CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Did Saddam Help?

Yesterday I posted about this article in the Telegraph.

The British paper also published a second Coughlin article titled: "Does this link Saddam to 9/11?" In this article Coughlin offers more details about the document revealed by Iraq's interim government detailing a 2001 Baghdad meeting between 9-11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.

According to Coughlin, the handwritten communique was:

Written in the neat, precise hand of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and one of the few named in the US government's pack of cards of most-wanted Iraqis not to have been apprehended, the personal memo to Saddam is signed by Habbush in distinctive green ink.

Headed simply "Intelligence Items", and dated July 1, 2001, it is addressed: "To the President of the Ba'ath Revolution Party and President of the Republic, may God protect you."

The first paragraph states that "Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre - his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision.

"We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him . . . He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy."

Cautioning that it is almost impossible to ascertain whether or not the document is legitimate, Coughlin reports that Iraqi officials working for the interim government are convinced of its authenticity.

There are people who are working with us who used to work with Habbush who are convinced that it is his handwriting and signature. We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's dealings with al-Qaeda, and this document shows the extent of the old regime's involvement with the international terrorist network.

Coughlin reminds readers that this is the second document highlighted by the Telegraph that highlight possible links between Saddam and al-Qaeda. In April of this year the Telegraph published this article about another Iraqi intelligence document that indicated Saddam's regime was attempting to set up a meeting with Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, then based in Sudan.

So far the mainstream media have ignored these two articles. Power line’s John H. Hinderaker,"Hindrocket," in a post entitled “News Blackout Continues,” shares this explanation offered by the Robert Kaiser, Associate Editor of the Washington Post, in an online chat session, as to why the Post has blacked out news of the memo:

Annapolis, Md.: Will the Post be looking into the story reported by the Telegraph about connections between Abu Nidal, Mohammad Atta and Saddam Hussein? Very likely to be untrue, but would be immensely significant if true. And there's no mention on the Post's Web site about it yet.

Robert G. Kaiser: If we put every rumor and story in the British press (not to mention many others around the world) on the Web site, you'd be dizzy--and no wiser. The Post does not print other papers' uncheckable 'exclusive' stories. And I can tell you that there have been dozens of bad--that is, wrong--ones over recent months. The Telegraph, Daily and Sunday, has not earned our respect for accuracy or careful reporting.

Thankfully, the blogosphere will not allow these stories to be buried. Like the Feith memo revealed ny Stephen Case in his Case Closed article, this document needs to be scrutinized by the mainstream media’s best investigative reporters so we can ascertain wether there is any substance to the allegations of collaboration between al-Qaeda and Saddam.

In this article published by the National Review Online, Deroy Murdock, observes:

Also, Indiana-born, Iraqi-reared terrorist Abdul Rahman Yasin was indicted for mixing the chemicals in the bomb that exploded beneath One World Trade Center, killing six and injuring some 1,000 New Yorkers. Indicted by U.S. prosecutors in August 1993 as a conspirator in that plot, Yasin is on the FBI's Most-Wanted Terrorists list. ABC News confirmed on July 27, 1994, that Yasin had returned to Baghdad, where he traveled freely and visited his father's home almost daily. Richard Miniter reported September 25 on TechCentralStation: "U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, which shows Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and a monthly salary."

Abu Nidal's appearance in this memo is intriguing. The perpetrator of attacks that killed at least 275 people and injured some 625 others moved to Baghdad in 1999 where he lived under Hussein's protection. But on August 16, 2002, Nidal committed suicide, Baathist officials claimed. What they could not explain, however, is how Nidal killed himself with four bullets to the head.

Did Saddam Hussein, fearing an impending U.S. invasion, eliminate Nidal as Mohammed Atta's former tutor?

Atta Trained In Iraq

The Telegraph reports that it has acquired a copy of a handwritten memo, dated July 1, 2001, evidencing that Mohammed Atta’s, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was trained in Iraq. The secret memo was written to Saddam Hussein, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

The story states that Atta was “trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.”

