JUST VISITING

Saddam's al Qaeda Connection: The evidence mounts, but the administration says surprisingly little. (Stephen F. Hayes, 09/01/2003, Weekly Standard)

If critics can show that the administration overplayed the al Qaeda-Saddam connection, they will undermine not only an important rationale for removing the Iraqi dictator, but the broader, arguably more important case for the war--that the conflict in Iraq was one battle in the worldwide war on terror.

What, then, did the Bush administration say about this relationship before the war? Which parts of that case, if any, have been invalidated by the intelligence gathered in the months following the conflict? What is this new "evidence," cited by Gore and others, that reveals the administration's arguments to have been embellished? Finally, what if any new evidence has emerged that bolsters the Bush administration's prewar case?

The answer to that last question is simple: lots. The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants it finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998. More disturbing, according to an administration official familiar with briefings the CIA has given President Bush, the Agency has "irrefutable evidence" that the Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998, around the time his Islamic Jihad was merging with al Qaeda. "It's a lock," says this source. Other administration officials are a bit more circumspect, noting that the intelligence may have come from a single source. Still, four sources spread across the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment.

In interviews conducted over the past six weeks with uniformed officers on the ground in Iraq, intelligence officials, and senior security strategists, several things became clear. Contrary to the claims of its critics, the Bush administration has consistently underplayed the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Evidence of these links existed before the war. In making its public case against the Iraq regime, the Bush administration used only a fraction of the intelligence it had accumulated documenting such collaboration. The intelligence has, in most cases, gotten stronger since the end of the war. And through interrogations of high-ranking Iraqi officials, documents from the regime, and further interrogation of al Qaeda detainees, a clearer picture of the links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is emerging.

Such a relationship would explain why al-Zawahiri, who according to the orthodox view is supposed to hate the secular Saddam, was urging attacks against American targets in the run-up to the war. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2003 6:24 AM