In 1999, Saddam Linked To Al Qaeda ( January 1999 ABC News special )

One of our readers (Vince1974) reminded us of this January 1999 ABC News special on the ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda posted last year on Powerline.

3 Responses to “In 1999, Saddam Linked To Al Qaeda”

Highlighting the Powerline article:

February 10, 2007
A Trip Down Memory Lane

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Video at the Link

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The current flap over the Pentagon Inspector General's report on Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans has embarrassed the Associated Press, the Washington Post and, if he has any shame, the Inspector General. The controversy does have the merit, though, of raising once again the issue of the relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda and other terrorists.

The Inspector General said it was "inappropriate" for Feith's group to question the wisdom of the CIA's dogma that Saddam Hussein, a "secularist," would never cooperate with bin Laden or other Islamic terrorists. There was a time, though, when the likelihood of such collaboration was widely reported and understood. Thus, courtesy of Power Line Video, we are rescuing from the memory hole this ABC News report from 2000.

If you have a web site, feel free to use the "get code" button to reproduce the video on your site.

UPDATE: Tom Joscelyn writes:

The original ABC News report you linked to was from January 1999, I believe, and not 2000. The report was similar to numerous accounts in the worldwide press following Operation Desert Fox. That Clinton-ordered air campaign lasted from December 16 to December 19, 1998. Its purpose was to degrade Saddam's WMD and intelligence capabilities. Reports from more recent years indicate that the campaign nearly plunged Saddam's regime into chaos.
In any event, Saddam's response was telling. Just two days after Operation Desert Fox ended he dispatched one of his top intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. As I and others have written, Hijazi was no low-level flunky. He was one of Saddam's most trusted goons and was responsible for overseeing a good deal of the regime's terrorist and other covert activities. It was this meeting that led to widespread reporting on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. I collected a bunch of these reports, including the ABC News report, in "The Four-Day War." Another, earlier piece also discusses Saddam's conspicuous response to Operation Desert Fox.
The consensus in the media then was that there was a relationship between the two and that Saddam's regime was very willing to work with al Qaeda against their common foe: America. And vice versa. Indeed, the reporting indicated that they had been working together even long before Operation Desert Fox.
The reports from late 1998 and early 1999 are tough for naysayers to explain away for a variety of reasons, but that hasn't stopped them from trying. For example, last year's Senate Intelligence Report on Iraq's ties to al Qaeda (the report was written, primarily, by a former John Kerry for President campaigner) unhesitatingly cited Hijazi's testimony, in which he claimed that he did not meet with bin Laden again after a lone incident in the mid 1990's. The Senate Intelligence report did not cite any of the voluminous reporting, by ABC News and other outlets, following the meeting in December 1998. Obviously, that reporting demonstrates Hijazi is a liar. I asked the Senate Intelligence Committee's staff about this after the report came out. They said they didn't have any evidence that contradicted Hijazi's testimony and that is why they cited it unquestioningly. I think that is a good demonstration of the ignorance or bias or both that clouds this issue.
Of course, at the same time that the worldwide media was reporting all of this, various CIA and National Security Council officials were watching as well. Thus, Richard Clarke worried in February 1999 about bin Laden's possible "boogie to Baghdad." A month earlier he defended intelligence tying Saddam's VX nerve gas program to a suspected al Qaeda front company in Sudan. Michael Scheuer also at one time found it convenient to cite some of this evidence. In his original 2002 edition of Through Our Enemies' Eyes he approvingly cited several of the media's late 1998/early 1999 accounts. Of course, they both now pretend none of this really means anything.
Such is the state of affairs in today's Washington establishment.

To comment on this post, go here.

Posted by John at 02:40 PM

Guess this would an article from the Left...still commenting on why we invaded..or searching their Archives ...not sure...:

War on Iraq - Conceived In Israel

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No 1, 2003

Stephen J. Sniegoski (*), USA

In a lengthy article in The American Conservative criticizing the rationale for the projected U.S. attack on Iraq, the veteran diplomatic historian Paul W. Schroeder only noted in passing 'what is possibly the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy - security for Israel.' If Israel's security were the real American motive for war, Schroeder went on: 'It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state.'1 Is there any evidence that Israel and its supporters have managed to get the U.S. to fight for its interests?