In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta "displayed extraordinary effort" and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be "responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy."

If true, this is an explosive report:

The Telegraph article offers new support for the Feith memo and will breath new life into the debate about allegations of collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq. I have been posting about this debate since the Weekly Standard published Stephen Case’s Case Closed article four weeks ago.

Atta Meeting Denied Again

The New York Times reports that the former Iraqi intelligence officer who is alleged to have met with Mohamed Atta, the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told American interrogators he did not meet with Atta in Prague.

Reports have been circulated since shortly after the 9-11 terror attacks that an Iraqi spy had met with Atta in Prague. Czech government officials initially confirmed these reports, but according to the Times, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. eventually concluded that the meeting probably did not take place, and that there was no hard evidence that Mr. Hussein's government was involved in the 9-11 plot.

The allegations of a meeting between Atta and Iraqi Officials, have fueled the debate about whether there was any collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Reports of the alleged meeting are highlighted in the Feith memo revealed in Stephen Hayes’ Case Closed article published in the Weekly Standard four weeks ago. You can access my series of posts following the coverage of the Feith memo here.

The Times notes that American records now indicate that Mr. Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va. However, the Times’ report doesn’t mention this Edward Jay Epstein article in Slate which I posted about here. According to Epstein, the FBI had no records that put Atta in the United States at the time of the Prague meeting.

Case Misunderstood

In an article entitled, “The Case of the Misunderstood Memo,” published by Slate, Daniel Benjamin has written, what is so far, the best analysis of the Feith memo. And well he should!

Benjamin observed the rise of al-Qaeda as the National Security Council's director for counter-terrorism during the Clinton administration and co-authored The Age of Sacred Terror. I am reading that book now and have so far found it to be a phenomenal introduction to the Islamic perception of the west and review of the failure of U.S. intelligence in the years leading up to 9-11. More on the book later.

When revealed in Stephen L. Hayes’ "Case Closed" story three weeks ago, the Feith memo generated a lot of excitement, but little real analysis. Benjamin succinctly summarizes, that despite many calls for “some real reporting on the matter,” all we have gotten is “a passing look” by some big publications.

The piece has elicited one genuinely interesting column from the Washington Post's David Ignatius, who revealed that the United States and Britain had a highly placed informant in Iraqi intelligence "who told them before the war that in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had indeed considered such an operational relationship with bin Laden—and then decided against it."

The few beat reporters who cover the intelligence community called their sources and were told there was nothing new ....

Benjamin, like many of us following the Feith memo, is frustrated because a fuller airing is necessary to bring clarity to the issue of possible a possible collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Benjamin finds “glaring mistakes in the analytic material” in Hayes” article, but is not sure whether the errors were originally Feith's or Hayes'. Two examples: First, what is referred to as Bin Laden's "fatwa on the plight of Iraq" was in fact the famous "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," and second, some of the material presented in the Hayes article insinuates that Iraq staged the Khobar Towers bombing, when two administrations have laid the blame at 's door.

Benjamin acknowledges that there were a lot of meetings between Iraqis and jihadists and that some jihadists lived in or traveled through Iraq. According to Benjamin what is disputed is whether the meetings went anywhere.

Benjamin agrees with Hayes that “the Feith memo ‘just skims the surface of the reports of Iraq-al Qaeda connections.’”

The large sampling provided in his article, he [Hayes] believes, destroys critics' arguments "that links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely 'exaggerated' for political purposes; that hawks 'cherry-picked' bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public."

Of course there are more reports. When your intelligence service relays, as it should, everything short of sightings of Bin Laden on the moon, 50 reports of varying quality do not amount to much. The remaining material, many who are familiar with it believe, does not confirm the Hayes-Feith version but points in the other direction.

Putting all the disparate pieces together and trying to construct a coherent picture—yes, connecting the dots—is harder still, requiring a mastery of all the material.

