed the "ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and
residential populations and the sources of drinking water." [1] Quickly extradited, he is now in U.S. custody awaiting trial this
spring.
Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States. But who is he? Is
he a free-lance bomber? A deranged but highly-skilled veteran of the Muslim jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Is he an
Arab, or of some other Middle Eastern ethnicity? Is there an organization--perhaps even a state--behind his work?
Seeking Saddam's smoking gun
By Joe Lauria, Globe Staff, 7/29/2001
Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America
By Laurie Mylroie (email a request to join her email newsletter)
American Enterprise Institute, 321 pp.
Saddam Hussein vowed revenge earlier this year for one of President Bush's first acts in office: the Feb. 16 bombing of Iraq in
response to Saddam's increased attacks on US aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.
Conventional Washington wisdom said Saddam was too boxed in by sanctions to hit back. Instead, he called on Arabs outside
Iraq to strike US interests in the region. That, according to a new book by Laurie Mylroie, a specialist on Iraq, fits Saddam's
pattern of revenge since the 1991 Gulf War: masterminding terrorism through Arab fundamentalists who are left holding the bag.
Mylroie argues in "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" that the Clinton administration erred
by prosecuting such individuals in Justice Department-led criminal trials, rather than conducting national security investigations
that would have singled out Saddam.
IRAQ BEHIND USS COLE ATTACK
Iraq - Bin Laden USS Cole bomb link
USS Cole: 17 dead mourned as experts piece together attack
Julian Borger in Washington
The Guardian
Thursday October 19, 2000
Investigators in Yemen yesterday uncovered evidence suggesting the bomb attack on the warship USS Cole had been a
meticulously organised conspiracy, which a leading US terrorism expert said may have been the first joint operation between
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Under an overcast sky at the Norfolk naval base in Virginia, President Clinton led
thousands of US servicemen in mourning the 17 victims of last week's blast, as the state department warned that more attacks
against US citizens could be on the way in the Middle East or Turkey.
In Aden, Yemeni police and FBI agents were examining a flat apparently rented by the bomb makers four days before the attack.
Bomb-making materials were found in the flat, which was rented by two non-Yemeni Arabs, at least one of whom had a Gulf
accent, local residents said. They kept a fibre glass boat parked nearby.
IRAQ'S UNFINISHED WAR
Saddam vs. The Bushes
John LeBoutillier
Thursday September 13, 2001
NewsMax
This tragedy is becoming very understandable: it is payback from
Saddam Hussein to the first George Bush team that ran the Gulf War
ten years ago.
Back then the American - and Coalition - team was run by Bush,
Cheney and Powell.
Today our government - again busily assembling a new Coalition - is
comprised of Bush, Cheney and Powell.
Attacks Against America Are Not Over
NewsMax
Col. Stanislav Lunev
Friday, September 14, 2001
Col. Stanislav Lunev is the highest-ranking military spy ever to
defect from Russia. He continues as a security consultant to the
U.S. government. He filed this report from an undisclosed
location in Europe.
I was surprised to hear, Thursday, some politicians in Washington
making statements that terrorist operations against America are over.
HIJACKERS USED STOLEN IDENTITIES - IRAQI INTELLIGENCE MO
Hijackers may have taken Saudi identities
A Compilation Of Material On False Identities In Islamic Terrorism
MY LINKS
Iraq behind destruction of World Trade Center? -
Attacks with weapons of mass destruction next?
IMMINENT CHEMICAL SCUD MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL? (7/8)