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a
malcontent rant�
04.21.2005
(Editors Note: I was
beginning to Think that I made this story up... I recently found it again, and I
do not have to go through boxes in my Garage. Imagine, Leftists were
making the case for Saddam first. The problem is, the War in Afghanistan
went so well, so quickly, and Public Opinion was SO behind the President, that
even the Leftists at Salon.com had to bury this one... Well, I found it...
Enjoy! - tha malcontent)
A Saddam connection?
While the world focuses on Osama bin Laden, some experts argue that Iraq was
a likely conspirator.
By David Neiwert
http://archive.salon.com/politics/f...iraq/print.html
Sept. 21, 2001 | Even as the Bush administration and the national media focus
almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden as the seemingly preordained "prime
suspect" in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, evidence
is beginning to emerge that a more familiar enemy may also have been involved in
the devastation: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The central trail of evidence appears to show bin Laden's unquestionable
complicity, but a second, subtler set of footprints may lead to Saddam's door.
That trail originates with the first World Trade Center bombing, with evidence
that some analysts believe links the 1993 operation to Iraq. That theory has
gained currency over the past few years among some intelligence experts,
including former CIA director R. James Woolsey. In recent days, the
administration has contended that the Sept. 11 attacks likely had some
state-supported assistance, and others (including Israeli intelligence) have
pegged Iraq as the likely co-conspirator. Moreover, there are reports of
possible ties between at least one of the hijackers and Iraqi intelligence.
All of which raises a new and troubling possibility: that last week's attacks
were not just the insane acts of a small fringe fundamentalist network, but the
completion of unfinished business -- and that their ultimate intent is not
merely terror, but revenge for the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent military actions
against Iraq.
The case against Iraq is also being made against the political backdrop of a
split among Bush advisors, reported in the New York Times -- pitting hard-liners
like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has long advocated action
against Iraq, against more cautious officials, like Secretary of State Colin
Powell. And the hypothesis of an Iraqi connection may be being pushed by
conservatives who, long irritated that the U.S. did not push on to Baghdad
during the Gulf War and finish off Saddam Hussein, see an opportunity to
conclude that unfinished business.
The specter of Saddam's involvement in the series of hijackings and subsequent
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was raised officially this
week by administration sources who told reporters at CBS News and the Boston
Globe that one of the known hijackers, Mohammad Atta, may have met with Iraqi
intelligence officials during his travels to Europe this past summer. Those
sources were quick to say the connection was not a "smoking gun," and Iraqi
officials immediately denied their government's involvement.
This was not, however, the first indication of Iraqi complicity. A number of
intelligence experts have questioned whether bin Laden's organization possessed
the intelligence capacity required to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. They say
that even though bin Laden may well have provided the personnel, the most likely
suspect behind the logistics of the disaster is Saddam Hussein's intelligence
operation.
According to Woolsey, who was CIA director from 1993 to 1995, the model of
terrorism currently at play in the media -- in which a "loose network" of
Islamic fundamentalists is solely to blame for the attacks -- may well be
incomplete, since it obscures the possibility of state sponsorship, and ignores
the possibility that these small terror groups may in fact be useful front
organizations for larger entities.
Woolsey and other intelligence analysts say that although the Sept. 11 attacks
themselves were a relatively low-tech affair involving box cutters and knives
used to hijack jets and convert the airliners themselves into potent bombs, the
entire operation was in fact extremely sophisticated. The logistics, the
planning, the coordination, the ability to apparently provide new identities for
a large team of operatives and to hide them effectively within U.S. borders --
all these point to the greater likelihood of a state-operated intelligence
agency's complicity.
"Unless it is bin Laden himself or one of his senior colleagues, this attack,
this whole thing says to me that there was some integrated plan," says Woolsey,
who also wrote of Iraq's possible involvement in the New Republic. "Terrorist
groups are not -- I mean, driving a truck bomb into the Marine barracks in
Beirut is one thing, but an integrated plan is not the first thing you think of
when you think of a terrorist group. Even a relatively wealthy terrorist group."
The highly visible media campaign that has given bin Laden the widespread image
as the world's top terrorist strikes Woolsey as disinformation: "I mean, if you
look at bin Laden sitting over there issuing fatwahs and making video tapes and
reciting poems, sound bites about attacking the United States, and having his
lieutenants talk openly and loudly and often on open telephone lines about
attacking the United States, you begin to think that there might be somebody
sitting back there who is just as happy as bin Laden is for him to be front and
center, because he likes the fame and being the pin-up boy. And somebody else --
possibly the Iraqis -- may like the fact that somebody else is getting the
attention rather than them," Woolsey says. "They care about the damage, not the
attention."