One thing intelligence analysts do as they evaluate a body of information is keep in mind the context. This is worth attempting in the case of the Feith memo, too, because while much of the material may be new to the public, most of it has been bouncing around the government since well before the invasion of Iraq.

Benjamin goes on to point out that after all that time and much analysis little has been found that was solid enough to present in public.

Compare the Feith memo with Colin Powell's U.N. speech, which was preceded by the most thorough evaluation of the intelligence ever conducted by the Bush administration. Remarkably little on the ties between al-Qaida and Iraq made it into that speech.

This is perilous business. Making a judgment about Iraq-al-Qaida ties on the basis of the sections presented by Hayes would be like accepting a high-school biology student's reading of a CAT scan.

Strangely, however, there has been little inquiry into the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship. The press has had a difficult time taking this issue any further since so few reporters have good sources in the intelligence community.

Perhaps lack of good sources is the best explanation of why, after three weeks, Benjamin’s article is the best the mainstream media can provide. You can find my posts following the Feith memo story here.

Case Still Not Closed

Stephen Hayes is certainly tenacious. Three weeks after his Case Closed article, Hayes has yet another article maintaining a focus on Feith memo., and collabration between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. My series of posts following the Feith memo can be found here.

Hayes writes in the December 15, 2003 issue of the Weekly Standard that Evan Bayh (D. Indiana), responded to questions last week on the war in Iraq and the Feith memo. According to Hayes, Bayh reiterated his support for the war in Iraq and encouraged President Bush administration to be more aggressive in its preemptive measures to protect Americans:

Even if there's only a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would cooperate, the question is whether that's an acceptable level of risk. My answer to that would be an unequivocal 'no.' We need to be much more pro-active on eliminating threats before they're imminent.

Bayh had this to say about the growing evidence of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda: Some of the intelligence is strong, and some of it is murky. But that's the nature of intelligence on a relationship like this--lots of it is going to be speculation and conjecture. Following 9/11, we await certainty at our peril.

There is more, Hayes’ "An Itelligent Democrat" is worth reading. It provides hope that even though the main stream media let us down on thoroughly analyzing the Feith memo, the Senate Intelligence Committee may release additional information about it. That of course assumes that the Committee can get over the roadblock caused by the Democratic staff memo laying out a plan to politicize intelligence data. You can find my posts about that memo here.

Al-Qaida and Iraq Link Still Suvives

Rowan Scarborough has an article in today's Washington Times about the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

This article reveals some new information. Scarborough writes that the reports in the Feith memo "are from detained Iraqis and communications intercepts." I haven't found any reference to "communication intercepts" in the Case Closed article.

In addition, Scarborough reveals that:

Much of the information in Mr. Feith's letter was compiled by a special team he assembled in 2002. Their job was to study a decade of raw and confirmed intelligence on any ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, and put it in one report.

The team was disbanded in the fall of 2002 after the report was filed. Mr. Rumsfeld was briefed, as were other administration officials, including Mr. Tenet.

Scarborough reports that it was at this point that Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice began making stronger statements about the connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

He quotes Rumsfeld as saying in September 2002:

"We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad."

Tenet is quoted from a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

"We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade. ... We have credible reporting that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities."

Rice is quoted as saying:

"We know that several of the detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al Qaeda in chemical-weapons development."

Two other articles were published during the Thanksgiving weekend belittling the Feith memo. In this column in the Washigton Post David Ignatius, concludes:

The CIA, which collected most of the raw intelligence Feith cites, remains unconvinced, and for good reason. The case is thin, and contradicted by high-level Iraqi sources.

In this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jon Sawyer asserts that the leaking of the Feith memo may evidence a willingness to "manipulate intelligence for political ends."

This story has survived for over two weeks. A newspaper publishes a story about the Feith memo every other day or so. But we haven't seen the media feeding frenzy that the story deserves. The mainstream media should find the necessary experts and analyze the Feith memo, picking it apart piece by piece. Only then can the case be closed. Either the links were there or not, we deserve to know either way.

You can find all my posts following this story here.

