AFP running the story now.
Posted on 11/24/2003 6:42:48 AM PST by TexKat
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A conservative US magazine said it had obtained a classified US government memo purporting to prove that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein had contacts with al-Qaeda and was implicated in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources," says an article in Monday's edition of The Weekly Standard.
"The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies."
However a skeptical commentary on the Weekly Standard article in Newsweek magazine suggests the Pentagon (news - web sites) memo was intentionally leaked "to shore up the Bush administration's prewar claims and defuse the intelligence committee investigation into allegations of the misuse of intelligence."
The top secret memo, dated October 23, 2003, detailed intelligence on contacts between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda over the past decade, the magazine said.
The memo was sent by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had requested evidence of Iraq-al-Qaeda ties as part of a probe into intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq.
Many critics of the war say US allegations of a link between Saddam and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on Washington and New York remain unproven.
And on September 17 this year, President George W. Bush himself admitted that there were no known links.
"We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said.
The Pentagon memo quoted by the Weekly Standard lists 50 pieces of intelligence gathered from domestic and foreign agencies including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
"Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al-Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old," the magazine said.
The first meetings between the Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS) and al-Qaeda took place from 1992 to 1995 in Sudan, the memo says, citing a senior Iraqi intelligence officer debriefed in May 2003. "Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan."
Bin Laden received training on bomb making from Iraqi explosives expert Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed, who was seen on his farm in Khartoum in 1995 and 1996, the memo says, citing a "well-placed source."
Senior al-Qaeda operative Ayman al-Zawahiri met with Iraq's vice president on February 3, 1998 in Baghdad to discuss coordination between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and the establishment of "camps" in Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan, the memo claims.
"According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least twice, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan (news - web sites) in 1999," it says.
The contacts continued until the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, though intelligence reports from mid-1999 to 2003 "are conflicting," the Standard says.
In late 2002, al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al Zarqawi "was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a US occupation of the city," the memo says.
AFP running the story now.
The top secret memo, dated October 23, 2003, detailed intelligence on contacts between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda over the past decade.......
And on September 17 this year, President George W. Bush himself admitted that there were no known links. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said.
B does NOT imply A!!! The two statements are totally consistent, yet they are written up as mutually exclusive.
Amazing what turns up from the searchs on Free Republic.
Did I do that? LOL!!
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