Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who, having seen the same intelligence as the Bush administration and our allies, issued warnings as loudly as anyone, saying from the Senate floor in October 2002 that “I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat” and insisting “we can no longer afford to wait around for a smoking gun.”
But now he says the report shows “the Bush administration’s case for war was fundamentally misleading.”
It’s Levin’s and Rockefeller’s analyses that are misleading.
The report says one of Saddam’s senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, admitted to meeting bin Laden in 1995. But the report accepts at face value Hijazi’s claim that “this was his sole meeting with bin Laden or a member of al-Qaida, and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact.”
No mention is made of the December 1998 meeting between bin Laden and Hijazi in
Afghanistan that got worldwide coverage in newspapers such as Milan’s Corriere Della Sera and London’s Guardian, as well as the New York Post. In 1999, an ABC News report mentioned this meeting and reported Saddam offered bin Laden asylum, citing their “long relationship.”
A 1998 e-mail from Richard Clarke, national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, to then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger warned that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan, he might just “boogie to Baghdad.”
As the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes has reported, reams of captured documents reveal that elite Iraqi military units trained 8,000 al-Qaida terrorists, belonging to groups such as Algeria’s GSPC, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam and the Sudanese Liberation Army, at camps in Samarra, Ramadi and at Salman Pak.
The links were confirmed by 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Thomas Kean, who said: “There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, a number of them … They were definitely there.”
Indeed there were. Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al-Qaida cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, found safe haven in Iraq, and documents recently found in Tikrit indicate Saddam provided Yasin with both a home and a salary. Why?
The Clinton Justice Department alleged in a 1998 indictment against bin Laden that “al-Qaida reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.”
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