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Mr Perstein - Questions on Saddam and Al Qaeda:

Below I enclose both 9/11 Commission report citations and other referenced comments on the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Which of the below documented links between Saddam and Al Qaeda do you dispute (if any), which do you agree with, and what conclusion does this overall body evidence lead you to?
Do you agree that those who argue about "no links" between
Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda are refuted by the documented links cited by the 9/11 Commission?
Do you further agree that Saddam was, indeed, a sponsor of terrorism (above and beyond links to Al Qaeda alone)?
Do you further agree that Saddam's removal from power was therefore an advance in the global war on terror, by taking out a man who was willing to give refuge to Osama Bin Laden?

Go here for the full linked version of below text:
http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com/2004/07/saddams-regime-and-al-qaeda.html

The debate on the links between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda is not closed, in part because the story is not fully known. But we do at least know some parameters of the story.
The 911 Commission Report cites many meetings and links between Saddam and Al Qaeda over the preiod from the early 1990s to 2001 and later. Commentary on 911 Commission Report on Saddam's Al Qaeda links. The 911 Commission has concluded that Al Qaeda was/is an independent entity, and so vis a vis Iraq's regime, these two have independent interests and common enemies (the Saudi Govt and the United States). Those links,did not develop into a 'collaborative operational relationship' to use the 911 Commission report language. (Although there is independent evidence that it was an operational collaboration in the case of Ansar Al-Islam.)

p60: "Bin Laden sought the capability to kill on a mass scale ..." [attempted to buy uranium, but were hoodwinked]
p 61:"To protect his own ties with Iraq, Turabi [Sudanese extremist ally of Bin Laden] brokered an agreement that Bin laden would stop supporting activities against Saddam ... In 2001, with Bin laden's help they [Kurdish extremists] reformed into an organization called Ansar Al-Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar Al islam against the Kurdish enemy. (NOTE: There is plenty of evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to Ansar Al Islam. That linkage has served the insurgency, and Zarqawi is one of those links!)

p61: "With Sudanese Govt acting as intermediary, Bin Laden himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 and early 1995. Bin Laden is said to ask for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.(55)" NOTE: This statement is infuriating, because in the footnote they cite CIA memoranda with sources that did claim requests were fulfilled, in particular training requests. The report was that an Iraqi military bomb-making expert and the chief of Iraq's intelligence services met with Bin Laden and trained his group on bomb making techniques in 1996. This piece of intelligence was passed to the US in 1996. In the footnote they discount this piece of evidence because the timing of the meeting seems to contradict Bin laden's timeline of leaving Sudan for Afghanistan. But they cite the source saying the Iraqi bombmaking expert was there in December 1995. It is infuriating to see 'no evidence' masking the very footnote that contains it! It should have been written "and Iraq may have fulfilled requests to help train on bomb-making". This to me is a suspicous example of the 9/11 commision report skewing away from the Al Qaeda - Iraq link.

Page 66: “In March 1998, after Bin Ladin’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraq intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis.”

Page 66: “According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States.”

Page 128: On November 4, 1998, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed its indictment of Bin Ladin, charging him with conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The indictment also charged that al Qaeda had allied itself with Sudan, Iran, and Hezbollah. The original sealed indictment had added that al Qaeda had “reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.” This passage led (Richard) Clarke, who for years had read intelligence reports on Iraqi-Sudanese cooperation on chemical weapons, to speculate to Berger that a large Iraqi presence at chemical facilities in Khartoum was “probably a direct result of the Iraq-Al Qaida agreement” Clarke added that VX precursor traces found near al Shifa were the “exact formula used by Iraq”.

The 9/11 report does say that “no evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out attacks against the United States (page 66)” were documented.

But the report doesnt tell the whole story nor look at the whole evidence that might be out there. One take take the above and add some additional layers of links to it: IIS training of Al Qaeda (911 Commission report mentions that this was evidence given to that effect but was retracted); and the 1993 WTC bombing, evidence of links. Those latter links were not properly looked at in the 911 Commission investigation. In addition, it should not be forgotten that Saddam had long-standing links with other terrorist organizations that were not the scope of the 911 report.
Consider the comments of DoD Undersecretary Wolfowitz on the links.:

SEC. WOLFOWITZ: …how many people here have heard of Abdul Rahman Yassin, if you’d raise your hand? Abdul Rahman Yassin I mean, it’s a well-informed audience. My guess is that – I’ll be generous – 20 percent of you have heard of him. He is the only fugitive, indicted fugitive, still at large from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was pulled off by the nephew and very close buddy of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the mastermind of 9/11. These are not separate events. They were the same target. They were the same people. It would seem significant that one major figure in that event is still at large. It would seem significant that he was harbored in Iraq by Iraqi intelligence for 10 years. That’s a fact. We don’t know why.

