November 15, 2003

Explosive, If True

A memo disributed to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee outlines evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda - including links to the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and, possibly, the September 11 attack.

The New York Post has the story. [UPDATE: The Weekly Standard broke the story and its story is the definitive story on the memo.]

The memo goes far beyond the alleged but unproven meeting of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Saddam's intelligence chief in Prague in April 2001.

The relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued to grow in the aftermath of the Cole attack when two al Qaeda terrorists were deployed to Iraq to be trained in weapons of mass destruction and to obtain information on "poisons and gases." CIA reporting shows the Saudi National Guard went on a "kingdom-wide state of alert in late December 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia," the memo says.

There's more on the memo here from Rantburg, and here from NRO. Exceprt of the latter:

According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."

UPDATE: Some critics will try to say this is after-the-fact justification of the invasion of Iraq. But it is not. As the Weekly Standard makes clear, the memo outlines classifed pre-war intelligence:

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.