Limbaugh to White House: What About Salman Pak?

Friday Aug. 30, 2002; 11:16 p.m. EDT Limbaugh to White House: What About Salman Pak?

Is the Bush administration using all the ammunition at its disposal to convince the American people that war with Iraq is imperative?

Not according to conservative media giant Rush Limbaugh, who chastised the White House Thursday for not spotlighting the issue of Salman Pak, the hijacking school run by Saddam Hussein just south of Baghdad where the 9-11 hijackers likely trained to attack America.

"It's unbelievable that somehow this story remains sequestered," Limbaugh told his 20 million listeners. "I read this story last night and I was amazed."

"There is something called the Republican National Committee and there is the administration," the number one talk host complained. "And look, if I could find this on the Internet, I'm sure the web surfers in the basement of the White House or the Old Executive Office Building could find it too."

Limbaugh proceeded to read at length from a Nov. 11 report in London's Observer newspaper - one of the most respected broadsheets in Great Britain - detailing the accounts of two Salman Pak defectors along with corroborating testimony from a former UN weapons inspector.

Though the Observer's bombshell report has been largely ignored by both the press and the White House in recent months, the similarity between what transpired over the skies of New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11 and the drills at Saddam Hussein's hijacking school offers clear evidence of Iraq's involvement in Osama bin Laden's attacks on America.

The facts uncovered by the Observer have yet to be refuted by any subsequent media investigation. And should they be invoked by the Bush White House, the story could form the basis for a solid argument that attacking Iraq isn't merely a preemptive strike to keep Saddam from getting the bomb, but instead direct retribution against the lone head of state who both financed and helped plan the worst attack on the United States in its history.

NewsMax.com first reviewed the Salman Pak story nearly three weeks ago in a report headlined: "Salman Pak: Iraq's Smoking Gun Link to 9-11."

With all the talk about how little evidence the Bush administration has tying Saddam Hussein to the 9-11 attacks, we're more than a little surprised at how quickly reporters, not to mention the White House, seem to have forgotten about Salman Pak.

That's the name of the Iraqi training camp located south of Baghdad where, according to the accounts of at least two Iraqi defectors quoted in the New York Times last November, terrorists from around the world rehearsed airline hijackings aboard a parked Boeing 707 that bore an eerie resemblance to what transpired on 9-11.

"We could see them train around the fuselage," one of the defectors, a five-year veteran of the camp, told the paper. "We could see them practice taking over the plane."

A few days before the Times report, the London Observer revealed that one of the defectors, a colonel with the Iraqi intelligence service Mukhabarat, had drawn an even more direct link to 9-11.

The former Iraqi agent, codenamed Zeinab, told the paper that one of the highlights of Salman Pak's six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. Like the Sept. 11 hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five, he explained.

Zeinab's story has since been corroborated by Charles Duelfer, the former vice chairman of Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspection team, who actually visited the Salman Pak camp several times.

"He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors," the Observer reported. "The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counterterrorist training."

"Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer explained. "I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect?"

Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab told the Observer that there was a foreigners' camp that was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein.

"It was a nightmare! A very strange experience," the Iraqi agent said. "These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying."

A second defector said that conversations with the hijacker-trainees made it clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco.

"We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States," he added chillingly. "The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this."

Though the Bush administration has been largely silent about Salman Pak, former CIA Director James Woolsey is apparently convinced it was used to rehearse Sept. 11-style hijackings.

"We know that at Salman Pak, on the southern edge of Baghdad, five different eyewitnesses - three Iraqi defectors and two American U.N. inspectors - have said - and now there are aerial photographs to show it - a Boeing 707 that was used for training of hijackers, including non-Iraqi hijackers trained very secretly to take over airplanes with knives."

Another intriguing coincidence: Salman Pak's hijacking school reportedly opened for business in 1995, the same year al-Qaeda agents in the Philippines hatched a plot to hijack 12 airliners and slam some of them into U.S. landmarks. (End of NewsMax excerpt)

Despite the compelling case of Salman Pak, the shockingly flat-footed Bush public relations team remains mum on the most potent justification for hitting back at Baghdad.

No wonder support for Bush's Iraq attack has dropped to just 51 percent in the latest Gallup poll.

