Challenge, Chapter 2: Osama's Peace with Saddam

One of the constant themes of the anti-war media blitz was that Osama and Saddam were enemies due to Saddam's secularism (or skin-deep Islamism prior to the first Gulf War) and Osama's fanatical Islamist beliefs. Osama, they said, could not abide a secularist such as Saddam and probably was working against him. Believers in this meme -- and there were many -- argued that an American war that deposed Saddam benefited al-Qaeda rather than hinder it. Cynical essays were published during the brief war that had Osama celebrating the Americans doing his dirty work in Iraq.

However, reality was somewhat different, as even the Clinton administration knew well before the embassy bombings of 1998. After those bombings, Janet Reno's Justice Department indicted Osama bin Laden for both bombings and for conspiring to kill Americans:

According to the indictment, bin Laden and al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in Sudan and with representatives of the Government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah with the goal of working together against their common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.

"In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq," the indictment said. [USIA press release, 11/4/98]

That substantiates this part of the Feith memo, as has been discussed at length around the blogosphere:

5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader.

This agreement did not just comprise a non-aggression pact between Osama and Saddam; it was the basis of a working relationship, allowing al-Qaeda safe harbor from which to plot attacks against American and Western targets:

8. Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti.

Remember that this section of the Feith memo does not detail newly-discovered intelligence on the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Saddam regime; this was known to the Clinton administration, and presumably to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at least as far back as 1998. Why, then, have the Democrats been insisting that there was no evidence of a link between al-Qaeda, Osama, and Saddam Hussein? According to evidence available to the Clinton administration and the Senate, they knew about the link from multiple sources. In this light, the Rockefeller memo of the past month is particularly reprehensible, as is the public statements of most Democratic presidential candidates, excepting Lieberman and Gephardt.

More tomorrow. And if you're blogging on this memo daily in response to Andrew Sullivan's challenge to the blogosphere, please send a trackback ping so I can liink your posts on my site, or leave a comment with the URL of your post.

UPDATE: Power Line links to a Washington Post article and an Andrew Sullivan critique of it. The article is off-line at the moment, but here's a quote that states the thinking of the reporter, Walter Pincus:

The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.

That's a pretty lame excuse for burying the story -- just the two paragraphs I quote today mention "a well placed source" and "a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated". That both analyzes them and addresses their accuracy. The entire Feith memo has numerous such passages. And, let's remember, that the correlation was strong enough for Justice in '98 to claim the exact same correlation as discussed in my post. This is why the blogosphere needs to stay on top of this story.

UPDATES: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for linking to this post. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here. Note: The next part can be found here.

Jon at QandO has more on the WaPo article; he notes that Pincus' attitude towards investigative journalism seems a bit suspect.

Now that you have read this post, read the most recent entries at the new Captain's Quarters at http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/!