If Iraqi intelligence is involved, Woolsey does not believe that necessarily
absolves bin Laden. "I'm not comfortable with the formulation of one or the
other having done it," he says. "I'm more comfortable with the formulation that
it was a partnership, and each one was doing what he does best. Who knows? It
may have been that Iraqi intelligence handled part of the logistics, and bin
Laden's group provided the people."
Woolsey and other intelligence analysts point to a number of other pieces of
evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to Islamic terrorists, ranging from regular
gatherings of such groups in Baghdad, to the way Saddam -- whose ruling Baath
Party is avowedly atheistic -- has altered the Iraqi flag to include an Islamic
blessing. But the trail of evidence most starkly goes back to the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing.
The similarity of that attack to the Sept. 11 disaster extends beyond the target
itself. Perhaps the most striking point is that the mastermind of that plot,
when arrested two years later, had been in the process of organizing a highly
coordinated mass hijacking of airliners.
And as it happens, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this man --
contrary to the contention of the Clinton administration at the time -- was an
agent of Saddam's elite intelligence unit.
A man who calls himself Ramzi Yousef is currently serving a 240-year sentence in
federal prison for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in which
six people died, though even his trial judge noted at sentencing: "We don't even
know what your real name is."
What is known about him is that he entered the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi
passport bearing Yousef's name, and then promptly sought political asylum.
Shortly afterward, he began organizing a group of Islamic radicals in the Jersey
City, N.J., area who had been planning to pipe-bomb government officials and
Jewish leaders in retaliation for the imprisonment of one of their martyrs, Meir
Kahane assassin El Sayyid Nosair. However, Yousef promptly escalated the plot
into one with a bigger target -- namely, the World Trade Center.
Yousef's real identity has been the particular obsession of intelligence analyst
Laurie Mylroie, whose 2000 book, "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished
War Against America," which reads now like a prophecy about the Sept. 11
attacks, and is referenced by many, including Woolsey, who question whether bin
Laden was solely responsible for the attacks. Mylroie has an extensive
background in Middle East intelligence, and her book is largely based on a
thorough examination of the trial documents in the World Trade Center cases.
Mylroie says Yousef's operations were a classic "false flag" in which actions
are carried out in a way that makes others look responsible -- and Yousef, she
believes, was almost certainly an Iraqi intelligence operative. She points
particularly to the circumstances around his flight from the United States after
his team of bombers set off their device in 1993 -- which had been intended to
kill 250,000 people, toppling one tower into the other and releasing a deadly
cloud of cyanide, but which only created a ball of flame that instead burned up
the cyanide -- and in short order were arrested.
Yousef fled the country and flew to Karachi, Pakistan, with the passport of a
Kuwaiti named Abdul Basit Karim. For the next two years he remained at large,
but resurfaced in Manila when a batch of chemicals he was mixing for his next
bombing plot caught fire. Forced to flee, he was apprehended a month later in
Pakistan, thanks to information on a computer he left behind in the Philippines.
The details of the plot contained on that computer were chilling. Investigators
found that Yousef was planning to plant bombs, comprised of a liquid explosive
that could get past metal detectors, in coordinated fashion aboard a series of
11 American airliners scheduled to fly at roughly the same time over the Pacific
Ocean.
Mylroie believes that even though Yousef was captured, at least some of the
logistical planning behind this plan may have lived on with whomever his cohorts
might have been, and may well have provided the groundwork for the Sept. 11
attacks on America.
"I don't know if these attacks are part of the same plan -- I haven't seen any
evidence of that -- but there are clearly echoes of the logistical side of
Yousef's plot in it," she says. "Even more striking is that he plotted to
destroy the Trade Center as well. "I don't think it's hard to see the hand of
Iraqi intelligence at work here. It's clear a state was involved in the attack
because it was so sophisticated, and Iraq is the most likely candidate. They are
the only state we are at war with."
The penultimate piece of evidence linking Yousef to Iraqi intelligence, Mylroie
says, is his assumption of the identity of Abdul Basit Karim. There really was
an Abdul Basit, who was a Kuwaiti educated in Britain, but who was living in
Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990. He also was four inches shorter than
Yousef, who generally bears little resemblance to the man.
