Author: William Safire
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 22, 2001
Veteran reporters and creaking commentators
have a single goal in writing about great events: advance the story. Unearth
facts that policy makers do not know, do not want to know, or do not want
the public to know they know.
For years, U.S. officials kept mum
about the duplicity of Saudi Arabia in financing anti-U.S. incitement while
professing to be a U.S. ally. But because The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh,
the oldest investigative reporter alive, held his ear trumpet to our ultra-secret
Big Ear, we now have telephone intercepts between Prince Bandar, the Saudi
ambassador to Washington, and his father, the defense minister. The Saudis
never have been on our side in the war on terror - which our leaders have
long known but most Americans did not.
What about a connection between
Osama bin Laden and Iraq's Saddam Hussein? Because the Scowcroft set at
the National Security Council is still in denial about its blunder a decade
ago that permitted Saddam to stay in power, the C.I.A. professes to see
no collaboration in Baghdad.
That wearing of blinders by our
intelligence agents was recently revealed by The Washington Post's columnist
and editor Jim Hoagland, who is dry behind the ears, to say the least.
He interviewed a defector from Saddam's
elite militia now in the U.S. who recounted the hijacking and assassination
training carried out in the Salman Pak suburb of Baghdad. This was independently
confirmed by an Iraqi ex-intelligence officer now in Turkey who reported
"Islamicists" training on a Boeing 707 in Salman Pak only one year ago.
Both sources were unsought or dismissed by C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials
aware of topside resistance to evidence of Saddam-bin Laden connections.
Allow another journageezer to dodder
in, however, with a few more details to advance the unwelcome story.
Faruq Hijazi, in 1994 Saddam's secret
service director and now his ambassador to Turkey, has had a series of
meetings with bin Laden. These began in Sudan, arranged by Hassan al-Tourabi,
the Sudanese Muslim leader, and continued in Afghanistan. The conspiracy
was furthered in Baghdad in 1998 between bin Laden's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
and Saddam's vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan.
To strengthen Saddam's position
in the Arab world during his 1998 crisis with the U.N., bin Laden established
the "World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders."
The Muslim-in-name Iraqi dictator reciprocated by promising secure refuge
in Iraq for bin Laden and his key lieutenants if they were forced to flee
Afghanistan.
Bin Laden sent a delegation of his
top Al Qaeda terrorists to Baghdad on April 25, 1998, to attend the grand
celebration that week of Saddam's birthday. It was then that Saddam's bloody-minded
son Uday agreed to receive several hundred Al Qaeda recruits for terrorist
training in techniques unavailable in Afghanistan.
That Baghdad birthday party, according
to an unpublished spying report, celebrated something else: Uday Hussein's
agreement with bin Laden's men to formally establish a joint force consisting
of some of Al Qaeda's fiercest "Afghan Arab" fighters and the covert combatants
in Iraqi intelligence unit 999.
This information does not include
reports of the most recent contacts between the terrorist group and the
terrorist state. However, combine that late-90's groundwork to what is
known of (a) bin Laden's supply this year of 400 fanatic "Afghan Arabs"
to Saddam to attack free Kurds in Iraq's no- flight zone, and (b) this
summer's observed contacts of Al Qaeda's suicide-hijacker Mohammed Atta
with Iraqi spies under diplomatic cover in Prague. A pattern manifests
itself.
Does this web of eavesdropped-upon
communication provide proof positive of Saddam's participation in the Sept.
11 attack? No indisputable smoking gun may ever be found, but it is absurd
to claim - in the face of what we already know - that Iraq is not an active
collaborator with, harborer of, and source of sophisticated training and
unconventional weaponry for bin Laden's world terror network.
"One war at a time" goes the coalitionaries'
mantra, which our spymasters take to mean "Don't follow leads to Iraq."
Journageezers ignore such government manipulation. Nobody has come close
to my Times colleagues in covering the cataclysm and the war it triggered,
but it would be good to see a new wave of reporters beat the old media
bigfeet in advancing this story.