'Saddam controlled the camp'

The Iraqi connection

As evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to the 11 September hijackers begins to emerge, David Rose gathers testimony from former Baghdad agents and the CIA to reveal the secrets of Saddam's terror training camp

War on Terrorism: Observer special

Sunday November 11, 2001
The Observer

His friends call him Abu Amin, 'the father of honesty'. At 43, he is one of Iraq's most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as 'M8' - the department for 'special operations', such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre.
Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. The Observer has learnt that Atta's talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent links between Iraq, the 11 September hijackers and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Senior US intelligence sources say the CIA has 'credible information' that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States. They are believed to be Atta's closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the 'German cell ' who lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s.

In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: 'Yes, you cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey, weather and other topics. But I am not so sure.

http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,591439,00.html

In the early period after the attacks, Western intelligence agencies said they knew of nothing to suggest an Iraqi connection. That position has now changed. A top US analyst - a serving intelligence official with no connection to the 'hawks' around Wolfowitz - told The Observer: 'You should think of this thing as a spectrum: with zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100 per cent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find most plausible is somewhere in the middle range - significant Iraqi assistance and some involvement.'

SNIP

The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany, was the hijackers' overall leader. He personally handled more than $100,000 of the plot's funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 - all of which appear to have had some operational significance. Investigators lay heavy stress on a captured al-Qaeda manual which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.

Two of those trips were to meet al-Ani in Prague. The Iraqi's profile has been supplied by defectors from Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who are now being guarded by the London-based opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). CIA sources have confirmed its crucial details. 'There's really no doubt that al-Ani is a very senior Iraqi agent,' one source said.

The Observer has interviewed two of the defectors. They began to tell their stories at the beginning of October, and have been debriefed extensively by the FBI and the CIA. Al-Ani's experience in covert 'wet jobs' (assassinations), gives his meetings with Atta a special significance: his expertise was killing.

According to the defectors, he has an unusual ability to change his appearance and operate under cover. One defector recalls a meeting in the early 1990s when al-Ani had long, silver hair, and wore jeans, silver chains and sunglasses. Al-Ani explained he was about to undertake a mission which required him to look like a Western hippy. A member of Saddam's Baathist party since his youth, al-Ani also has extensive experience working with radical Islamists such as Mohamed Atta.

Since the 1980s, Saddam has organised numerous Islamic conferences in Baghdad, expressly for the Mukhabarat to find foreign recruits. Al-Ani has been seen at at least two of them. On one occasion, the defectors say, he took on the cover of a Muslim cleric at a fundamentalists' conference in Karachi, presenting himself as a delegate from the Iraqi shrine of the Sufi mystic Abdel-Qadir al-Gaylani, whose followers are numerous in Pakistan.

Last Wednesday, Iraq made its own response to the news of the meetings between al-Ani and Atta. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, denied Iraq had anything to do with the hijackings, saying: 'Even if that [the meetings] happened, that would mean nothing, for a diplomat could meet many people during his duty, whether he was at a restaurant or elsewhere, and even if he met Mohamed Atta, that would not mean the Iraqi diplomat was involved.'

Yet the striking thing about the meetings is the lengths to which Atta went in order to attend them. In June last year, he flew to Prague from Hamburg, only to be refused entry because he had failed to obtain a visa. Three days later, now equipped with the paperwork, Atta was back for a visit of barely 24 hours. He flew from the Czech Republic to the US, where he began to train as pilot. In early April 2001, when the conspiracy's planning must have been nearing its final stages, Atta was back in Prague for a further brief visit - a journey of considerable inconvenience.

On 17 April, the Czechs expelled al-Ani, who had diplomatic cover, as a hostile spy. Last night, a senior US diplomatic source told The Observer that Atta was not the only suspected al-Qaeda member who met al-Ani and other Iraqi agents in Prague. He said the Czechs monitored at least two further such meetings in the months before 11 September.

The senior US intelligence source said the CIA believed that two other hijackers, al-Shehri and Jarrah, also met known Iraqi intelligence officers outside the US in the run-up to the atrocities. It is understood these meetings took place in the United Arab Emirates - where Iraq maintains its largest 'illegal', or non-diplomatic, cover intelligence operation, most of it devoted to oil exports and busting economic sanctions.

The source added that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which has now effectively merged with al-Qaeda, maintained regular contacts with Iraq for many years. He confirmed the claims first made by the Iraqi National Congress - that towards the end of 1998, Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and a key member of the Mukhabarat leadership - went to Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden.

The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy's 'muscle', Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts' passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer - codenamed Abu Zeinab - had extraordinary information about terrorist training in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took down Zeinab's story. He had worked at a site which was already well known - Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris river south of Baghdad.