Despite that, Yousef's fingerprints appear in Basit's official Kuwaiti file.
Mylroie collected an array of evidence, including missing pages and a strikingly
out-of-place notation, that the file was tampered with extensively, all
indicating that Yousef had assumed the identity of someone killed during the
Iraqi invasion. Creating such identities is common for agents involved in "wet"
operations by Soviet-style intelligence agencies.
And in the case of Yousef/Basit, the only such organization that could have done
so was Iraq's.
Saddam Hussein rose to power through the ranks of Iraqi intelligence, and
consolidated his grip on the nation in the 1970s by dramatically expanding the
power and scope of his intelligence and security forces. Over the years, that
power has if anything grown and intensified, particularly in the wake of
Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War.
Today's Iraqi intelligence agencies cover a broad range of activities, from
Saddam's personal protection force to handling political dissent. But by far the
most powerful and feared of these is the Iraqi Intelligence Service, or
Mukhabarat. Its powers range from electronic surveillance to counterintelligence
and special operations; notably, its mysterious "Office Sixteen" exists solely
for training agents for clandestine operations abroad, including lessons in the
use of terror techniques.
The Mukhabarat received considerable notoriety in 1994, when U.S. intelligence
uncovered proof that Iraqi agents had attempted to assassinate former President
George Bush during his visit to Kuwait. In retaliation, President Clinton
ordered a missile attack on the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.
The missiles found their mark, but the response was nonetheless inadequate in
impressing Saddam, since few of the spy agency's personnel were lost. "The only
thing the Clinton administration did was launch a few cruise missiles at an
empty building in the middle of the night," says Woolsey, who was CIA chief at
the time. "That probably made him laugh even harder."
Woolsey believes Saddam was already laughing at the Americans because of their
failure to uncover his likely involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing. At the time, the plot's mastermind, Yousef, was still at large, and
investigators were still focusing on the sacrificial lambs he had left behind --
one of whom, desperate for airfare, had actually attempted to redeem his deposit
on the truck used in the bombing.
The FBI's chief in New York at the time, Jim Fox -- who had a background in
counter-terrorism -- was in fact doggedly pursuing the likelihood of Iraqi
complicity in the bombing. Several of his agents had uncovered what he believed
were strong indications that Mukhabarat agents had enacted the plot, including
information from foreign intelligence agencies.
But Fox was replaced in mid-1994 for ostensibly bureaucratic reasons, and his
successors chose not to keep pursuing the state-sponsorship angle, saying they
had found no evidence of it. Instead, they focused on convicting the
perpetrators they had in hand, including a second set of bombing conspirators
associated with a blind Muslim cleric in Jersey City named Sheikh Omar Abdul
Rahman.
Mylroie believes the Clinton administration made a conscious effort to downplay
the Iraqi connection because it was wedded to a policy designed to "contain"
Saddam rather than confront him. Woolsey demurs, suggesting that the problem was
more a pragmatic one, given the American system of justice and the difficulty
often associated with obtaining conspiracy convictions.
Despite their often overlapping interests, a high bureaucratic wall exists
between American security and law-enforcement agencies, and that wall proved
crucial in the World Trade Center cases, particularly Ramzi Yousef's. With the
Justice Department firmly in charge, national security concerns such as the
possibility of state sponsorship of the terrorism took a back seat to the
reality of prosecuting the case in U.S. courts.
"There's nothing nefarious about that," says Woolsey. Conspiracy cases in
particular can be quite complex and difficult for obtaining convictions, and he
thinks the prosecutors were mostly intent on trying to keep the case simple for
the sake of putting the men behind bars: "They were only doing what good
prosecutors do."
But in the process, the chance of establishing whether or not Yousef was an
Iraqi intelligence agent carrying out Saddam's orders was lost. If the Iraqi
dictator was in fact involved, then the message he got was clear: He could
sponsor covert terrorism in America and get away with it.
It might still be possible to determine whether or not Ramzi Yousef is really
Abdul Basit Karim; the latter had friends in London who could identify him, and
Scotland Yard possesses papers with Basit's fingerprints from 1988. If those
prints match those in the tampered Kuwaiti file, then it would confirm he is
indeed Basit. If they don't, then it means within a high degree of certainty
that he is an Iraqi agent. However, that simple test has never been conducted by
U.S. agencies.
