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.

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MORE LINKS

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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.

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HIJACKER MEETS IRAQI INTELLIGENCE

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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).

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IRAQ BEHIND RAMZI YOUSEF AND 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING

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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.

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IRAQ BEHIND USS COLE ATTACK

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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.

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IRAQ'S UNFINISHED WAR

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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.

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HIJACKERS USED STOLEN IDENTITIES - IRAQI INTELLIGENCE MO

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Hijackers may have taken Saudi identities

A Compilation Of Material On False Identities In Islamic Terrorism

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MY LINKS

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DOW 10,000 & SADDAM'S REVENGE?

Iraq behind destruction of World Trade Center? -
Attacks with weapons of mass destruction next?

IMMINENT CHEMICAL SCUD MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL? (7/8)