The 9/11 attack used

In coming up with the real motives for the projected war on Iraq, one must ask the critical question: How did the 9/11 terrorist attack lead to the planned war on Iraq, for which there is no real evidence that it was involved in the 9/11 terrorism? It can be observed that from that from the time of the 9/11 attack, neoconservatives, of primarily (though not exclusively) Jewish ethnicity and right-wing Zionist persuasion, tried to make use of the 9/11 attack to achieve a broad war against Islamic terrorism, which coincided with the enemies of Israel.

The neoconservatives and Israel

Although the term neoconservative is in common usage, a brief description of the group might be helpful. Many of the first generation neoconservatives were originally liberal Democrats, or even socialists and Marxists, often Trotskyites. They drifted to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as the Democratic Party moved to the anti-war McGovernite left. And concern for Israel loomed large in their change. As political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg puts it: 'One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right's hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel's security.'2

War against Iraq at Israel's behest?

Neoconservatives had for some time prior to September 11, 2001 publicly advocated an American war on Iraq. The 9/11 atrocities essentially provided the pretext for carrying out such an activity. The idea that neoconservatives are the motivating force behind the United States movement for war has been broached by a number of commentators. For instance, Joshua Micah Marshall authored an article in The Washington Monthly entitled: 'Bomb Saddam?: How the obsession of a few neocon hawks became the central goal of U.S. foreign policy.' And Kathleen and Bill Christison wrote in the leftist e-journal CounterPunch: 'The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong. Many Israeli analysts believe this. The Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar recently observed frankly in a Ha'aretz column that Perle, Feith, and their fellow strategists 'are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests.' The suggestion of dual loyalties is not a verboten subject in the Israeli press, as it is in the United States. Peace activist Uri Avnery, who knows Israeli Prime Minister Sharon well, has written that Sharon has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring the Middle East and that 'the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got their ideas from him . But the style is the same.' 3

In the following essay an effort has been made to flesh out this thesis and to show the linkage between the war position of the neoconservatives and what has been long-time strategy of the Israeli right, if not of the Israeli mainstream itself. Essentially, the idea of a Middle East war had been bandied about in Israel for many years as a means of enhancing Israeli security, which revolves around an ultimate solution to the Palestinian problem.

Deportation of Palestinians: 'What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times'

To understand why Israeli leaders would want a Middle East war, it is first necessary to take a brief look at the history of Zionist movement and its goals. Despite public rhetoric to the contrary, the idea of expelling the indigenous Palestinian population (euphemistically referred to as a 'transfer') was an integral part of the Zionist effort to found a Jewish national state in Palestine. 'The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings, first appearing in Theodore Herzl's diary,' historian Tom Segev observes. 'In practice, the Zionistists began executing a mini-transfer from the time they began purchasing the land and evacuating the Arab tenants ... ''Disappearing'' the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence ... With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer - or its morality.' However, the Zionist leaders learned not to publicly proclaim their mass expulsion intent because 'this would cause the Zionists to lose the world's sympathy.'4 The key issue was to find an opportune time to initiate the mass expulsion process that would not incur the world's condemnation. In the late 1930s, Ben-Gurion would write: 'What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out - a whole world is lost.'5 The 'revolutionary times' would come with the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when the Zionists were able to expel 750,000 Palestinians (more than 80 percent of the indigenous population), and thus achieve an overwhelmingly Jewish state, though the area did not include the entirety of Palestine, or the 'Land of Israel', which Zionist leaders thought necessary for a viable state. The opportunity to grab additional land took place as a result of the 1967 war; however, the occupation of the additional territory brought the problem of a large Palestinian population. World opinion was now totally opposed to forced population transfers, equating such an activity with the unspeakable horror of Nazism. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, had 'unequivocally prohibited deportation' of civilians under occupation.6 Since the 1967 war, the major issue in Israeli politics has been what to do with that territory and its Palestinian population.