However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis from bin Laden's Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi Arabs.

Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners' camp was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The Observer, Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: 'It was a nightmare! A very strange experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying.'

Asked whether he believed the foreigners' camp had trained members of al-Qaeda, Zeinab said: 'All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.' One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five.

In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas - Captain Sabah Khodad, who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer, he echoed Zeinab's claims: 'The foreigners' training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking. They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, "this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak".'

More...

Zeinab and Khodad said the Salman Pak students practised their techniques in a Boeing 707 fuselage parked in the foreigners' part of the camp. Yesterday their story received important corroboration from Charles Duelfer, former vice chairman of Unscom, the UN weapons inspection team.

Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training. 'Of course we automatically took out the word "counter",' he said. 'I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect? Iraq presents a long-term strategic threat. Unfortunately, the US is not very good at recognising long-term strategic threats.'

At the end of September, Donald Rumsfeld, the far from doveish US Defence Secretary, told reporters there was 'no evidence' that Iraq was involved in the atrocities. That judgment is slowly being rewritten.

Many still suspect the anthrax which has so far killed four people in America has an ultimate Iraqi origin: in contrast to recent denials made by senior FBI officials, CIA sources say there simply is not enough material to be sure. However, it does not look likely that the latest anthrax sample, sent to a newspaper in Karachi, can have come from the source recently posited by the FBI - a right-wing US militant. 'The sophistication of the stuff that has been found represents a level of technique and knowledge that in the past has been associated only with governments,' Duelfer said. 'If it's not Iraq, there aren't many alternatives.'

If the emerging evidence of Iraqi involvement in 11 September becomes clearer or more conclusive, the consequences will be immense. In the words of a State Department spokesman after Powell's briefing by the Czech leader on Friday: 'If there is clear evidence connecting the World Trade Centre attacks to Iraq, that would be a very grave development.'

At worst, the anti-terrorist coalition would currently be bombing the wrong country. At best, the world would see that some of President Bush's closest advisers - his father, Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney, to name but three - made a catastrophic error in 1991, when they ended the Gulf war without toppling Saddam.

The case for trying to remove him now might well seem unanswerable. In that scenario, the decisions Western leaders have had to make in the past two months would seem like a trivial prelude.

A portrait of evil
By Christopher Kremmer
February 22 2003

He committed his first murder to settle a personal score at the age of 15. When he became displeased with his health minister in 1982, he hauled him out of a cabinet meeting and shot him dead.

Clawing his way to the top in a country where politics is both a blood sport and a route to social mobility made Saddam Hussein the ruthless dictator some parts of the world see today.

Born in the late 1930s in a dirt-poor village on the banks of the Tigris River, he was orphaned at an early age. But when Arab nationalism swept the Middle East in the 1950s, his life found meaning and he plunged into violent student politics.

Gunplay was his forte. In his early 20s he took part in a failed attempt to assassinate Iraq's president Abdel Karim Kassem.

Modelling himself on Joseph Stalin, he toughed his way up through the ranks of the Ba'ath Party, doing several stints in jail and exile before seizing the presidency in July 1979. Since then he has ruled Iraq by terror - the only way such a disjointed and turbulent country can be ruled, many observers say.

But Iraq, a country of 24million people, was too small a stage for Saddam's maniacal ambitions.

In September 1980, he launched a doomed invasion of neighbouring Iran, hoping to kill its Islamic revolution at birth and stamp his secular leadership on the entire Arab and Muslim world. America covertly supported him, with the president, Ronald Reagan, sending a special emissary called Donald Rumsfeld to shake on the deal.

But instead of a glorious victory, the Iran-Iraq war degenerated into an eight-year bloodbath in which more than 1million people died, many of them Iranian troops exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons.

Frustrated in Iran, Saddam turned on Kuwait two years later hoping its 10percent of world oil reserves would replenish his exhausted coffers. Instead, defeat cost Iraqis $US230 billion in damaged infrastructure and at least $US200 billion in lost oil production.

But miraculously, Saddam survived, only to squander the opportunity to quickly repent, surrender his weapons of mass destruction and rejoin the world community.

Instead, weapons inspections became a game of cat and mouse, and sanctions stayed.

The human cost was incalculable. Infant mortality doubled and according to the World Health Organisation the vast majority of Iraqis have had a semi-starvation diet for years.

