"Proof Of Al-Qaida's Links To Iraq Just Too Strong To Be Dismissed"

Richard Miniter has a nice piece in today's Investors' Business Daily. Here is part of the piece, but there is a lot more evidence if you follow the link.

. . . Rather than trumpet this new evidence, the Administration and the military seem to regard it as historical. They are more focused on today's decisions than justifying yesterday's. So the growing impression, especially among the press, is that there simply was no link between Iraq and al-Qaida. If so, they would have told us, goes the argument. . . .

These sources reveal three kinds of undisputed connections between Iraq and al-Qaida: meetings, money, and training.

MEETINGS

• Photographs taken by Malaysian intelligence in January 2000 place Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi intelligence operative, meeting with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

• Captured Iraqi intelligence documents show that bin Laden met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Syria in 1992.

• Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

• Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit and a critic of the Bush administration, writes in "Through Our Enemies' Eyes" that bin Laden "made a connection with Iraq's intelligence service through its Khartoum station."

• Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations on Feb. 6, 2003.

• Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat, Iraq's external intelligence service, in Khartoum in 1996.

• An al-Qaida operative now held by the United States confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden agreed to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Powell said.

• Patrick Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in the Clinton Justice Department, noted in the bin Laden indictment: "Al-Qaida reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

• In 2000, Saudi Arabia went on nation-wide alert when its intelligence learned that Iraq was working with al-Qaida to attack U.S. interests there.

• Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes cites captured Iraqi documents: "In 1998, according to documents unearthed in Iraq's intelligence headquarters in April 2003, al-Qaida sent a 'trusted confidant' to Baghdad for sixteen days of meetings beginning March 5. Iraqi intelligence paid for his stay in Room 414 of the Mansur al-Melia hotel and expressed hope that the envoy would serve as the liaison between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden. The DIA \[the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency\] has assessed those documents as authentic."

• ABC News's Nightline interviewed a "twenty-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence," identified him by his nom de guerre, Abu Aman Amaleeki, who said: "In 1992, elements of al-Qaida came to Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein. And among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri. I was present when Ayman al-Zawahiri visited Baghdad." Zawahiri is al-Qaida's no. 2.

• Another visit by al-Zawahiri, in 1999, was confirmed by former Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi.

• Allawi also said that al-Zawahiri was invited to attend the ninth Popular Islamic Conference by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's own no. 2. The Iraqi government, he said, has the invitation and other records. . . . . [the piece is much longer and contains much more information]