Saddam/Al-Qaeda Ties? Czech It Out

Posted 1:30 a.m., June 22, 2004

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The idea that [Saddam] Hussein has ties to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists is laughable--he is a secular leader who has worked for years to crush fundamentalist Islam within Iraq, and if he were to give weapons of any kind to Qaeda, they would use those weapons on him first.

-- Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector, 2002

I know it's bad form to quote Scott Ritter, a man accused of being everything from being a patsy for the Iraqi government to being a traitor against the United States--even if he is also one of the key men who, as a UNSCOM inspector, helped destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons capacity in the 1990s. Whatever, Ritter's words now seem pretty well vindicated by the 9/11 commission's recent staff statement No. 15.

Not that the current administration is taking any notice, other than to say that the 9/11 commission staff report is wrong when it concludes that no collaboration took place between Saddam and al-Qaeda leading up to 9/11. Never mind that the commission--made up of both Republicans and Democrats--has spent the past year investigating the Sept. 11 plot, including whether Saddam Hussein played a role.

Vice President Dick Cheney told CNBC reporter Gloria Borger last week that he "probably" has more information than the 9/11 commission was privy to, though he quickly added, "I don't know what they know." Commission members have since asked the vice president to cough up whatever information he is holding back so they can wrap up their probe. "We should have that information already," commission member Richard Ben-Veniste said.

But how can Cheney? He doesn't know what they don't know! They probably don't know what Cheney knows, but how can Cheney know what they don't know, which he knows, even though by seeming so confident that he knows something they don't know, it would suggest he does know exactly what it is they don't know. Unless there really is nothing else to know. You know?

Instead of helping to better inform the commission, though, the vice president continues to parrot the same words, phrases and clauses he has been casting out since shortly after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, dropping barely veiled hints that Hussein was behind the plot. More than half of Americans--as Cheney well knows--believe that is the case, though there is no evidence of that connection.

The Czech Meeting

Personally, I think that the administration is deliberately spreading confusion bombs to keep doubt in play, so that the last shred of justification for the war in Iraq doesn't disintegrate before the election in November.

Take the alleged "Czech meeting": Cheney has persistently cited a meeting in the Prague between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and a "senior Iraqi official" in April 2001.

The 9/11 commission has cited cell phone records that seemed to indicate Atta was in the U.S., not the Prague, at the time that the supposed meeting took place. You don't get the feeling that this issue is really in doubt.

"We have pretty unshakable evidence Atta was in Florida. So with the principal that someone can't be in two place at the same time, as well as looking at this very carefully over time--talking to the CIA, FBI, all those with primary information--we have come to the conclusion that the so-called Czech meeting never happened."

-- Richard Ben-Veniste, 9/11 commissioner, "Meet the Press," June 20, 2004

However, in another corner, sits the vice president.

"We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11. The one thing we had was a Czech intelligence service report saying that Muhammad Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official at the embassy on April 9, 2001. That's never been proven; it's never been refuted."

-- Vice President Dick Cheney, CNBC's Capital Report, June 17, 2004

If it's never been proven, one "Washington Week" pundit was heard to ask Friday evening, and if it's never been refuted, why is it being cited?

Here is Gloria Borger's answer to that question:

"I think it's all this question of intelligence and people reading intelligence differently and people looking at different intelligence. And what you saw there with the vice president is somebody who completely believes, and said to me that there is overwhelming evidence that there is a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. And what you see from the 9/11 commission report is they said there is "no collaborative relationship." They believe there is a courtship between Osama bin Laden and Iraq, but that it was never consummated. When you talk to the vice president of the United State, he believes that it was."

-- Gloria Borger, Washington Week, June 18, 2004

Borger could be a little more forthright. She pointedly asked the vice president in her interview with him last week about the Czech meeting, even reciting back to him his statement that the Czech meeting "was pretty well confirmed." But then she let Cheney get away with saying, "I never said that. I never said that. Absolutely not."

Didn't he really?

It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April.

-- Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," Dec. 9, 2001

A simple difference in interpreting the available evidence? Maybe. But that is getting harder and harder to believe.

Dazed and Confused

You'd be in plentiful company if all this confounds you. I'm siding with those who think that 9/11 had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, but I too am confused. And after watching TV Sunday morning, millions of other people must be, too.

On "Meet the Press," two members of the 9/11 commission gave decidedly mixed messages about the Hussein-Osama connection--though the commission members nonetheless agreed that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.

Here's what former Watergate prosecutor Ben-Veniste told Tim Russert on Sunday's "Meet the Press."

There are two distinct issues. One, first of all, 9/11. Take it to the bank: There was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11. Let's put that to bed.

That's what our commission found. That's what our staff, which included former high-ranking CIA officials who know what to look for, who to questions, where to look [said in their report]. We looked at everything available: no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe.