The demography of Iraq has exacerbated its leader's political psychosis. Two-thirds of the population are Shiah Muslims, but since independence in 1932, the country has been ruled by the Sunni Muslim minority.

When his citizens have tried to rise up, Saddam has repressed them brutally. The 20per cent Kurdish minority in the north was shown the price of defiance in March 1988 when Iraq's military attacked the Kurdish city of Halabja with chemical weapons, killing an estimated 5000 people.

Terrorism is the political currency of the Middle East, and rare is the leader who has not invested in it.

In the 1980s, Saddam gave shelter to notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, but later expelled him at Washington's behest.

In 1993, the FBI says, Saddam's agents smuggled a car bomb into Kuwait in a failed effort to assassinate George Bush Snr, although explosives experts have questioned the evidence.

Recent Iraqi defectors have told of a training camp at the Salman Pak military base south of Baghdad, where Islamists from across the Middle East have trained in hijacking aircraft.

Whenever it has suited him, the whisky-drinking Saddam has mouthed the language of jihad. He helped fund the Islamic fundamentalist government in the Sudan.

Then there was the well-known meeting in Prague between al-Qaeda suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer just five months before the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

The British author and journalist Con Coughlin claims Saddam appeared to have had prior warning of September 11.

Just two weeks before the attacks took place, he put his country's armed forces on their highest alert since the invasion of Kuwait.

In April 1998, Coughlin says, Osama bin Laden even sent a delegation to attend the birthday celebration of Saddam's son, Udai, who in return agreed to train al-Qaeda operatives in Iraqi camps.

Al Qaeda was trained in Iraqi terror camps

GWYNNE ROBERTS

EVIDENCE is now emerging of a shadowy military alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden which involves training al Qaeda fighters to use chemical and biological weapons in sabotage operations in Europe and the United States.

US claims of a direct link between bin Laden and Saddam have fallen on deaf ears in Europe. But an investigation I conducted for PBS, the American state broadcaster, reveals such a connection really exists.

Iraq's ruling Ba'ath Party was indeed once hostile to Islamic fundamentalism. But times have changed. The Iraqi media often refer to their leader as the great Mujahed (holy warrior) Saddam Hussein. His speeches are peppered with Koranic

references; his regime has launched a "faith campaign"; senior Ba'athists are learning the Koran by heart, and religious instruction is being stepped up in schools.

In the late 1990s, senior Iraqi defectors reaching Lebanon, Turkey, northern Iraq, and Europe even began to suggest that Saddam's embrace of Islam and his hatred of America had caused a seismic shift in Middle Eastern politics, resulting in an alliance of convenience.

The first hint that something unusual was happening was picked up in 1997 by Jane's Intelligence Review. It reported that Saudi and Palestinian dissidents were being trained in Iraq at secret camps run by a Iraqi military intelligence group known as Unit 999.

Abu Khalil arrived in Ankara last year after escaping from Iraq. His first post was as a Unit 999 trainer.

In 1994, Unit 999 was tasked with training non-Iraqis from all over the Middle East and North Africa. "Many of them were very Islamic, very religious and very radical," he said. "I knew the head of the camp and he told me they came from countries like Sudan, Yemen, Egypt, Palestine.

"They were trained in many different techniques - how to lay bombs and how to use chemical weapons. They were taught to do operations outside Iraq, never inside."

In 1994, Unit 999 also started training Saddam's Fedayeen, a brutal militia. Abu Mohammed, who fled to Turkey three years ago, told me that in 1997 and 1998 Islamic extremists were being instructed to use poison gas and biological weapons in behind-the-lines operations in the Middle East and the West. Unit 999 ran a course for a number of extremist Middle Eastern groups, including al Qaeda.

Mohammed said he was recruited into Saddam's Fedayeen in 1997. His first encounter with bin Laden's fighters occurred that same year when he went to Salman Pak.

"I went there with 70 other officers. I noticed people queueing for food. The camp manager said to me, 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group, and the PKK and the Mujahidin e' Kalq.' So, I knew at the beginning who we were training with."

Mohammed said a year later he attended another training course at Salman Pak and Unit 999 where he encountered al Qaeda fighters.

"There was also training in the use of biological and chemical weapons there but they were not Iraqis doing it - only foreigners. In the training areas there is a field especially for weapons of mass destruction. Here, experts hold lectures and conduct biological experiments, theoretical experiments, of course, on how to place explosives, or how to pollute specific areas."