About That Memo

The Weekly Standard has published another article about the Feith memo.

The editors say that the mainstream media’s failure to run with the Feith memo is a “simple case of media bias.” The editors aren’t surprised by bias among the mainstream media. They state they rarely complain about it, since we take it for granted.

The Weekly Standard editors complain about the administration’s failure to use the memo revelation as an opportunity to substantiate the links between Osama and Saddam:

They produce a memo for the Senate Intelligence Committee laying out the connections between They produce a memo for the Senate Intelligence Committee laying out the connections between Osama and Saddam. We obtain the memo, and make public those parts that don't endanger intelligence sources and methods. But now the administration--continuing a pattern of the last several months--shies away from an opportunity to substantiate its own case before the American people and the world.

The editors quote the introduction to part of the Feith memo, called "Summary of Body of Intelligence Reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda Contacts (1990-2003)."

Some individuals have argued that the al Qaeda ties to Iraq have not been "proven." The requirement for certainty misses the point. Intelligence assessments are not about prosecutorial proof. They do not require juridical evidence to support them nor the legal standards that are needed in law enforcement. Intelligence assessments examine trends, patterns, capabilities, and intentions. By these criteria, the substantial body of intelligence reporting--for over a decade, from a variety of sources--reflects a pattern of Iraqi support for al Qaeda's activities. The covert nature of the relationship has made it difficult to know the full extent of that support. Al Qaeda's operational security and Iraq's need to cloak its activities have precluded a full appreciation of the relationship. Nonetheless, the following reports clearly indicate that Osama bin Laden did cooperate with Iraq's secular regime despite differences in ideology and religious beliefs in order to advance al Qaeda's objectives and to defeat a common enemy--the U.S.

The editors then pose a number of questions they think the administration should answer about the alleged links between Iraq and alQaeda, including:

Is there in fact "credible reporting" about Iraqi training of al Qaeda in "the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs"?

Is there corroborating evidence for the reports detailed in the memo of 1998-1999 meetings between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

What is the "fragmentary evidence" of Iraqi involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and possible Iraqi involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center attack?

Read About That Memo.

I have been following this story for the last two weeks in these posts. While media bias may be taken for granted, it doesn’t make sense that the media would fail to examine in infinite detail a secret Pentagon memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee detailing, in 50 bullet points and over 16 pages, the relationship between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

Making an Iraq-Al Qaeda Link

The LA Times, unable to decide whether there Feith memo makes the case for an Iraq-Al Qaeda link, published two commentaries today about the memo.

One, “Making an Iraq-Al Qaeda Link” is by Stephen F. Hayes, the author of the Case Closed article. That article started the renewed debate about Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration which I have been following in these posts.

Hayes writes in the LA Times that there is now evidence demonstrating that those who are dismissive of the allegations of Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration are wrong. Hayes relies on a number of quotes from the Feith memo in support of the argument that there was cooperation between Iraq-Al Qaeda. Three quotes concern explosive and weapons training Iraq provided to Al Qaeda:

"An Iraqi intelligence officer said that as of mid-March, the Iraqi Intelligence Service was providing weapons to Al Qaeda members located at a training camp in northern Iraq, including rocket-propelled grenade (RPG-18) launchers."

"Bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the [Iraqi Intelligence Service's] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at Bin Laden's farm in Khartoum [Sudan] in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996."

Referring to information from an interview with former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence: "He said that in a 1994 meeting with Bin Laden in the Sudan, Bin Laden had requested that Iraq assist Al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured anti-ship limpet mines … Bin Laden also requested the establishment of Al Qaeda training camps inside Iraq."

Hayes concludes by warning that those clinging to the conventional wisdom that there were no connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq do themselves and the country a disservice by ignoring the relationship between Hussein and Bin Laden, two of America's most dangerous and determined enemies.

The other, commentary “'Evidence' for Link Is Administration Ploy,” is by Christopher Scheer. Scheer asserts that the Weekly Standard’s publishing extensive excerpts of a leaked of the Feth memo is nothing more than an attempt to “retroactively defend the debunked claims that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had meaningful ties.”