It was during the 1980s, with the coming to power of the rightwing Likud government, that the idea of expulsion publicly resurfaced. And this time it was directly tied to a larger war, with destabilization of the Middle East seen as a precondition for Palestinian expulsion. Such a proposal, including Palestinian population removal, was outlined in an article by Oded Yinon, entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,' which appeared in the World Zionist Organization's periodical Kivunim in February 1982. Oded Yinon, had been attached to the Foreign Ministry and his article undoubtedly reflected high-level thinking in the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The article called for Israel to bring about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings. Thinking along these lines, Ariel Sharon stated on March 24, 1988 that if the Palestinian uprising continued, Israel would have to make war on its Arab neighbors. The war, he stated, would provide 'the circumstances' for the removal of the entire Palestinian population from the West Bank and Gaza and even from inside Israel proper.7

Israeli foreign policy expert Yehoshafat Harkabi critiqued the war/expulsion scenario - 'Israeli intentions to impose a Pax Israelica on the Middle East, to dominate the Arab countries and treat them harshly' - in his very significant work, Israel's Fateful Hour, published in 1988. Writing from a realist perspective, Harkabi believed that Israel did not have the power to achieve this goal, given the strength of the Arab states, the large Palestinian population involved, and the vehement opposition of world opinion. Harkabi hoped that 'the failed Israeli attempt to impose a new order in the weakest Arab state - Lebanon - will disabuse people of similar ambitions in other territories.'8 Left unconsidered by Harkabi was the possibility that the United States would act as Israel's proxy to achieve this goal.

Securing oil supply

In the 1970s and 1980s, the US Middle Eastern policy, although sympathetic to Israel, was not identical to that of Israel. The fundamental goal of United States policy was to promote stable governments in the Middle East that would allow the oil to flow to the Western industrial nations To allow the oil flow, it was not necessary for these governments to befriend Israel - in fact they could openly oppose the Jewish state. The United States worked for peace between Israel and the Arab states but a peace that would accommodate the demands of the Arab nations - most crucially involving the Palestinians.

US support for the Iraq in its war against Iran

In its policy of ensuring the security of Middle East oil supplies, the U.S. by the mid-1980s was heavily supporting Iraq in its war against Iran, although for awhile the United States also had provided some aid to Iran (the Iran-Contra scandal). Ironically, Donald Rumsfeld served as the U.S. envoy who paved the way for the restoration of relations with Iraq in 1983, which had been severed in 1967. The U.S. along with other western nations looked upon Iraq as a bulwark against the radical Islamism of the Ayatollah's Iran, which threatened western oil interests. U.S. support for Iraq included intelligence information, military equipment, and agricultural credits. And the U.S. deployed the largest naval force since the Vietnam War in the Gulf, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting oil tankers, but which engaged in serious attacks on Iran's navy. It should be added that it was during this period of U.S. support that Iraq used poisonous gas against the Iranians and the Kurds, which the U.S. government and its media supporters now describe as so horrendous. In fact, United States intelligence information facilitated the Iraqi use of poison gas against the Iranians. In addition, the United States eased up on its own technology export restrictions to Iraq, which allowed the Iraqis to import supercomputers, machine tools, poisonous chemicals, and even strains of anthrax and bubonic plague. In short, the United States helped arm Iraq with the very horrific weaponry that administration officials are now trumpeting as justification for Saddam's forcible removal from power.9

When the Iran/Iraq war ended in 1988, the United States continued its support for Iraq, showering it with military hardware, advanced technology, and agricultural credits. The United States apparently looked to Saddam to maintain stability in the Gulf. With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, American policy would swiftly change. And neoconservatives were hawkish in generating support for a U.S. war against Iraq. The Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, headed by Richard Perle, was set up to promote the war.10 And neoconservative war hawks such as Frank Gaffney, Jr., Richard Perle, A. M. Rosenthal, William Safire, and The Wall Street Journal held that America's war objective should not simply be driving Iraq out of Kuweit but also destroying Iraq's military potential, especially its capacity to develop nuclear weapons. The Bush administration embraced this position.11 More than this, the neoconservatives hoped that the war would lead to the removal of Saddam Hussein and the American occupation of Iraq. However, despite the urging of then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to adopt a military plan to invade Iraq, this was never done because of the opposition from General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander.12 Moreover, the U.S. had a UN mandate to liberate Kuwait, not to remove Saddam. To attempt the latter would have caused the warring coalition to fall apart. America's coalition partners in the region, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, feared that the elimination of Saddam's government would cause Iraq to fragment into warring ethnic and religious groups. This could have involved a Kurdish rebellion in Iraq that would have spread to Turkey's own restive Kurdish population and the Iraq Shi'ites falling under the influence of Iran that would have increased the threat of Islamic radicalism in the region.

