From NEWSWEEK, 11/19/03:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/995706.asp?0cl=c1&cp1=1

Case Decidedly Not Closed

The Defense Dept. memo allegedly proving a link between Al Qaeda and
Saddam does nothing of the sort

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an
"operational relationship" between Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein?s former regime is mostly based on 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, according to current and former U.S.
intelligence officials.

CASE CLOSED blared the headline in a Weekly Standard cover story last
Saturday that purported to have unearthed the U.S. government?s
"secret evidence of cooperation" between Saddam and bin Laden.

Fred Barnes, the magazine?s executive editor, touted the magazine?s
scoop the next day in a roundtable chat on "Fox News Sunday."

(Both the Standard and Fox News Channel are owned by the conservative
media baron Rupert Murdoch.)

"These are hard facts, and I?d like to see you refute any one of
them," he told a skeptical Juan Williams of National Public Radio.

In fact, the tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of
whether there has been Iraqi-Al Qaeda complicity is far from closed.

The Oct. 27, 2003, memo, prepared by Deputy Secretary of Defense
Douglas Feith?s office, was written in response to detailed questions
from the Senate Intelligence Committee about the basis for
intelligence pushed by Feith and other senior Pentagon officials
during the run-up to the Iraq war.

With a few, inconclusive exceptions, the memo doesn?t actually contain
much "new" intelligence at all.

Instead, it mostly recycles shards of old, raw data that were first
assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts (led
by a Pennsylvania State University professor and U.S. Navy analyst
Christopher Carney) whom Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al
Qaeda "connection" in order to better justify a U.S. invasion.

Within the U.S. intelligence establishment, the predominant view--then
as now--is that the Feith-Carney case was murky at best.

Culling through intelligence files, the Feith team indeed found
multiple "reports" of alleged meetings between Iraqi officials and Al
Qaeda operatives dating back to the early 1990s when Osama first set
up shop in Sudan.

But many of these reports were old, uncorroborated and came from
sources of unknown if not dubious credibility, U.S. intelligence
officials say.

(Not unlike, as it has turned out, much of the "reporting" on Iraq?s
ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction.)

Moreover, other reports--some of which came foreign intelligence
services and Iraqi defectors--were selectively presented by the Feith
team and are, as one U.S. official told NEWSWEEK, "contradicted by
other things."

Consider one of the seemingly more compelling reports cited in the
memo: that Farouk Hijazi, the former chief of Iraqi intelligence and
then ambassador to Turkey, flew to Afghanistan in late 1998 to meet
with bin Laden.

As Stephen Hayes, author of The Weekly Standard piece dutifully notes,
accounts of this purported Saddam overture to Osama made its way into
the mainstream press at the time--including NEWSWEEK.

A Feb. 6, 1999, story in the British newspaper The Guardian contended
the purpose of Hijazi?s visit was to offer a presumably besieged bin
Laden asylum in Iraq.

But, as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official,
says, the Feith-Carney memo omits the rest of the story: that bin
Laden actually rejected the Hijazi overture, concluding he did not
want to be "exploited" by a regime that he has consistently viewed as
"secular" and fundamentally antithetical to his vision of a strict
Islamic state.

There is, moreover, compelling reason to believe bin Laden clung to
this view as late as this year when Bush administration officials were
making no secret of their plans to invade Iraq and topple Saddam.

In a Feb. 11, 2003, audiotape released by Al-Jazeera, a voice believed
to be bin Laden called on Arabs to rise up and strike at the U.S.
invaders--a declaration that contributed to a Bush administration
decision to ratchet up the country?s threat level at the time.

But, less well publicized, bin Laden emphasized in the same tape his
interest was in defending the Iraqi people, not an "infidel" like
Saddam.

"The socialists and their rulers [had] lost their legitimacy a long
time ago and the socialists are infidels regardless of where they are,
whether in Baghdad or in Aden," the bin Laden tape proclaimed.

(The CIA later concluded the voice on the tape was "almost certainly"
Osama.)

Overlooked in The Weekly Standard hype, the Pentagon memo itself
concedes that much of the more recent reporting about Iraqi-Al Qaeda
ties is "conflicting."

It quotes one Iraq intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil
Ibrahim Abdallah, as saying that "the last contact" between Iraqi
intelligence and Al Qaeda was in July 1999 and that it was actually
Saddam, not bin Laden, who cut off the contacts.

While Hayes?s story insists "the bulk of the reporting ... contradicts
this claim," the actual examples cited in the memo to buttress this
point are less than persuasive.

The memo invokes the by-now hoary claim--first reported by Czech
intelligence-that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent
in Prague in April 2001.

But it concedes that the FBI and CIA "cannot confirm" that such a
meeting actually took place.

In fact, the Iraqi agent in question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir
al-Ani, has been in U.S. custody for months and, according to U.S.
intelligence sources, denies ever meeting Atta--a denial that
officials tend to believe given that they have not unearthed a
scintilla of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the
alleged rendezvous.

The memo also cites the claims of one senior Al Qaeda operative in
U.S. custody, Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, who reported to his interrogators
that he was "told by an Al Qaeda associate" (who is unidentified) that
two Al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq in December 2000 for
training in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

(Both national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld later relied on al-Libi?s claims to make the
same allegation.)

But U.S. intelligence officials note that al-Libi?s claims are hearsay
(he professed no firsthand knowledge) and that his credibility, like
that of many captured Al Qaeda detainees, is sometimes spotty.

In any event, the Pentagon memo pointedly omits any reference to the
interrogations of a host of other high-level Al Qaeda and Iraqi
detainees--including such notables as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi
bin al-Shibh, Abu Zubaydah, and Hijazi himself.

All of them have reportedly dismissed the idea that Al Qaeda and
Saddam had any working relationship.

Can there be any doubt that if any of these captives had confirmed
such a relationship that Bush administration officials would have
found a way to get the word out?

None of this means, of course, that all accounts of Iraqi-Al Qaeda
connections should be completely dismissed.

The memo, for example, makes brief reference to the intriguing case of
Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a Malaysia-based Iraqi national who, purportedly
through the aid of an Iraq embassy employee, landed a job at the Kuala
Lumpur airport and then served as greeter and driver for two of the
September 11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

The two men flew to the city for a crucial Al Qaeda planning session
in January 2000.

FBI documents obtained by NEWSWEEK more than a year ago show that U.S.
law enforcement had a great deal of interest in interrogating Shakir
in the months following September 11.

After being picked up, first by Qatari intelligence and later by
Jordanians, he was twice released--without the FBI ever getting a
crack at him.

He then flew off to Iraq, where he has never been seen since. U.S.
military and intelligence officials are still looking for him to this
day, sources say, and for good reason.

But all this is a far cry from solid evidence of ongoing cooperation
between Saddam and Osama.

The outing of the memo (a still classified document, as it happens) is
likely now to become the subject of yet another Justice Department
leak investigation.

The CIA is expected to begin preparing a "crimes report" identifying
the potential damage to national security (most likely pretty
minimal).

But there can be little doubt about the motive of the leaker: to shore
up the Bush administration?s prewar claims and defuse the intelligence
committee investigation into allegations of the misuse of
intelligence.

Unfortunately, for the Pentagon and the Standard, the claims detailed
in the memo will do little, if anything, to advance the case.

________________________________________________________

More right wing garbage. It is what it smells like.

Harry