The Connection

Saddam, Terror and US Security
While the media and most observers focused on the Afghanistan war, we highlighted the threat posed to US security by Saddam. We understood that the US intelligence community by then had convincing evidence of a connection between this regime and international terror; specifically, confirmation that Saddam had for years provided support by the way of finance, shelter and training to various terrorist groups, including al Qaeda.
Thus, the Iraqi war which followed was not about democracy, women’s rights or oil. It was about seeing to the physical security of the United States.
The war was also poorly advertised. There was a consensus in Washington pre-9/11, both parties, that Saddam had unconventional weapons. In fact he admitted a long list to the UN in 1998, including chemical, nerve and germ agents. For some reason the administration chose this pretext - weapons of mass destruction - to justify the war to the masses when it in fact it had a rapidly accumulating stockpile of information connecting Saddam directly to terror.
Since the conclusion of the Iraqi war, intelligence documents captured from that and the Afghani conflict have been collected in Qatar as part of what is called the Harmony document, coming under the auspices of Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. Many of us pressed for a full release of these documents. Negroponte stalled. Suddenly word came Monday Mar/13 that most of the documents would be gradually released, this the apparent result of congressional and perhaps ever presidential pressure on this agency.
The first documents, although a tiny fraction of the whole, were released Mar/16. These support our long-held position on Iraq. One, an eight page fax dated June 6, 2001, indicates that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group in the Phillippines, founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law. Another is an internal IIS memo regarding cooperation between that agency and Saudi opposition groups, recording that Osama requested Iraqi cooperation on terrorism and that at least as of Jan/1997, the Iraqis were eager to continue the relationship with bin Laden. The third, a Sep/2001 report from an IIS official in Afghanistan, speculates on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and the likely US response to it. Taken from that translation, the source speculates that, "America has evidence that the Iraqi government and the group of Osama bin Laden have cooperated to attack targets inside America and in the event that it has been proven that the group of Osama and the Taliban have planned such operations, it is possible that America will attack Iraq and Afghanistan."

Robert Craven