Not only did the Bush administration dash neoconservative hopes by leaving Saddam in place, but its proposed 'New World Order,' as implemented by Secretary of State James Baker, conflicted with neoconservative/Israeli goals, being oriented toward placating the Arab coalition that supported the war. This entailed an effort to curb Israeli control of its occupied territories. The Bush administration demanded that Israel halt constructing new settlements in the occupied territories as a condition to receive $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Although Bush would cave in to American pro-Zionist pressure just prior to the November 1992 election, his resistance disaffected many neoconservatives, causing some such as William Safire to back Bill Clinton in the election of 1992.13

During the Clinton administration neoconservatives promoted their views from a strong interlocking network of think tanks - such as the American Enterpise Institute (AEI), Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Forum, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Center for Security Policy (CSP) - which have had great influence in the media and staff Republican administrations. Some of these organizations were originally set up by mainline conservatives and taken over by neoconservatives;14 others were established by neoconservatives, with some of them having a direct Israeli connection. For example, Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence was a co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri). And these various organizations have been closely connected. For example, the other co-founder of Memri, Meyrav Wurmser, was a member of the Hudson Institute, while her husband, David Wurmser, headed the Middle East studies department of AEI. Richard Perle was both a 'resident fellow' at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a trustee of the Hudson Institute.15

The power of influential individuals

A recent article by Jason Vest in the The Nation discusses the immense power of individuals from two major neoconservative research organizations, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), in the current Bush Administration. Vest details the close links between these organizations, right-wing politicians, arms merchants, military men, Jewish multi-millionaires/billionaires, and Republican administrations.16

Regarding JINSA, Vest writes:

More from the Historian that wrote the article at post #18.

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Sniegoski on the Empire,/b>

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Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski is a historian who still believes that the truth is trumps. In this section he investigates the lies, contradictions, and crimes of the American Empire and its courtiers, at home and abroad.

• From time to time over the past few decades libertarians and Old Rightists have felt frustration at the Left's reputation as the antiwar, anti-imperialist tendency. But of course that reputation is hollow, and leftists are not to be trusted. Now, having focused on some other critics of the Mearsheimer-Walt approach, Dr. Sniegoski turns to an examination of one leading left-winger's analysis. As you'll see, we've gone a little Victorian in the title department: "Israel-lobby denial: The bankruptcy of the mainstream Left as illustrated by Stephen Zunes, – or, – On the issue of the Israel lobby the Left is no more courageous than anyone else."
Posted June 18, 2006.

• With John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "Israel Lobby" essay continuing to be a hot topic, Dr. Sniegoski takes a close look at the current state of play: "The second wave against Mearsheimer and Walt: A well-tempered smother-out as a new war looms."

I most highly recommend this article to your attention. It is a worthy companion piece to Dr. Sniegoski's original, longer piece on the "Israel Lobby" controversy (see below, April 20); and it is yet another piece that I am proud to publish. As you may deduce from the title, in this masterly follow-up investigation Dr. Sniegoski takes account of the neocons' saber-rattling at Iran.
Posted May 25, 2006.

• I'm excited to be able to report Dr. Sniegoski's return to the TLD trenches. In this magnificent essay, he turns his keen analytical talents to exploring a certain scandal in academia that you may have heard about: "Israel lobbying: The attack on Mearsheimer and Walt."
Posted April 20, 2006.

• Have you noticed? One moment, our rulers pretend to take seriously the law they lay down, and the next moment, they openly dispense with it: as soon, that is, as it threatens to inconvenience them. Dr. Sniegoski has noticed: "The Downing Street memos and Nuremberg: The illegality of the war on Iraq."

No respectable citizen, of course, is supposed to notice any of it. If many of them did notice, why, Our System of Self-Government would just break down!
Posted July 13, 2005.