... The issue about Saddam’s support for terrorism isn’t whether or not he was involved in 9/11. The issue is that over a decade, there were a series of meetings between high-level Iraqis—intelligence people – and high-level al Qaeda people. We have from the principal cooperating witness in the 1998 embassy bombings, the report that in 1992-’93, they debated in al Qaeda about whether it was OK to cooperate with Saddam since he was not a religious man. And they came to the conclusion that he was the only real enemy of the west and therefore you could cooperate with him. And this particular witness said one of the leading advocates of cooperating with Saddam was a senior al Qaeda man named Abu Hafs, the Mauritanian. Recently, we’ve had confirmation from the former Iraqi ambassador to Sudan that in 1998 which, by the way, was after our cooperating witness had any knowledge of this subject.

Abu Hafs, the Mauritanian made a secret trip from Sudan to Baghdad. We don’t know what happened in that trip. But you don’t meet with Iraqi intelligence and with al Qaeda, which is a terrorist organization, in order to discuss how to build hospitals or schools. So it seems to me if you talk about intelligence, here we’re talking about a subject where we know a certain amount, we know there’s a lot that we don’t know and you’ve got to figure out what is your policy going to be based on the uncertainties.

Wolfowitz raises an interesting point, since it articulates the second of two credible theories of the links.

Steven Hayes, author of "The Connection", brings up the evidence of additional links beyond those reported by the 911 Commission. The first paragraph of the last chapter (pp. 177-78) sums up some of the evidence:

Iraqi intelligence documents from 1992 list Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset. Numerous sources have reported a 1993 nonaggression pact between Iraq and al Qaeda. The former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence now in U.S. custody says that bin Laden asked the Iraqi regime for arms and training in a face-to-face meeting in 1994. Senior al Qaeda leader Abu Hajer al Iraqi met with Iraqi intelligence officials in 1995. The National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations between al Qaeda-supported Sudanese military officials and the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program in 1996. Al Qaeda sent Abu Abdallah al Iraqi to Iraq for help with weapons of mass destruction in 1997. An indictment from the Clinton-era Justice Department cited Iraqi assistance on al Qaeda "weapons development" in 1998. A senior Clinton administration counterterrorism official told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq had supported al Qaeda chemical weapons programs in 1999. An Iraqi working closely with the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur was photographed with September 11 hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar en route to a planning meeting for the bombing of the USS Cole and the September 11 attacks in 2000. Satellite photographs showed al Qaeda members in 2001 traveling en masse to a compound in northern Iraq financed, in part, by the Iraqi regime. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, senior al Qaeda associate, operated openly in Baghdad and received medical attention at a regime-supported hospital in 2002. Documents discovered in postwar Iraq in 2003 reveal that Saddam's regime harbored and supported Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attack...
This is a lot of possible links. It is likely that a truthful understanding lies somewhere in the vicinity of the Hayes/Wolfowitz and 911 Commission conclusions. It is certainly the case that the 911 Commission does not cover all the ground and in several places they UNDERSTATED Saddam's terrorist links in the text. One example is their whitewash of the question of whether Iraq was involved in the 1993 WTC attack; they claim there is no evidence, yet a whole book ("Saddam's Secret War") was written on it.
The superficial claims that there were no links between Saddam and Al Qaeda are wrong and refuted even by the cautious and established evidence that even the 9/11 Commission brought out. The Saddam 9/11 link stories are not held up by the 9/11 Commission: like Atta met Iraqi intelligence in Prague in April 2001 - The 9/11 Commission casts serious doubt on this, convincingly.

UPDATE: Senior Al Qaeda detainee was main source for Iraq- Al Qaeda training links, retracted story A senior leader of Al Qaeda who was captured in Pakistan several months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was the main source for intelligence ... that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to members of the organization, according to American intelligence officials.

UPDATE - Aug 2: Southack from FR posted these additional points to ponder -

The terrorist leaders Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal both died in Iraq...Abu Abbas in our custody.
Ansar al-Islam terror leader Aso Hawleri, also known as Asad Muhammad Hasan, was captured in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in 2003.

Ansar al-Islam's spiritual leader, Mullah Krekar, was taken into custody in the Netherlands in September 2002 and later was deported to Norway.

Ahmed Walid Raguib al-Baz, a 1st Lieutenant in the terrorist Palestine Liberation Front, was Killed on 3/20/03 near Baghdad.

Abu Nidal terror operative Khala Khadr Al-Salahat was captured in Iraq in April, 2003.

A Malaysia-based Iraqi national, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport, facilitated the arrival of two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi (who were at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon), for an operational-planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January, 2000. Shakir helped them through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel. Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Hayes says that Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for intelligence operations; sometimes more than half of the alleged diplomats were intelligence operatives.) Another man at that al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole. Also in attendance was Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks. The meetings lasted three or four days. Documents uncovered in Iraq listing the rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen (the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday) include the name of Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir... http://www.congressaction.info/2004/06202004.htm

Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, former Iraq Consul, reportedly met with Mohammed Atta in Prague shortly before 9/11, Captured in Iraq on 7/02/03.

Abdul Rahman Yasin, Indicted fugitive from 1993 WTC bombing, $25 Million reward, last seen in Iraq.

Lets also not forget that 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef entered the U.S. with an Iraqi passport.