Maybe because I have strongly supported the liberation of Iraq, but Scheer’s article strikes me as nothing more than another antiwar rant.

Scheer’s one rational point is that raw intelligence shouldn't be divulged publicly because it is riddled with unverifiable hearsay. I say those of us who are untrained in intelligence analysis just aren’t competent to judge it. This is why I continue to beg the mainstream media to use their contacts to do some serious investigative reporting evaluating the Feith memo. Opinion pieces won’t resolve the issue.

Safire Joins the Missing Links Fray

William Safire has joined in the effort to bring attention to the story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection.

Referring to the Feith memo disclosed in the Weekly Standard’s Case Closed article, which I have posted about here, Safire writes:

The Defense Department acknowledged the Oct. 27 letter included a classified annex of "raw reports or products" of U.S. intelligence agencies on "the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," cautioning that it "drew no conclusions." But with so much connective tissue exposed — some the result of "custodial interviews" of prisoners — the burden of proof has shifted to those still grimly in denial.

Focusing on the allegations that the Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, al Ani, on several occasions, Safire writes about Edward Jay Epstein’s article in Slate, which I posted about here. Safire raises a number of questions concerning the alleged contact between Att and al Ani.

Since July, al-Ani has been in U.S. Department of Justice custody and I wonder how effectively he is being interrogated. Have we learned the whereabouts of his Prague and Baghdad aides and secretaries, and taken their testimony? Have we asked M.I.5 to let us speak to Jabir Salim, his Prague station-chief predecessor, who defected to Britain and may know which employees and which banks could transfer $100,000 to an account accessible to Atta?

Did al-Ani order any payment to "the student from Hamburg" or his co-conspirators, as Czech intelligence believes, and did the paymaster carry out the order? To what superior in Baghdad did al-Ani report, and who worked most closely with him, and are they in custody and do their stories jibe? What have we offered al-Ani, in protection or immunity or plea bargain, to turn state's evidence?

Safire thinks that “journalists will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light.” I hope he is right. So far the mainstream media is doing a great job of downplaying a very important story.

UPDATE: Captain’s Quarters, has been posting daily about the Feith memo. In today’s post he also applauds Safire for joining this fray. Check out the entire challenge series which begins here.

Newsweek's "Case"

Yesterday Stephen Hayes responded to Newsweek’s dismissive critique of Hayes’ Case Closed article. As I posted here, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write that the evidence revealed in the Feith memo was nothing more than “unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago—and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community.”

In his response, Hayes explains that Isikoff And Hosenball incorrectly assert that the Feith memo “omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees.” Hayes explains that paragraph No. 34 of the Feith memo concerns a September 3, 2002 interview, of senior al Qaeda lieutenant Zubaida. He next points out that paragraph No. 39 concerns a May 2003 custodial interview with Faruq Hijazi,

Hayes refutes the assertion that the memo concedes that much of the more recent reporting about Iraqi-al Qaeda ties is 'conflicting. He points out that the “conflicting” characterization was Hayes,’ not the memo’s.

There is more, Hayes also writes that the Feith memo “contains 13 reports of collaboration after July 1999. Several of these appear to be well-sourced and corroborated.”

Overall Hayes successfully makes it appear that “Isikoff and Hosenball have not seen the memo or they misreport its contents.”

Where is the mainstream media? Other than the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek the Feith memo has been ignored by the mainstream media. Apparantly, the media views this as does Joshua Marshall. In his weekly column in The Hill, Marshall characterizes it as "the dubious link between Iraq and al Qaeda." Marshall, like Newsweek, the Washington Post and the New York Times writes that the Feith memo is nothing but discredited old news.

In talkingpointsmemo.com, Marshall is more succinct writing, "the people who are following the intel story know that this is raw intelligence which the people in a position to know, and with access to all the information, say is either unreliable or doesn’t amount to anything."