Al Qaeda’s Man in Iraq?

NEWSWEEK ^ | Oct. 7, 2002 | Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman

[Republican_Strategist]

U.S. intelligence officials may have traced a key Osama bin Laden operative to Saddam Hussein’s home base

Oct. 7 issue — In the weeks after the September 11 attacks, security officials around the world were on highest alert. So when a 37-year-old Iraqi national named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir stepped off a plane in Amman’s Queen Alia airport on Oct. 21, Jordanian officials soon became suspicious.

A QUICK REVIEW of his passport showed Shakir had recently traveled to Pakistan, Yemen and Malaysia—key stops on the terror trail. FBI agents were alerted. Within days they concluded that Shakir was no incidental traveler: he was, according to confidential U.S. intelligence reports, a suspected terrorist who had been in direct contact with some of the major operatives in the September 11 plot.

But hopes that the FBI had nabbed a potential Qaeda source were soon dashed. Three months after he was detained, Shakir was inexplicably released by Jordanian authorities—and promptly vanished. NEWSWEEK has learned that some U.S. intelligence officials believe Shakir is now back home in Iraq. The Bush administration has made no public comments about Shakir and officials acknowledge they know little about his current activities. But Shakir’s case may be the most tantalizing evidence yet to support the administration’s contention that there are ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

BULLETPROOF EVIDENCE?

For more than a year the White House has strained to find a solid connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network—an effort that has taken on new urgency as Congress prepares to debate a resolution authorizing a war with Iraq. Last week national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice told a TV interviewer that Iraq has provided Qaeda operatives with training in “chemical-weapons development.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described what he called “bulletproof” evidence that senior Qaeda leaders were being harbored in Baghdad. But the relationship between Baghdad and Al Qaeda is still far from clear, and even top administration officials acknowledge there are large gaps in what they actually know. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” said one senior U.S. official familiar with the intelligence reports on Iraq. “You have a little fragment here and another fragment there. But you don’t know whether you’re looking at a face or a monkey’s ass.”

Some of the new information on Iraq’s terror links, sources tell NEWSWEEK, has come from two high-level Qaeda detainees—Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden’s former operations chief, and his onetime deputy Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a fierce Libyan operative who was once the military commander of Al Qaeda’s Khalden training camp in eastern Afghanistan. Under interrogation, both men have separately described efforts by Qaeda operatives to seek out Iraqi assistance in assembling chemical weapons. But how much help the Iraqis actually provided is “really very fuzzy,” said one knowledgeable source.

Read the rest here.

[Republican_Strategist]

Please write you Senator & Congressman and demand they take action.

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[scooby321]

Interesting