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Saddam's Ambassador to al-QaedaBy Jonathan SchanzerWeekly Standard | February 23, 2004 A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in...

Trucker Shaaban Hafiz Ahmad Ali Shaaban is what trucker/terrorist-wannabe, Mohammed Yousef Mullawala dreamed he could be. Mullawala is facing deportation on various charges, including suspicious activities surrounding his brief attendance at the Nationwide Tractor Trailer School in Rhode Island. Unlike Mullawala, Shaaban was the real deal – a terrorist spy hiding behind the steering wheel of a big truck. The story of Shaaban is as captivating as it is unsettling. The Palestinian-born Russian-educated Shaaban settled in Greenfield, Indiana, with his family and worked as a truck driver for CLM Freight Lines in nearby Indianapolis. According to reports, his commercial driver’s...

Saddam Hussein had a secret torture room built in the basement of the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York’s Upper East Side, it has been reported. The Iraqi dictator ordered the installation of the “detention room” inside the five-story building at 14 East 79th Street when he rose to power in 1979, two unnamed Iraqi officials told the New York Post. “It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that nobody could break in or out. You didn’t need to soundproof it,” one official said. The other official added: “You’re not going to...

American special forces stormed the basement of the notorious Mukhabarat, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And while they didn’t find the alleged weapons of mass destruction, nor the Iraqi dictator himself, what they did find was a rare collection of artifacts from the Iraqi Jewish community dating back hundreds of years, including a Hebrew Bible and Babylonian Talmud. The collection was waterlogged and damaged, and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq placed an urgent call to the United States National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland. With permission from local...

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."  U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, CubaFOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or...

Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. […] He was accused of having been acquainted with the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and of having provided them with support and sending them to Afghanistan to receive training. He has also been accused of involvement in the Millennium Plot, the foiled terrorist attack targeting the Los Angeles International Airport. At least that’s the claim made by Ahmed Ressam, the...

Guilty verdict in spying case Tue Jan 13,11:14 AM ET - Chicago Tribune By Matt O'Connor, Tribune staff reporter A federal jury deliberated less than three hours Monday before convicting a suburban Arabic-language newspaper publisher on charges he acted as a secret agent of Iraq before Saddam Hussein fall. The government alleged that since 1999, Palestinian-born Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi provided information to Mukhabbarat, the Iraqi intelligence agency, about Hussein opponents living in the U.S. Prosecutors said Dumeisi betrayed the U.S. out of admiration for Hussein's support for the Palestinian cause and to get money for his cash-strapped publication, though he...

The strange case of an Iraqi agent caught operating on American soil. His arrest may be the first of many. KHALED DUMEISI, a newspaper publisher in northern Illinois, was surprised when federal agents showed up at a modest condominium in suburban Chicago to arrest the man known to his colleagues in Iraqi intelligence as "Sirhan." He shouldn't have been shocked. First, the FBI, according to a complaint unsealed Wednesday in Illinois, had the goods on Sirhan. Among his offenses: supplying false press credentials for Iraqi intelligence agents; spying on Iraqi opposition leaders--at times, using a mini-camera implanted in the end...

Samir Vincent's ongoing court case exemplifies the underreported story of Saddam Hussein's agents who were operating inside the United States in the years prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Vincent's trial involves the Oil for Food scandal and implicates the Iraqi agent in attempting to buy off pro-Iraq (pre-invasion) sentiments within the U.S. government and the United Nations on behalf of Baghdad. The FBI's press release details Vincent's admission of guilt as an unregistred Iraqi agent and is available here. ShaabanAnother recently concluded trial is that of Shaaban Hafiz Ahmad Ali Shaaban (pictured right). Shaaban, who had met with...

In the fall of 2002 Iraq crossed an unacceptable threshold, supplying operational weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to bin Laden's terrorists. These developments were confirmed to the Western intelligence services after several terrorists -- graduates of WMD training programs -- were captured in Israel, Chechnya, Turkey, and France, along with documents related to their activities. On the basis of pure threat analysis, the United States should have gone to war against Iraq, as well as its partners Syria and Iran, in fall 2002. By then there was already unambiguous evidence indicating the urgency of defusing the imminent danger posed by...

