What the devil is going on? Has the world gone stark, staring mad? The splash headline in the virulently anti-war Independent was exultant:

‘Official verdict: White House misled world over Saddam’.

The New York Times reported gleefully:

‘The bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks further called into question on Wednesday one of President Bush's rationales for the war with Iraq, and again put him on the defensive over an issue the White House was once confident would be a political plus. In questioning the extent of any ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the commission weakened the already spotty scorecard on Mr. Bush's justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.’

And Senator John Kerry leapt onto the runaway bandwagon to squawk that ‘the administration misled America’.

The cause of the excitement was an interim report by the staff of the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, which said it had found no conclusive evidence of any links between Iraq and al Qaeda in attacking the US. This has immediately been spun by the anti-war lobby to claim falsely that a) there were no links between Iraq and al Qaeda – official — and that President Bush lied to the world by saying Iraq was involved in 9/11.

But both of these statements are outright lies. President Bush never said it. The commission staff never said it. As the President said today:

‘ “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda," the president said. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, in the Sudan. There's numerous contacts between the two.” ’

What’s more, when you look at the commission staff’s report itself, it is immediately clear that it is a very suspect document indeed. First of all, it contains hardly anything about the links between Iraq and al Qaeda. In twelve pages it devotes precisely one paragraph to the issue. This is it:

‘Bin Ladin also explored possible co-operation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein’s secular regime. Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded bin Ladin to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Ladin in 1994. Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons,. But Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda co-operated on attacks against the United States’.

Now first of all, this risibly brief paragraph makes very little sense. It is internally contradictory. As Andrew C McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and others, says in the National Review:

‘…it cannot be true both that the Sudanese arranged contacts between Iraq and bin Laden and that no “ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq.” If the first proposition is so, then the “[t]wo senior Bin Laden associates” who are the sources of the second are either lying or misinformed.’

But the real jaw-dropper is that the commission staff simply fail to deal with the vast raft of evidence of close links between Iraq and al Qaeda. Take, for example, the original indictment of bin Laden obtained by the Justice Department in spring 1998:

‘Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.’ (My emphasis).

Or what about the testimony of former CIA director George Tenet in a letter to Congress on October 7, 2002, which he repeated in evidence to a Senate committee this year, highlighted by Stephen Hayes earlier this month:

‘Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank. We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade. Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs. Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.’

Nor do the commission staff mention the striking evidence about the role played in an al Qaeda planning meeting in by one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. As McCarthy observes:

‘Shakir is the Iraqi who got his job as an airport greeter through the Iraqi embassy, which controlled his work schedule. He is the man who left that job right after the Malaysia meeting; who was found in Qatar six days after 9/11 with contact information for al Qaeda heavyweights — including bin Laden's aforementioned friend, Salim — and who was later detained in Jordan but released only after special pleading from Saddam's regime, and only after intelligence agents concluded that he seemed to have sophisticated counter-interrogation training. Shakir is also the Iraqi who now appears, based on records seized since the regime's fall, to have been all along an officer in Saddam's Fedayeen. Does all this amount to proof of participation in the 9/11 plot? Well, in any prosecutor's office it would be a pretty good start. And if the commission staff was going to get into this area of Iraqi connections to al Qaeda at all, what conceivable good reason is there for avoiding any discussion whatsoever of Shakir? At least tell us why he is not worth mentioning.’

Nor do they mention any of the other voluminous evidence in Hayes’s book The Connection – such as the intelligence that bin Laden’s top deputy Ayman al Zawahiri ‘visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi vice-president on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for co-ordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in al-Falluja, an Nasiriya and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz. The visit coincided with a payment of $300,000 from Iraqi intelligence to Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic jihad, which merged that same year with al Qaeda.’ (p 105)

Or this on p 83: ‘Bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS’s [Iraqi intelligence Service’s] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden’s farm in Khartoum in Sep-Oct 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence Mani-abd-al-Rashid-al-Tikriti… The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden’s farm, and discussed bin Laden’s request for IIS technical assistance in a) making letter and parcel bombs b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure and c) making false passport (sic). Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brig al Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence’s premier explosives maker – especially skilled in making car bombs – remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required’.

And so on, and on. But whatever is going on in Washington -- which appears to be having a collective nervous breakdown – that is preventing any of this even being discussed by an official committee expressly charged to discuss it, what is clear is that the mainstream media, both in the US and in Britain, is now simply incapable of applying proper journalistic criteria to the subject of the war in Iraq. Whether through venomous ideology or sheer incompetence and laziness, it is not prepared or able to do the spade-work and actually read what is in the public domain, let alone try to excavate more material. Instead it seizes upon an obviously vacuous and inconsistent paragraph, and because a lazy and slippery reading gives it a couple of soundbites with which to tell more lies about the war, proceeds to do so.

How al Qaeda must be laughing. 'Decadent west'? They never knew the half of it. Wicked, wicked stuff.

Posted by melanie at June 17, 2004