Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda Link Allegations - Background

Background

Just prior to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Saddam turned to religion perhaps to bolster his government (for example, adding the words "God is Great" in Arabic to the flag, and referring to God in his speeches). After Saddam lost the Gulf War, he identified more closely with Islam by hosting international conferences and broadcasting Islamic sermons on national radio. In 1994, Saddam began his "Faith Campaign" in which he began to build mosques, changed laws to outlaw public drinking, required Baathist officials to attend prayers and held Quran reciting competitions.

Some sources allege that several meetings between top Iraqi operatives and bin Laden took place, but these claims have been disputed by many other sources, including most of the original intelligence agencies that investigated these sources in the first place. Many in the intelligence community are skeptical about whether such meetings, if they took place at all, ever resulted in any meaningful relationship. Many of the claims of actual collaboration seem to have originated with people associated with the Iraqi National Congress whose credibility has been impeached and who have been accused of manipulating the evidence in order to lure the United States into war on false pretenses. In addition, many of the raw intelligence reports came to the awareness of the public through the leaking of a memo sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the conclusions of which have been disputed by intelligence agencies including the CIA. Feith’s view of the relationship between Saddam and Osama differed from the official view of the intelligence community. The memo was subsequently leaked to the media. The Pentagon issued a statement cautioning that the memo was "a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the intelligence community...The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions." The Pentagon warned that "Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal." Former head of the Middle East section of the DIA W. Patrick Lang told the Washington Post that the Weekly Standard article which published Feith's memo "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" And, according to the Post, "another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather 'data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true.'"

Some have suggested that an understanding was reached between Iraq and al-Qaeda, namely that al-Qaeda would not act against Saddam in exchange for Iraqi support, primarily in the form of training. No evidence of such an understanding has ever been produced. Some reports claim that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague, but intelligence officials have concluded that no such meeting took place. A training camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, was said by a number of defectors to have been used to train international terrorists (assumed to be al-Qaeda members) in hijacking techniques using a real airplane as a prop. The defectors were inconsistent about a number of details. The camp has been examined by U.S. Marines, and intelligence analysts do not believe it was used by al-Qaeda. Some of these analysts believe it was actually used for counterterrorism training, while others believe it was used to train foreign fighters overtly aligned with Iraq. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that "Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq. There have been no credible reports since the war that Iraq trained al-Qa'ida operatives at Salman Pak to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations."

In November 2001, a month after the September 11th attacks, Mubarak al-Duri was contacted by Sudanese intelligence services who informed him that the FBI had sent Jack Cloonan and several other agents, to speak with a number of people known to have ties to Bin Laden. al-Duri and another Iraqi colleague agreed to meet with Cloonan in a safe house overseen by the intelligence service. They were asked whether there was any possible connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and laughed stating that Bin Laden hated the dictator who he believed was a "Scotch-drinking, woman-chasing apostate.”