perfidy

Steve Waite over at Commonsense and Wonder links to a Weekly Standard article by Stephen Hayes that lays out some evidence for a significant connection between Saddam's regime and bin Laden going back to the nineties.

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

Not that I needed additional justification, but this would be one more reason to feel good about what we've done. I think that over the next several months, we might begin to see increasingly rapid progress in the war on terror.

In the Belmont Club post I linked a while back, Viva Los Pepes, Wretchard talks about "tearing down the mountain" - a deliberate process of slowly destroying a network from the bottom up to get at the (presently) invulnerable bad guy at the top. We used this technique against the drug cartels in Columbia to get Pablo Escobar, and it looks as if it worked with Saddam, may pay off any moment with Zawahiri, and perhaps soon with bin Laden himself.

And one reason that we are able to do this is the intelligence information we are gaining from captured Iraqis.

[wik] From Kathy Kinsley at On the Third Hand (I got the blog name right this time! I'm not such a complete idiot as to get my blog hostess' blog wrong twice in one day.) we get a link to another story about Iraq-Al Qaida links, this one from the Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough at the Washington Times.

We have obtained a document discovered in Iraq from the files of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). The report provides new evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The 1993 document, in Arabic, bears the logo of the Iraqi intelligence agency and is labeled "top secret" on each of its 20 pages. The report is a list of IIS agents who are described as "collaborators."

On page 14, the report states that among the collaborators is "the Saudi Osama bin Laden." The document states that bin Laden is a "Saudi businessman and is in charge of the Saudi opposition in Afghanistan. And he is in good relationship with our section in Syria," the document states, under the signature "Jabar."

The document was obtained by the Iraqi National Congress and first disclosed on the CBS program "60 Minutes" by INC leader Ahmed Chalabi.

A U.S. official said the document appears authentic.