Before the War (prior to March
2003)
Before the invasion of
Iraq, the
Bush administration was boltering its case for the war by insinuating
connections between Iraq, Sadam, Al Qaeda, and 9/11. There was substantial international dispute over such
claims. For example, the LA Times
reported on November 4th, 2002:
As the Bush administration prepares for a possible military attack on Iraq that it describes as the next logical step in its war on terror, some of its strongest front-line allies in that war dispute Washington's allegations that the Baghdad regime has significant ties to Al Qaeda.
In recent interviews, top investigative magistrates, prosecutors, police and
intelligence officials who have been fighting Al Qaeda in Europe said
they are
concerned about attempts by President Bush and his aides to link Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden's terror network.
"We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda,"
said
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French judge who is the dean of the region's
investigators after two decades fighting Islamic and Middle Eastern
terrorists.
"And we are working on 50 cases involving Al Qaeda or radical Islamic
cells. I think if there were such links, we would have found them. But we
have
found no serious connections whatsoever."
Even in Britain, a loyal U.S. partner in the campaign against Iraq, it's hard
to find anyone in the government making the case that Al Qaeda and the Iraqi
regime are close allies. In fact, European counter-terrorist veterans who are
working with American counterparts worry that an attack on Iraq,
especially a
unilateral U.S. invasion, would worsen the threat of radical Islamic
terrorism
worldwide and impede their work.
"A war on Iraq will not diminish the terrorist threat. It will probably
increase it," said Baltasar Garzon, Spain's best-known investigative
magistrate, who is prosecuting Al Qaeda suspects in Madrid as alleged
accomplices in the Sept. 11 attacks. "It could radicalize the
situation in
the Middle East.... As for the investigations of Sept. 11, doors would
close in
the Arab world that have helped in the fight against Al Qaeda. And a war
would
do nothing to bolster the investigation into the attacks in the United
States."
The
European critics aren't limited to the usual suspects: instinctively
anti-American, pro-Arab politicians and pundits whose voices are often
the loudest in the Iraq debate here. On the contrary, Bruguiere, Garzon
and other investigators have won praise from U.S. officials for their
tough tactics and proven willingness to lock up suspected terrorists
during the past year.
European investigators
said
the Al Qaeda presence is stronger in Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Iran than
it is
in Iraq. Since the war in Afghanistan, Iran in particular has become a busy
refuge for Bin Laden's operatives, according to French
investigators.
And Saudi Arabia, officially a
U.S. ally, has been deeply involved in the worldwide funding mechanism
that helps sustain Al Qaeda operations as well as fundamentalist
ideologues active in recruitment of terrorists and the theology of
violence, European investigators said.
Bruguiere, the French judge, took issue with the idea that an invasion of
Iraq
would make the world safer from terrorism.
The main thing that Iraq and Al Qaeda have in common is enmity toward the
United States, according to Bruguiere and others. That is not enough to
create
an alliance, but it could cause a resurgent Al Qaeda to exploit a U.S.
military
operation that produced civilian casualties and an extended occupation of
Iraq,
the same way Al Qaeda uses the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to whip up
resentment of the West.
A U.S. military intervention in Iraq could "globalize anti-American and
anti-Western sentiment," Bruguiere said. "Attacking Iraq would
intensify
Islamic terrorism, not reduce it."
Top officials around the world
argued that there was no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In fact, they worried that a pre-emptive
invasion of Iraq might actually create terrorists by providing a new
recruiting tool for the radical Islamic fundamentalists looking to take
advantage of resentment against America.
Another example comes from the BBC
NEWS, published
February 5th, 2003:
There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News.
The classified document, written by defence intelligence staff three
weeks ago,
says there has been contact between the two in the past. But it assessed that any fledgling
relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies.
That conclusion flatly contradicts one of the main charges laid against Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein by the United States and Britain - that he has
cultivated
contacts with the group blamed for the 11 September attacks.
The defence intelligence
staff document, seen by BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, is
classified Top Secret and was sent to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other
senior members of the government.
It says al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden views Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party as
running contrary to his religion, calling it an "apostate
regime".
"His aims are in ideological conflict with present day Iraq," it
says.
Concurring with this British assessment, the leader of Ansar al-Islam, Majamuddin Fraraj Ahmad (a.k.a. Mullah Kreker) vehemently denied connections to Iraq, as reported by ABC NEWS on February 5th, 2003:
"They are our
enemy," he said, adding that his group opposes Saddam Hussein because,
unlike Osama bin Laden, Saddam is not a good Muslim.
"We believe that Saddam Hussein, him and his group and his ministers
also
outside of Islam zone," said Krekar.
The skeptics weren't only to be found on foreign ground however. As USA TODAY reported as early as September 26th, 2002, that Pentagon and CIA counterterrorism officials argued against an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection:
...A Pentagon official,
speaking on condition of anonymity, called the new assertions an
"exaggeration." Other intelligence experts said some of the charges
appeared to be based on old information and that there was still no
"smoking gun" connecting Iraq with the Sept. 11 attacks on the
United
States.