Mohammed added: "They had maps of the USA, Britain, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia."

The training described by the defectors raises the dreadful spectre that Iraq was passing on expertise learned from the East Germans during the cold war. At Massow, a camp just south of Berlin, secret police instructors taught Iraqis, Yemenis and Palestinians, among others, how to attack civilian targets.

A former Stasi lieutenant colonel said: "The courses emphasised chemical weapons which attack the nervous system such as yperit, the nerve gas, Sarin, and binary chemicals. They were also taught how to deploy bacteriological weapons - influenza, anthrax, pneumonia and yellow fever."

Fighters were taught to terrorise civilians by attacking railways stations, airports and public gatherings. The contamination of water sources, roads and large surface areas was also emphasised.

Gwynne Roberts is an Iraq specialist and documentary film maker

-Feb 13th

Bound together by a common hatred

FRASER NELSON

THE missing piece in the Iraq jigsaw is not weapons of mass destruction. The hunt which occupies the United States is for the bigger prize: linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

George Bush, the US president, claims to know "for sure" the two are linked - yet even Tony Blair dares not join him. So far, he says, the evidence just isn’t there. But since the 11 September attacks, the evidence has been fast accumulating, from the first sketchy reports of the lead hijacker meeting an Iraqi agent in Prague.

The interview transcript of an al-Qaeda terrorist, intercepted by German police before his attack, shows what level of detail is now becoming known. Al-Qaeda code words are just the start of the new data.

Within weeks, the US may well be able to release its dream dossier - one explaining that Saddam has been supporting, sheltering and encouraging the Islamic fundamentalists with whom the world is now at war.

In April last year, a Jordanian named Shadi Abdullah was arrested by German police after receiving instructions to launch a terrorist attack using "Russian apples" - al-Qaeda code for grenades.

The files, now made public, give an example of how much intelligence the West has gathered. Abdullah was able to provide names and descriptions of al-Qaeda cells in Germany, Italy and the UK, as well as half a dozen code words.

But the picture being assembled in the US centres on four people whose movements and affiliations suggest that Saddam and bin Laden are not the sworn enemies they both make out, and which last week’s bin Laden video release suggested.

The first building block is a non-aggression pact which al-Qaeda and Saddam are understood to have reached in 1993. It was an extension of the deal which bin Laden reached with the House of Saud - he would stay out of their hair and they paid him to focus on the "far enemy" instead.

The first key player is Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi, who, in 1995 was dispatched by bin Laden to ask Saddam for help in poison gas training.

His mission is understood to have been successful - and he returned home with a deal which the CIA is now desperate to prove.

Saddam is suspected of sending a number of trainers from an organisation called Unit 999, one of his secret-police operations, who flew into Kabul and spent months in bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

This deal in itself would be the "smoking gun" which, if demonstrable, would allow Saddam to face the damning charge-sheet levied against the Taleban in Afghanistan.

The next link is Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, an Iraqi who is understood to have served as al-Qaeda’s chief weapons procurer during the 1990s and as a liaison officer with Iraqi intelligence in the run-up to Operation Desert Fox in 1998.

He moved on to Iraq after working on Sudan’s chemical weapons programme. He is now in a New York jail, awaiting trial for the 1998 East Africa embassy bombing.

Little information has been released about his story - it could well be up the US’s sleeve.

Several pieces of evidence already incriminate Mussa’ab al-Zarqawi, whose crimes include the suspected assassination of a CIA official in Jordan last year. He controls an organisation called Jund al-Shams, or the Soldiers of the Levant, which has been hiding out in northern Iraq.

He was wounded fighting for the Taleban in Afghanistan, but rather than return to his hideout, he was flown back to Baghdad itself to have his leg amputated. It was the only place, it seems, where he could be sure of good healthcare and political security.

The operation took place last May and al-Zarqawi stayed in Baghdad for two months. During that time, the CIA believes, nearly two dozen Islamic extremists - several with links to bin Laden - converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. The Jordanian government got wind of al-Zarqawi’s stay in Baghdad and asked Iraq to extradite him. Not long after the request was received, he vanished - to the northern enclave of Iraq.

It is northern Iraq which is home to a terrorist group named Ansar al-Islam, created just before the 11 September attacks by the merger of two Kurdish groups in the area.

They are Islamic extremists who control a string of villages on the Iraq-Iran border. Last August, CIA records show they tested ricin on live animals and one Kurd, who was infected with it at a marketplace, then died at home.