Were there contacts over time between Iraq and al-Qaeda? Yes. There were efforts made to communicate. We found no evidence of collaboration in any effort about any kind of operation against United States interests. And if there is additional information that the vice president has or others have, we think we should have gotten that information by now, but if there is more information, then we are happy to look at it, we are interested in looking at it and ought to look at it.

And if there is some reason to modify our position, then we will do so. But this not an effort to discredit or modify someone else's statements. This was an objective, fact-finding effort by a bipartisan commission to get the facts. And that's what we've done.

-- Richard Ben-Veniste, 9/11 commissioner, Meet the Press, June 20, 2004

Now, here's John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy and also a 9/11 commission member:

I really totally disagree with what I thought were outrageously irresponsible journalism to portray what the staff statement--and again this is a staff statement, the commissioners have not addressed this issue yet--to portray it as contradicting what the administration said. There is really very little difference between what our staff found, what the administration is saying today and what the Clinton administration said.

The Clinton administration portrayed the relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam's intelligence services as one of cooperating in weapons development. There is abundant evidence of that. In fact, as you'll soon hear from Joe Klein, President Clinton justified his strike on the Sudan pharmaceutical site because it was thought to be manufacturing VX [nerve] gas with the help of the Iraqi intelligence service. Since then, that's been validated. There have been traces of [the precursor chemical] EMPTA that comes straight from Iraq. This confounds Republicans who accuse Clinton of [bombing Sudan in 1998] for political purposes. But it confirms the cooperative relationship, which were the words of the Clinton administration, between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.

The Bush administration has never said that [Iraq] participated in the 9/11 attack. They've said, and our staff has confirmed, that there has been numerous contacts between Iraqi intelligence and the al-Qaeda over a period of ten years at least. Now there is new intelligence, and this has come since our staff [report] has been written. Because as you know, new intelligence has been coming in steadily from the interrogations in Guantanamo and Iraq and from captured documents.

Some of these documents indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaeda. That still has to be confirmed, but the vice president was right when he said he may have things we don't yet have. And we are now in the process of getting this latest intelligence.

In any case it demonstrates the difficulty we've had in this commission, because we're under tremendous political pressures. Everything we come out with, one side or the other seizes on it in this political year to try to make a political point on it.

-- John Lehman, 9/11 commissioner, "Meet the Press," June 20, 2004

Sudan as Matchmaker

I've read the relevant portions of the 9/11 staff report that was quoted so widely in the press last week and that prompted the New York Times to demand an apology from the president. As I read it, here is what took place between al-Qaeda and Saddam:

• The report says that Osama Bin Laden in the early 1990s had taken refuge in the Sudan. While there, he began funding the anti-Iraqi Islamist resistance in Kurdistan in their struggle against Saddam Hussein's oppression in Iraq. (He was aiding Saddam's enemies, mind you.)

• But Sudanese officials were troubled by that, because the government of the Sudan had diplomatic and other ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein and didn't want to lose them. So they prevailed on Osama to stop funding the Kurds. He did.

• At that point, the Sudanese brokered a 1994 meeting between bin Laden and the Iraqis. An Iraqi intelligence officer met with bin Laden, who requested space in Iraq upon which to build and maintain a terrorist training camp and to assist in procuring weapons systems. The message was relayed to Saddam who replied with a deafening silence. Probably knowing that he would be harboring the seeds of his own destruction if he went along with the request, he simply ignored bin Laden.

• Contacts with Iraq continued after bin Laden was forced to return to Afghanistan, but never resulted in "a collaborative relationship." And two jailed senior al-Qaeda associates have adamantly denied "that any ties existed between al-Qaeda and Iraq."

So let's go back to Lehman's point: the Bush administration never said Saddam was involved in 9/11. Is that the case?

You decide. On Sept. 14, 2003, Cheney was confronted by Tim Russert with poll data from a Washington Post survey indicating that 69 percent of Americans believe there was a connection between Saddam and Sept. 11.

Cheney: I'm not surprised that people make that connection.

Russert: But is there a connection?

Cheney: We don't know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said, no, we didn't have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we've learned a couple of things. We've learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through the decade of the Nineties. That it involved training for example on [biological weapons] and [chemical weapons] that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get training on the systems. It involved the Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.

With respect to 9/11, of course you had the story that's been public out there that the Czechs have alleged that Mohammad Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer five months before the attack. But we've never been able to develop any more on that yet in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know.

We just don't know. We don't know what to think.

But we are coming to figure that out, as the Washington Post reports this morning.

Exactly half the country now approves of the way Bush is managing the U.S. war on terrorism, down 13 percentage points since April, according to [a new] poll. Barely two months ago, Bush comfortably led [John] Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by 21 points when voters were asked which man they trusted to deal with the terrorist threat. Today the country is evenly divided, with 48 percent preferring Kerry and 47 percent favoring Bush.

-- Richard Morin and Dan Balz, The Washington Post, June 22, 2004

-- Kevin Featherly

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