Saddam and al-Qaeda: of course there is a link
I have really never understood those who insist that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. After all, President Clinton talked of that link at least twice during his years in office. Shoot, the New York Times thought as much back in 1998 as did U.K.’s The Guardian, who reported on Iraqi and al-Qaeda ties in a 1999 story:
Saddam Hussein’s regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials.
The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad’s ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam’s most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.
How quickly the mainstream media forgets itself. Frontpage Magazine has a list of quotes from mainstream sources who once accepted that al-Qaeda and Saddam were linked. After President Bush was elected, they now want to pretend that whatever they wrote during the 1990s never existed.
PoliPundit alerts us to an article on Iraqi and al-Qaeda connections courtesy of Ray Robison at The American Thinker.
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Comments
Your argument is well-informed, but I have to disagree about your claim that Saddam Hussein had ties to terrorists. Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime were actually enemies, as one of al-Qaeda’s central tenets is that the regimes of secular Muslim rulers have plunged Islam into a “historic crisis”. In 1998, during the Clinton Administration, the National Security Council assigned staff to justify a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda link. No evidence of a relationship was ever found.
Also, the 9/11 Commission had found “no credible evidence” linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Even former Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that he had seen no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, despite the speech that he had made to the United Nations.
I acknowledge that some claim that Iraq did have ties to al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission report refutes this claim, stating that although Iraq did have contacts with al-Qaeda officials, the contacts resulted in no real cooperation between the two. In an intelligence briefing ten days after the 9/11 attacks, intelligence officials informed President Bush that Saddam Hussein’s regime was not involved.
Posted by: Brandon McNally | February 23, 2006 11:36 PM