The question is whether they defy Saddam or have a pact with his regime. For organisations deemed to be at war with each other, there are several suspicious overlaps.

An Iraqi agent captured by Ansar al-Islam last year claimed to have served as a secret bodyguard to bin Laden’s deputy, when he was dispatched to Baghdad on business in 1992. He has been interviewed by Western experts, who say his story holds water.

Intelligence from both the US and the UK centres on such people - where they go, who they saw and where they secured funding. But a trio of terrorists do not make for the hard evidence needed to prove a link.

One place where there is photographic proof is Iraq’s centre for hijack training in Salman Pak, a camp 20 miles south of Baghdad on the Tigris river. The last set of United Nations inspectors found the fuselage of an old Tupolev 154 airliner there - and were astonished to see people being trained.

"We were told it was for counter-terrorist training," said Charles Duelfer, the deputy head of the first UN inspections team. "We automatically knocked off the word ‘counter’." Spy photographs backed this up - Saddam seemed to be training people how to seize control of a cockpit.

There could be a perfectly excusable explanation for the Tupolev. But James Woolsey, who was CIA director from 1993 to 1995, said the West has spent too long waiting for solid proof.

"We now know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack aircraft in groups of four or five with short knives," he said last week.

"I mean, hello? If we had seen a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy in 1941 and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, ‘Well, you can’t prove that they were Japanese’?"

Saddam has nothing ideologically in common with al-Qaeda, as British terrorism experts have stressed. However, the same was true of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi and the IRA - yet he still sent the terrorists arms and funding.

Saddam runs an atheist form of dictatorship, more in common with the Nazis’ Aryan ideal. But this did not stop him doubling the bounty paid to the families of suicide-bombers to £30,000 from £15,000.

Saddam, bin Laden, the Kurdish terrorists and the Hamas in Palestine have one thing in common: an enemy - that is, the US and its allies. This is often all terrorist groups need to bind them together.

Ambiguous evidence is an occupational hazard of intelligence work. But the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda is becoming clearer as more pieces of the jigsaw emerge.

Soon, the picture may be complete.

Al-Qaeda's deadly code

IN April last year, Shadi Abdullah, 26, a Jordanian, was arrested after German police recorded him accepting instructions to carry out a terrorist attack.

The transcript of his police interview, now made public in Berlin, says that he told police the following al-Qaeda codewords:

RUSSIAN APPLE - A hand grenade manufactured in Russia.

SEVEN SEAS - Seven European countries which have abolished internal border controls, thus making undetected passage easier.

MUTE - A gun with a silencer

TOY - Pistol

HONEY - A CD-ROM containing recipes for making explosives

LITTLE GIRL - A forged driver’s licence

Finally, a potential Material Link between Hussein and 9-11.

I've been profoundly ambivalent about this proposed War for fourteen months, now. This is the FIRST report which I have read, in that entire time, which has actually contributed to the War-Monger case (the reputed "Czech intelligence report" boiled down to "Mohammed Atta and someone who might have been associated with Iraqi intelligence might have had lunch together". Even if true, that's just too insubstantial... it doesn't constitue "aid and comfort" even, let alone Harboring and training and equipping).

"Saddam invaded his own neighbors, Iran and Kuwait"... not a valid argument for War under Christian Just War theory (and never was). Iran and Kuwait are not US States, therefore I do not have the right to send someone else's son to die on their behalf.
"Saddam might develop Weapons of Mass Destruction"... not a valid argument for War under Christian Just War theory. The fact that you and your neighbor don't get along, and he might buy a gun tomorrow, does not actually make shooting him today a Jesus-like Moral Action.
"Saddam gassed his own citizens, etc!!" Morally atrocious, certainly. However, Iraq's citizens are not US citizens any more than Iranian or Kuwaitis are... not a valid argument for War under Christian Just War theory.
The Iraqi Salman Pak terrorist training camp may very well have been the "dress rehearsal" grounds for Al-Qaeda "skyjacker" training.
Oh. Well, in THAT case, we would have nearly the SAME moral justification as we (rightfully) enjoyed against the Taliban.
It appears we have our first contender for a LEGITIMATE "Just War" Argument.

Interesting stuff. Wonder what Bush HQ will do with it.
(As popular support -- even his own dad -- turns skeptical towards his War, Bush can scarcely afford to just sit on stuff like this).

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