• Dr. Sniegoski reviews an essay at CounterPunch: "Michael Neumann's 'Left Behind: Victory and Recruitment.'"
Posted June 27, 2005.

• Uzbekistan may strike many of us as a terminally obscure venue, but it's in just such venues that the post-1945 U.S. Empire has perpetrated much of its worst deviltry. It's likely that in 1962 most Americans could not have run to a world map and plopped their finger on the terminally obscure country of Vietnam. That said, I strongly recommend to your attention this major article by Dr. Sniegoski: "Idealistic democracy, total hypocrisy, and Israel: America's man in Uzbekistan."
Posted June 22, 2005.

• Crude propaganda is what we're usually fed, but we don't often learn all that much from it. More sophisticated efforts may be more educational, especially when expertly dissected. Dr. Sniegoski does the honors with a recent article by a former Mossad chief that has garnered considerable attention in some circles: "When the Mossad speaks, people listen: Truth and deception in Halevy's 'The Coming Pax Americana.'"
Posted May 23, 2005.

• Dr. Sniegoski, who has already done extremely important work in this area, now offers us "A closer look: The Israeli origins of Bush II's war." The evidence for his thesis seems overwhelming, especially in comparison with the evidence that is deemed sufficient to settle certain other historical controversies.
Posted April 24, 2005.

• In Part Three of his three-part series "Gulf War 1991: Prefiguration and prelude to the 2003 Iraq debacle," Dr. Sniegoski explores the legacy of that imperial adventure.
Posted March 8, 2005.

• In Part Two of his three-part series "Gulf War 1991: Prefiguration and prelude to the 2003 Iraq debacle," Dr. Sniegoski takes us through the war itself.
Posted February 24, 2005.

• I know this is terribly un-American, but once again we're posting a historical piece. In fact, we're about to commit sedition three times in quick succession: today's posting is the first part of a three-part series by Dr. Sniegoski, who reaches back into the murky ancient past — i.e., the 1980s and 1990s — in his "Gulf War 1991: Prefiguration and prelude to the 2003 Iraq debacle."
Posted February 18, 2005.

• Just what was the deal with that Inaugural speech — so grandiloquent, so ineloquent — that Little Bush was assigned to read in order to kick off his second regime? Our congenitally undeceived Dr. Sniegoski fills in the background for us, and it doesn't make for a pretty picture: "Sharansky, Weissglas, and the Inaugural address: The Israeli connection continues."
Posted February 2, 2005.

• I am proud and pleased once again to present a major essay by Dr. Sniegoski, this time dealing with "the oil argument," which is popular among leftists and others but which we haven't yet confronted at TLD, at least not head on: "War on Iraq: Not oil but Israel."
Posted October 22, 2004.

• The spectacle of all those millions of undecideds agonizing over whether to vote for Statesgod Bush or Statesgod Kerry looks even more fantastically absurd in the brilliant light of Dr. Sniegoski's most recent major essay: "The future of the global War on Terror: Next stop, Iran."
Posted October 14, 2004.

• If one were inclined to be excessively polite, one might describe John Kerry as a protean figure. But in a major article, Dr. Sniegoski argues that there really is a skeleton under all that rubbery protoplasm. It is a tricky collection of bones, though: "The contradictions of Kerry: Internationalism and Zionism."
Posted September 24, 2004.

• Dr. Sniegoski comments briefly on two articles — one at CounterPunch and one in the Washington Post — on how Bush's War may turn into "Kerry's War."
Posted June 8, 2004.

• "Bush as the lesser imperialist evil," Dr. Sniegoski's analysis of a piece by Gabriel Kolko, the left-wing revisionist historian who is familiar to many libertarians. Kolko believes the Squirrel-Monkey-in-Chief may be preferable to the looming alternative.
Posted April 17, 2004.

• "Questions you'd better not ask in Canada," a timely warning.
Posted April 17, 2004.

• "Prankster-in-Chief: Joking about the WMDs," wherein Dr. Sniegoski reviews the latest stand-up routine to hit the banquet circuit.
Posted March 30, 2004.

• "Finally, a WMD: Richard Clarke's bombshell," wherein Dr. Sniegoski deftly assesses the import of the latest exposé by a former Bushite official.
Posted March 23, 2004.

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