WASHINGTON - In a direct challenge to
recent assertions by both President George W Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney, the special bipartisan
commission investigating the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks against New York and Washington has
found "no credible evidence" of any operational link
between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
While the commission,
which has had access to highly classified US
intelligence, said that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden
had sought contacts with and support from former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein after his expulsion from Sudan
in 1994, those appeals were ignored.
Contacts
between Iraq and al-Qaeda after bin Laden moved to
Afghanistan "do not appear to have resulted in a
collaborative relationship", according to the
commission's report, which was released Wednesday
morning. It added that two senior al-Qaeda officials now
in US custody "have adamantly denied that any ties
existed between al-Qaeda and Iraq".
The report
is the first of a series expected to be released over
the coming months as the commission winds up its work,
most of which deals with al-Qaeda's evolution beginning
in the 1980s. Echoing the administration, the commission
warns that "al-Qaeda is actively striving to attack the
United States and inflict mass casualties".
Its
conclusion about the absence of any operational link
between al-Qaeda and Saddam not only further undermines
the administration's case for going to war against Iraq,
but also deals a sharp blow to the already-strained
credibility of Cheney, who on Monday asserted without
elaboration during a speech to a right-wing institute in
Florida that the Iraqi leader had "long-established
ties" to the group.
Cheney insisted as recently
as January that Washington had obtained "conclusive"
evidence that Saddam had biological weapons in the form
of two customized truck trailers that he said was for
their production.
The claim, which he has not
repeated since, was discredited by, among others,
outgoing Central Intelligence Agency director George
Tenet, as well as the head of the US task force in
charge of searching for alleged weapons of mass
destruction programs in Iraq, David Kay.
Asked
about Cheney's most recent remarks at a Tuesday press
conference, Bush declined to answer directly, insisting
instead that Saddam had ties with "terrorist
organizations", of which he cited only the late Abu
Nidal, a Palestinian who split from Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat in the 1970s and created his own terrorist
group.
Bush also suggested that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is identified by US
officials as a leader of resistance to the US occupation
of Iraq, might also have had ties to Saddam and
al-Qaeda.
"Zarqawi is the best evidence of
[Saddam's] connection to al-Qaeda affiliates and
al-Qaeda," Bush said. "He's the person who's still
killing."
The commission's conclusion on the
absence of ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda is also
certain to further discredit the so-called
neo-conservatives both inside and outside the
administration who led the march to war. Many of them
were behind what appeared to be an orchestrated campaign
to implicate Saddam in the September attacks themselves.
Within the administration, the principals appear
to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney and his
national security adviser, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
among others in key posts in the National Security
Council and the State Department.
Outside the
administration, key figures included close friends of
both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle,
former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey -
both members of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board; Frank
Gaffney, head of the arms-industry-funded Center for
Security Policy; and William Kristol, editor of the
Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of the
Project for the New American Century, among others.
A close examination of the public record
indicates that all of these individuals were actively
preparing the ground within days, even hours, after the
September 11 attacks for an eventual strike on Iraq,
whether or not it had any role in the attacks or any
connection to al-Qaeda.
A hint of a deliberate
campaign to connect Iraq with September 11 and al-Qaeda
surfaced one year ago in a televised interview of
General Wesley Clark on the popular public-affairs
program, Meet the Press. In answer to a question,
Clark asserted, "There was a concerted effort during the
fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin
9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.
"It came from the White House, it came from
other people around the White House. It came from all
over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a
call at my home saying, 'you got to say this is
connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has
to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"
While Clark
has not yet identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey,
Gaffney and Kristol were using the same language in
their media appearances on September 11 and over the
following weeks.
"This could not have been done
without help of one or more governments," Perle told The
Washington Post on September 11. "Someone taught these
suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't
think that can be done without the assistance of large
governments."
While Kristol and company were
trying to implicate Saddam in the public debate, their
friends in the administration were pushing hard in the
same direction. Cheney, according to published accounts,
had already confided to friends before September 11 that
he hoped the Bush administration would remove Saddam
from power.
But the evidence about Rumsfeld is
even more dramatic. According to an account by veteran
CBS newsman David Martin in September 2002, Rumsfeld was
"telling his aides to start thinking about striking
Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam
Hussein to the attacks" five hours after an American
Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon.
Martin
attributed his account in part to notes taken at the
time by a Rumsfeld aide. They quote the defense chief
asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good
enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time, not
only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. The administration should
"go massive ... sweep it all up, things related and
not", the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying.
Wolfowitz shared those views, according to an
account of the September 15-16 meeting of the
administration's war council at Camp David, provided by
the Washington Post's Bill Woodward and Dan Balz. In his
"I-was-there" style for which Woodward, whose access to
powerful officials since his investigative role in the
Watergate scandal almost 30 years ago is unmatched, is
famous:
"Wolfowitz argued [at the meeting] that
the real source of all the trouble and terrorism was
probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of September 11
created an opportunity to strike. Now, Rumsfeld asked
again: 'Is this the time to attack Iraq'?"
"Powell objected," the Woodward and Balz account
continued, citing Secretary of State Colin Powell's
argument that US allies would not support a strike on
Iraq. "If you get something pinning September 11 on
Iraq, great," Powell is quoted as saying. "But let's get
Afghanistan now. If we do that, we will have increased
our ability to go after Iraq - if we can prove Iraq had
a role."
Despite the secretary of state's
reservations, the neo-con campaign was remarkably
successful. As recently as eight weeks ago, a survey by
the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the
University of Maryland found that 57% of the US public
believed Iraq was either "directly involved" in carrying
out the September 11 attacks or had provided
"substantial support" to al-Qaeda. Fifty-two percent
said they believed that concrete evidence of a Saddam-al
Qaeda link had been uncovered by US investigators since
the war.
Retired senior US diplomats and
intelligence officials have long doubted any operational
link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, as noted by former US
ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, who signed a
statement by former top-ranking diplomats and military
officials that was released on Wednesday, denouncing US
policy in Iraq and the Middle East.
"[Saddam]
and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were mortal enemies
during this period," Freeman told reporters, adding that
administration assertions that the two had such links
before the war were regarded by specialists in the
region as "ludicrous".
"Why the vice president
continues to make that claim beats me," said another
former top diplomat, ambassador Robert Oakley. "I have
no idea."
