Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda Link Allegations - Skepticism of The Link

Skepticism of The Link

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Osama bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia by sending mujahideen from Afghanistan to repel Saddam's forces. After the Gulf War, bin Laden continued to criticize Saddam's Ba'ath regime, emphasizing that Saddam could not be trusted. Bin Laden told his biographer that "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother." Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist, and Ba'athism is a movement which combines pan-Arab nationalism with secularism and Arab Socialism. It is therefore very much at odds with political Islamism. The ideological founder of Ba'athism, Michel Aflaq, was himself a Christian.

The 9/11 Commission stated in its report that bin Laden had been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army. Those forces mostly operated in areas not under Saddam's control. Sudanese Islamic leader Hassan al-Turabi, to protect his ties with Iraq, brokered an agreement with Bin Laden to stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Laden seemed to honor this agreement for a time, although, he continued to aid Islamic extremists in Kurdistan. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, the extremist groups, with help from Bin Laden, re-formed into an organization called Ansar al-Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.

Osama bin Laden's expressed hostility to Saddam's regime, critical assessment of evidence from the Iraqi National Congress (the source of most of the claims of cooperation between the two) as well as the paucity of evidence for the alleged links, particularly for any substantial collaboration, have led most journalists and intelligence analysts not associated with or supporters of the Bush administration to dismiss the claimed links.

Robert Pape's exhaustive study of suicide terrorism found that "al-Qaeda's transnational suicide terrorists have come overwhelmingly from America's closest allies in the Muslim world and not at all from the Muslim regimes that the U.S. State Department considers 'state sponsors of terrorism'." Pape notes that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from Iraq. Daniel Byman's study of state sponsorship of terrorism similarly did not list Iraq as a significant state sponsor, and called the al-Qaeda connection "a rationale that before the war was strained and after it seems an ever-weaker reed." The conclusion of counterterrorism experts Rohan Gunaratna, Bruce Hoffman, and Daniel Benjamin, as well as journalists Peter Bergen and Jason Burke (who have both written extensively on al-Qaeda), has been that there is no evidence that suggests any collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That was similar to the conclusion of specific investigations by the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and 9/11 Commission, among others. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed the CIA's investigation and concluded that the CIA's conclusion that there was no evidence of operational collaboration was justified.

While Saddam was not involved in the September 11 attacks, members of his government did have contacts with al-Qaeda over the years; many of the links, as will be seen below, are not considered by experts and analysts as convincing evidence of a collaborative operational relationship. Former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke writes, "he simple fact is that lots of people, particularly in the Middle East, pass along many rumors and they end up being recorded and filed by U.S. intelligence agencies in raw reports. That does not make them 'intelligence'. Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports. Did al-Qaeda agents ever talk to Iraqi agents? I would be startled if they had not. I would also be startled if American, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Jordanian agents had somehow failed to talk to al-Qaeda or Iraqi agents. Talking to each other is what intelligence agents do, often under assumed identities or 'false flags,' looking for information or possible defectors." Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Voice of America that " Saddam Hussein had his agenda and al-Qaida had its agenda, and those two agendas were incompatible. And so if there was any contact between them, it was a contact that was rebuffed rather than a contact that led to meaningful relationships between them."

The purported meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi Intelligence officer, regarding which Vice President Cheney had stated "we’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it", was dismissed by CIA Director George Tenet, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2004 that there was no evidence to support that allegation. In fact, the FBI had evidence that Atta was in Florida at the time, taking aircraft flight training; and the Iraqi officer in question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani, has been captured and maintains he has never met Atta.

The repeated accusation by Vice President Cheney that Iraq harbored Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, conflicts with Iraq's 1998 offer to the FBI of extradition for Yasin in return for a statement clearing Iraq from any role in the attack. Even though the CIA and FBI had already concluded that Iraq played no role in the attack, the Clinton administration refused the offer. Iraq also offered to extradite Yasin in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. In June 2002, an unnamed US intelligence official told 60 Minutes that Iraq had attached "extreme conditions" to the handing over of Yasin. According to the official, the Iraqis wanted the U.S. to sign a document laying out where Yasin had been since 1993, but that the US did not agree with their version of the facts. In any case, Yasin had cooperated with the FBI and they had released him, although they would later call it a "mistake." The CIA and FBI had nevertheless concluded in 1995 and 1996 that "the Iraqi government was in no way involved in the attack." Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke called the allegations "absolutely without foundation." The Iraqis made another offer to the Bush Administration in 2003 but this offer was also spurned.

Former National Security Council counterterrorism directors Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon summarized the problem with the Bush Administration's view in the eyes of the intelligence community: "The administration pressed its case for war most emphatically by arguing that U.S. national security was imperiled by Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda. The argument had the obvious virtue of playing to the public's desire to see the war on terrorism prosecuted aggressively and conclusively. Yet, scant proof of these links was presented. The record showed a small number of contacts between jihadists and Iraqi officials. This was treated as the tip of an unseen iceberg of cooperation, even though it fell far short of anything that resembled significant cooperation in the eyes of the counterterrorism community—as it always had. No persuasive proof was given of money, weaponry, or training being provided."

Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, has since revealed that "as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida."