THE FINAL REPORT of the September 11 Commission, to be released tomorrow, cites many examples of “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al Qaeda, while concluding that those contacts do not appear to have resulted in a “collaborative operational relationship” for “carrying out attacks against the United States,” according to sources familiar with the commission’s work. The findings in the final report appear to differ from last month’s Staff Statement No. 15 in several important respects.
The staff statement, which declared simply that Iraq-al Qaeda contacts did not appear to have resulted in a “collaborative relationship,” led several leading news outlets to suggest that the report contradicted Bush administration claims about the relationship. On June 17, 2004, a front-page Washington Post headline declared “Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Dismissed.” The New York Times weighed in with similar headline that same day: “Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie.” Times reporters Philip Shenon and Christopher Marquis reported that the staff statement “sharply contradicted one of President Bush’s central justifications for war.”
Almost immediately, several commissioners offered public statements qualifying the staff report. Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, put it this way:
Hamilton was half right. The press did overstate the findings in the staff statement. But in casting doubt on a “collaborative relationship,” the staff statement did appear to contradict statements from the Bush administration and the intelligence community. Former CIA Director George Tenet, for example, testified repeatedly about intelligence reporting suggesting Iraq provided training and safe haven to al Qaeda.
The final, unanimous report from the commission paints a more complicated picture of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection than last month’s staff statement. The report describes repeated “friendly contacts” between followers of Osama bin Laden and the former Iraqi regime. It also qualifies the finding of no “collaborative relationship”–claiming only that there was no “collaborative operational relationship” for “carrying out attacks against the United States.”
While some of those “friendly contacts” have been reported previously, others have not. The report says that bin Laden approached Iraq on more than one occasion in the mid-1990s seeking cooperation. In the late 1990s, as the U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq grew more contentious, the courtship reversed itself, with Saddam Hussein’s regime reaching out to al Qaeda. By 1999, according to the report, Iraqi outreach included an offer of safe haven in Iraq for Osama bin Laden. Thus, in March of 1998, according to the report, two al Qaeda leaders visited Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi intelligence. And in July of that same year, representatives of the Iraqi regime met in Afghanistan with Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.
This appears to be the first public report of the July 1998 meetings. Meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda in March 1998 were first reported last year by Mitch Potter of the Toronto Star. In the days after the Iraq war, Potter and two colleagues took numerous files from the burned out headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. According to a memo they found, the March 1998 meetings in Baghdad were designed to “gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden.” Also on the table, according to the Iraqi Intelligence document, was “the future of our relationship with him.”
The travel was facilitated by the Iraqi Intelligence station in Khartoum, Sudan, and according to the memo, was paid for by the Iraqi regime. Handwritten notes on the third page of the memo indicated that the bin Laden envoy arrived on March 5, 1998, and stayed as a guest of the Iraqi regime at Baghdad’s Mansur Melia Hotel. Additional margin notes suggest that the meetings were extended by a week–for a total of 16 days.
THE 9/11 COMMISSION’S final report is one of three recent accounts that have added significantly to the public knowledge of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. The other two are the Senate Intelligence Committee report and a June 25, 2004, article published in the New York Times. Taken together, the new information leaves in ruins the conventional wisdom that Iraq and al Qaeda were longtime enemies that would never cooperate.
From the Times, based on an internal Iraqi Intelligence document from the mid-1990s later authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community, we learned:
* That the Iraqi regime agreed to bin Laden’s request to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda.
* That bin Laden “requested joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. had a strong troop presence in Saudi Arabia at the time.
* That following bin Laden’s departure from Sudan, Iraq intelligence began “seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship.”
* That the Iraqi Intelligence service believed “cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement.”
* And that a Sudanese official in 1994 told Uday Hussein and the director of Iraqi Intelligence that bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan.
From the Senate Intelligence Committee report we learned:
* That according to a CIA report called Iraqi Support for Terrorism, “the general pattern that emerges is one of al Qaeda’s enduring interest in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) expertise from Iraq.”
* That the Iraqi regime “certainly” had knowledge that Abu Musab al Zarqawi–described in Iraqi Support for Terrorism as “a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner”–was operating in Baghdad and northern Iraq.
* That the CIA reported that “any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States.”
So what was the exact nature of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda? We still don’t know. What we do know, however, is this: those who persist in claiming that there was no Iraq-al Qaeda connection are wrong.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. Parts of this article are drawn from his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America (HarperCollins).