"I think that there are very good indications that [Saddam] was involved in '93,
and it's a testable hypothesis by looking at the fingerprints that Scotland Yard
has," says Woolsey. "And if he was involved in '93, that substantially enhances
the possibility that he was involved Sept. 11 -- because it means he was sitting
over there for eight years laughing at us because he got away with the first
one, and continuing to undervalue us, as he did in 1990 when he invaded."
It is difficult to say whether or not the Bush administration, in its seemingly
single-minded pursuit of bin Laden, will take the time to examine the matter,
despite assurances it is investigating all potential aspects of the Sept. 11
attacks. So far, officials have shied away from connecting Saddam to the
disaster, though there are indications that may change soon.
On last Sunday's "Meet the Press," Vice President Cheney was asked if there was
any evidence linking Iraq to the attacks, and he flatly stated, "No," adding:
"In the past, there have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam
Hussein. But at this stage, you know, the focus is over here on al-Qaida [bin
Laden's organization] and the most recent events in New York. Saddam Hussein's
bottled up, at this point, but clearly we continue to have a fairly tough policy
where the Iraqis are concerned."
The only rumblings to the contrary have come from Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who paused for five seconds at a press briefing this week when asked
about the possibility of "state sponsorship" of the attacks. He finally answered
that he would leave the question to Justice officials, but added: "I know a lot,
and what I have said ... is that states are supporting these people."
The chief reason intelligence analysts have given for dismissing the notion of a
specific Saddam/bin Laden connection has been the supposed enmity between the
two men, based on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which bin Laden violently opposed.
But Mylroie is skeptical, pointing out that the invasion occurred more than 10
years ago, which is an aeon in diplomatic years. Woolsey, too, has his doubts.
"First of all, that may be a cover story," he says. "Secondly, they have the
same chief hatred, which is for us. Thirdly, bin Laden is Sunni, so there's not
any of the Sunni-Shi'a tension that there would be if the allegation were that
he was working with Iran.
"And finally, Saddam has gotten reasonably close in the last few years to some
of the fundamentalist terrorist Sunni groups. They have meetings in Iraq -- I
can't point to any personal meetings or any personal link between bin Laden and
Saddam, but if you just look at his relationships with the terrorist groups
generally, and particularly the fundamentalist Sunni ones, it's striking. Some
of them call him 'the new Caliph' [an Islamic term for a temporal and spiritual
leader]."
Certainly, identifying Saddam Hussein as one of the co-perpetrators of the Sept.
11 attack would drastically change the landscape of the "crusade" Bush has
proposed against terrorism. Making such an identification would require an
all-out response. Instead of focusing solely on capturing bin Laden and crushing
his organization, U.S. forces would simultaneously be faced with the far more
formidable task of a full-scale military assault on Iraq.
That daunting prospect might intimidate the Bush team into withdrawing from
pushing the issue, preferring to continue the current course of "containing"
Saddam. Laurie Mylroie says a number of key intelligence players within the
administration are fighting to bring the Iraqi issue forward, but she fears that
politics may ultimately hold them back.
"My main concern is that the administration will put this off and choose to just
focus on bin Laden, for policy considerations," Mylroie says. "I think we run
the risk of focusing on the individuals and not looking at the states --
forgoing security concerns for the sake of prosecuting criminals. If the states
go untouched, we'll just have more of the same."
Woolsey contends that even if no further evidence links Saddam to the Sept. 11
attacks, the Bush administration should at least look into the evidence now in
hand, and determine if he was behind the 1993 bombing. "If they determine that
Iraqi intelligence was behind '93, that should be enough. We got Al Capone not
for the many murders that he contracted for, but for income-tax evasion.
"In the '93 bombing, although six people died, it was certainly not as major a
thing as what happened on Sept. 11. There's no statute of limitations on
terrorism, and as far as I'm concerned, if he did the '93 bombing, that's enough
to get him on the list of folks who need to have their regimes changed."
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About the writer
David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle. He won a 2000 National
Press Club award for distinguished online journalism, and is the author of "In
God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest."
(All commentary included on this website is the opinion of tha malcontent and is
based in the Truth. No Liberals, Marxists, Stalinists, Socialists,
Communists or DemocRATS were harmed in the making of this website, I promise!
- tha malcontent)
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