Harboring al Qaeda

THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE has once again released a report claiming that the Bush administration hyped prewar intelligence. The so-called Phase Two report is supposed to investigate the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence. In reality, the report is little more than yet another attempt by partisan Democrats to make political hay out of flawed prewar intelligence. (The only Republicans to endorse the report were two of the Senate's most liberal GOP members.) The committee focused exclusively on prewar statements by Bush administration officials, ignoring similar statements by leading Democrats. Therefore, the report is intended to portray the Bush administration in the worst possible light. But even with this bias, the committee came to a noteworthy conclusion: The Bush administration was right to claim that Saddam's regime was harboring al Qaeda members.

These conclusions should not be surprising. In his book At the Center of the Storm, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet provided a number of details concerning the safe haven al Qaeda members received in Saddam's Iraq. For example, Tenet wrote that two of Ayman al-Zawahiri's top operatives, Thirwat Shihata and Yussef Dardiri, received safe haven in Baghdad. Tenet says that there was "concern that these two might be planning operations outside Iraq."

The first report on the uses of prewar intelligence published by the Senate Intelligence Committee in July 2004 also found that Zarqawi freely roamed around Iraq and Saddam's goons must have been aware of his presence. The authors of the Butler Report, the British government's investigation into prewar intelligence, found roughly the same. Even other al Qaeda members have, on occasion, been open about the relationship between Zarqawi, other al Qaeda operatives, and Saddam's regime in prewar Iraq.

One glaring illustration is the following baseless finding:

Iraq and al Qaeda did not have a cooperative relationship. Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaeda to provide material or operational support.

Here, the committee simply regurgitated an old storyline invented by some analysts within the CIA and other intelligence bureaucracies. The truth is that this was a prewar assumption that went untested and is contradicted by a variety of pieces of evidence discovered both in the prewar as well as postwar period. Some of this evidence is cited in the committee's own report!

For example, if Saddam was willing to harbor al Qaeda terrorists, as the committee itself admits was substantiated by "postwar information," then how can the committee claim that Saddam spurned all offers of cooperation and was entirely "distrustful" of al Qaeda members? Isn't giving safe haven to wanted terrorists--who, according to George Tenet, may have been plotting attacks around the world--evidence of a "cooperative relationship"? And if Saddam was willing to give al Qaeda members safe haven, how can the committee be sure that he wasn't willing to do more for them?

Another document from the mid-1990s, which was not cited in the IDA's analysis, relays Osama bin Laden's request for Iraqi assistance in performing "joint operations against the foreign forces in the land of Hijaz." That is, bin Laden wanted Iraq's assistance in attacking U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. We do not know what, exactly, came of bin Laden's request. But the document indicates that Saddam's operatives "were left to develop the relationship and the cooperation between the two sides to see what other doors of cooperation and agreement open up." According to the regime's own documents, therefore, Saddam did not "[refuse] all requests from al Qaeda to provide material or operational support." Saddam was willing to leave the relationship open to see what avenues for cooperation between his intelligence operatives and al Qaeda's terrorists may open up.

There's more, of course, but the Senate Intelligence Committee managed to avoid any direct mention of such documents, which contradict some of its findings. The report is, therefore, hardly comprehensive. However, we can be certain of at least one thing: Saddam harbored al Qaeda terrorists.

Even the Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee now admit that.