The man backed by many in the Bush administration to head Baghdad's postwar government said Sunday that documents uncovered over the weekend show that Saddam Hussein tried to recruit U.S. citizens to undermine the Bush adminsitration's war effort in Iraq. "We have captured a great many files of Saddam's services and there is astounding information about the extent of their networks and their efforts to recruit foreign nationals - including Americans - to work in the Mukabahrat [Iraqi intelligence service]," said Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. "I think that this is something that must be pursued,"...

The Saddam era Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) is still in business. In Arabic, the IIS was called the Jihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma, and was more commonly known as the Mukhabarat (Arab for “Intelligence.”) Combining the work of the American CIA, FBI and Secret Service, the IIS had a core strength of 5,000 highly trained, quite skilled, and very loyal (to Saddam) members. But the IIS controlled other intelligence and paramilitary personnel that totaled over 100,000 people. Few of these people were rounded up after Saddam’s government fell in April, 2003. They are still out there. Most of them anyway. Thusands have...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The midnight knock at the door is gone. But Iraqis say Saddam Hussein's old Mukhabarat secret police have created a new "republic of fear" two years after his downfall. ADVERTISEMENT Operating with ruthless efficiency, former Baathist agents are hunting down those who work for, or even voice support for, the new U.S.-backed government, say security experts who monitor the insurgency among Saddam's Sunni Arab minority in Iraq. "I never take the same road to work and I always spend half an hour checking my car for bombs before I drive," said Abbas, a Baghdad police officer who...

AL-QAEDA terrorists who have infiltrated Iraq from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries have formed an alliance with former intelligence agents of Saddam Hussein to fight their common enemy, the American forces. The alliance, known as Jaish Mohammed — the army of the prophet Mohammed — is believed to be responsible for increasingly sophisticated attacks on US soldiers. In the past four months  it has smuggled millions of dollars, weapons and hundreds of Arab fighters across the desert border with Saudi Arabia. Details of the alliance have emerged from Iraqi intelligence  and US military sources, and from local supporters in a...

MP's wife introduced him to Saddam sympathiser, writes CAMERON SIMPSON and AARON HICKLIN GEORGE Galloway first met the shadowy figure of Fawaz Zureikat through his Palestinian wife. The fateful meeting was to propel the man who goes under the soubriquets of "Gorgeous George" and the "MP for Baghdad Central" into one of the biggest crises of his colourful career. Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, 36, a Jerusalem-born scientist who married Mr Galloway in a secret ceremony in London in February 2000, had gone to the same university in Jordan as Mr Zureikat. Mr Zureikat's name first surfaced in a letter from Mr...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

In 1982, a close friend of Kurdish freedom fighter Salah Ameydi was captured by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Police. They brought him back to his village, and seized his wife and eight-month-old son. The new parents were then tied up and made to watch as their baby was burned to death in front of them with a hot iron. When the agents were finished with the child, they forced the husband to watch as his wife was brutally raped by four Iraqi soldiers. The husband was then dragged off to Abu Ghraib and tortured for years on end as...

DOCUMENTS LINK IRAQ, BIN LADEN Toronto Star, 26th April Top-secret Iraqi intelligence documents, unearthed by the Toronto Star inthe bombed-out headquarters of the dreaded Mukhabarat intelligence service in Baghdad, have established the first clear link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization. The documents were found by correspondent Mitch Potter, the Star's Jerusalem bureau chief. Potter, who has been in and out of Iraq since the war began, was digging through the rubble of the Mukhabarat's Baghdad headquarters with his translator Amir when they uncovered the intelligence treasure trove. Bin Laden's name appears three times in the...

Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com , show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders. One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support...

'King of clubs' being sheltered by Syrian army By Damien Mcelroy in Damascus (Filed: 11/05/2003) The king of clubs from America's card deck of most wanted Iraqis is being sheltered at a military base in the Syrian capital Damascus, according to a Gulf diplomat. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former vice-president of Iraq and one of Saddam Hussein's closest henchmen, is said to be under the protection of Syria's Republican Guard in the decrepit military base near the airport. He is among thousands of regime figures who are believed to have slipped into Syria before Damascus sealed the border. Izzat had...