Vince Cannistraro, former CIA counterterrorism chief, said the only known
discussion of that kind [ie, of a safe haven between Iraq and al-Qaeda]
occurred in 1998 when Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and
reputedly
a top Iraqi intelligence official, went to Afghanistan after al-Qaeda bombed
two U.S. embassies in Africa. Hijazi offered al-Qaeda sanctuary in Iraq, but
terrorist leader Osama bin Laden turned it down, Cannistraro says,
because he
did not want to become a tool of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
A small number of al-Qaeda members are known to have found refuge in northern Iraq in a Kurdish area outside Saddam's control. If al-Qaeda members are also in Baghdad, they could not be there without Saddam's knowledge and consent, experts say.
Officials at the State Department and the National Security Council also disavowed such a connection, again before the war. This is reported in the National Journal on August 9th, 2003:
"Our conclusion was
that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD
knowledge to al Qaeda because they were mortal enemies," said Greg
Thielmann, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
Research on weapons intelligence until last fall. "Saddam would have
seen
al Qaeda as a threat, and al Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of
secular government they hated."
Other Bush veterans concur that the evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq was
overblown.
"Anyone who followed al Qaeda for a living would not have considered
Iraq
to be in the top tier of countries to be worried about," said Roger
Cressey, who left the administration last fall after working on
counterterrorism issues at the National Security Council and as a top
aide to
cyberterrorism czar Richard Clarke. "I'd argue that Iraq would be in the
third tier." By contrast, Cressey said, Iran would rate in "the top
tier."
And Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security
Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution's
Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials
pushed the intelligence envelope on the Qaeda connection. "After
September
11, there was a concrete effort by policy makers, particularly in the
Pentagon
and the vice president's office, to come up with links between al Qaeda and
Iraq."
Generally, these and other former intelligence officials who talked to
National
Journal felt that the United States needed to confront Saddam
Hussein. But
the analysts questioned the war's timing and wondered whether the attack
should
have come before the battle against al Qaeda was sufficiently far
along.
The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that came out in October 2002 claimed "low confidence" that Sadam was likely, even "in desperation," to "share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qa’ida." The National Intelligence Estimate revealled that any high-level contacts that might have been made between al Qaeda and Iraq had taken place in the 1990's and had not been followed up since or by the Iraqi government.
Since
the invasion of Iraq (post March 2003)
The 14 months since the U.S. invasion of Iraq have only brought more evidence against a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The NY Times reported on June 6th, 2003 that "The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track Al Qaeda told reporters that his team had found no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.
Likewise, the LA Times reported on July 19th, 2003 that declassified documents undercut Bush administration claims before the war that Hussein had links to al Qaeda and that the bipartisan September 11th commission report [also] undercuts Bush administration claims before the war that Hussein had links to Al Qaeda.
On September 17th, 2003, in a press release that can be found on the White House webpage, President Bush himself admitted We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. On January 9th, 2004, the NY Times reports Colin Powell as saying, "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection" between Iraq and al-Qaida. And on Hardball, April 29th, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld conceded, "If youre asking if theres a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq, the answer is no."
According to a NY Times report on January 14th, 2004, after he lost power Saddam warned his followers not to mix with the Arab fighters coming across Iraqs now open boarders to battle with the American occupiers:
Saddam Hussein warned his
Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters
entering Iraq to battle American troops, according to a document found
with the
former Iraqi leader when he was captured, Bush administration officials said
Tuesday.
The document appears to be a directive, written after he lost power, from Mr.
Hussein to leaders of the Iraqi resistance, counseling caution against
getting
too close to Islamic jihadists and other foreign Arabs coming into occupied
Iraq, according to American officials.
It provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration
contention of close cooperation between Mr. Hussein's government and
terrorists
from Al Qaeda. C.I.A. interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda
officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden
had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Mr.
Hussein.
Officials said Mr. Hussein apparently believed that the foreign Arabs, eager
for a holy war against the West, had a different agenda from the
Baathists, who
were eager for their own return to power in Baghdad. As a result, he
wanted his
supporters to be careful about becoming close allies with the jihadists,
officials familiar with the document said.
A new, classified intelligence report circulating within the United States
government describes the document and its contents, according to
administration
officials who asked not to be identified. The officials said they had no
evidence that the document found with Mr. Hussein was a
fabrication.
According to a Carnegie Foundation report released in January of 2004, "The most intensive searching over the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddams government and Al Qaeda." And a Knight-Ridder report on March 3rd, 2004 states, "Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Saddam's links with al-Qaida, and several key parts of the administration's case have either proved false or seem increasingly doubtful. Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Saddam's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league."
A Miami Herald article summed it up on March 3rd, 2004:
Nearly a year after
U.S. and
British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify
allegations of
Hussein's links with al Qaeda, and several key parts of the administration's
case have either proved false or seem increasingly
doubtful.
Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Hussein's
secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in
league. At most, there were occasional meetings.
Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community never concluded that those meetings
produced an operational relationship, American officials said. That
verdict was
in a secret report by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence that was
updated in
January 2003, on the eve of the war.
''We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al Qaeda,'' a
senior
U.S. official acknowledged.