Never mind the hysteria, look at the evidence!
With the commentariat's ship of fools all but capsized over Iraq by the stampede of titanic egos for the lifeboats, it has escaped their notice -- in the clamour to proclaim with sublime lack of logic that the war was wrong after all because the peace is proving difficult and that Saddam was no more of a threat to anyone than any doddery old eccentric who just happened to have a consuming interest in producing fertiliser -- that evidence is growing that Saddam did indeed have links with al Qaeda. A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal claims that Iraqi documents captured by the US military point to a significant connection:
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'One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. [b]This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.
'It is possible that the Ahmed Hikmat Shakir listed on the Fedayeen rosters is a different man from the Iraqi of the same name with the proven al Qaeda connections. His identity awaits confirmation by al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody or perhaps by other captured documents. But our sources tell us there is no questioning the authenticity of the three Fedayeen rosters. The chain of control is impeccable. The documents were captured by the U.S. military and have been in U.S. hands ever since. As others have reported, at the time of the summit Shakir was working at the Kuala Lumpur airport, having obtained the job through an Iraqi intelligence agent at the Iraqi embassy. The four-day al Qaeda meeting was attended by Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi, who were at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. Also on hand were Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, a high-ranking Osama bin Laden lieutenant and mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. Shakir left Malaysia on January 13, four days after the summit concluded. 'That's not the only connection between Shakir and al Qaeda. The Iraqi next turned up in Qatar, where he was arrested on September 17, 2001, four days after the attacks in the U.S. A search of his pockets and apartment uncovered such information as the phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers' safe houses and contacts. Also found was information pertaining to a 1995 al Qaeda plot to blow up a dozen commercial airliners over the Pacific. After a brief detention, our friends the Qataris inexplicably released Shakir, and on October 21 he flew to Amman, Jordan. The Jordanians promptly arrested him, but under pressure from the Iraqis (and Amnesty International, which questioned his detention) and with the acquiescence of the CIA, they let him go after three months. He was last seen heading home to Baghdad.'
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The Journal refers to a new book by Stephen Hayes, 'The Connection', which apparently assembles an arsenal of smoking guns to support the belief in an axis betwen Saddam and al Qaeda. Last year, Richard Miniter's book 'Losing Bin Laden' --a devastating indictment of Bill Clinton's failure to scotch the al Qaeda snake -- also laid out a body of circumstantial evidence for this connection. This included the following:
Documents found in Baghdad showed Saddam had funded the Alllied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden;he funded the Iraqi Kurdish Group whose leader admitted he met bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda figures in Afghanistan;CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that information from 'multiple sources' revealed: 'Iraq has in the past procvided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provcided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates; one of these associates characterised the relationship as successful';
al Qaeda trained at a facility called Salman Pak in northern Iraq, where they trained to hijack planes with knives;
in 1998, a senior agent in Saddam's secret service travelled into the Hindu Kush reportedly to offer bin Laden asylum in Iraq (according to a report in the Guardian,);
in October 2000 another Iraqi intelligence operative was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, apparently after a visit to bin Laden; there were other documented meetings between bin Laden and Iraqi agents from 1994 onwards.
Of course, none of this is conclusive. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, the chances are that it is... a connection. But then, there are none so blind as our appeasenik lemmings in their full hysterical flight from reason.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005133
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Iraq and al Qaeda
