Winds of Change.NET: Special Analysis: Testing The Standard, Part 1/6

Special Analysis: Testing The Standard, Part 1/6

by Dan Darling at November 20, 2003 3:42 AM

Taken from an Osama bin Laden audiotape, February 12, 2003:

"Under these circumstances, there will be no harm if the interests of Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists in the fight against the crusaders, despite our belief in the infidelity of socialists.
The jurisdiction of the socialists and those rulers has fallen a long time ago.

Socialists are infidels wherever they are, whether they are in Baghdad or Aden.

The fighting, which is waging and which will be waged these days, is very much like the fighting of Muslims against the Byzantine in the past.

And the convergence of interests is not detrimental. The Muslims' fighting against the Byzantine converged with the interests of the Persians.

And this was not detrimental to the Companions of The Prophet."

Al-Qaeda training chief Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj to Saudi magazineal-Majallah, May 25, 2003:

"Allah has turned to him [Saddam Hussein] with forgiveness. He declared jihad and did not recognize Israel. There is nothing to bar cooperation with a Muslim who has made jihad his course and way for liberating the holy lands."

By now, I expect that just about everyone in blogosphere has heard from one source or another about the memo leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard that provided a considerable listing of evidence regarding a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

What I'm now going to do is to examine the memo excerpts that were provided by The Weekly Standard re: Iraq & al-Qaeda, and endeavor to see whether or not the raw data is consistent with what we already know or can reasonably deduce from reported stories in the press. This is a far from ideal method of verifying the excerpts in the Standard's piece, but short of full declassification of all US intelligence in relation to al-Qaeda (something that might happen around 2025 or so), it's probably the best that we're going to get here in the blogosphere.

Because of the length and detail, this will be a 6-part series. Part 1 deals with The Pentagon Memo, and begins to look at the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in particular Zawhiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

One might wonder why any of this matters. I believe this memo is significant information because if even some of its contents are true, it means as I have argued both on Winds of Change.NET and on my own blog that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States through its relationship with al-Qaeda, even if one sets aside the question of WMD.

The Pentagon Memo

However, before I can address the subject of the memo I must first deal with the Department of Defense press release on the subject, which some have erroneously interpreted as either a denial or a distancing of the DoD from the memo, when in fact it reveals a great deal of useful information to us on a number of issues:

1. The memo is the real McCoy. Rupert Murdoch and Fred Barnes didn't fabricate it as an ingenious PR offensive to shore up support for the administration's case for going to war.

2. The memo lists specific intelligence reports that detailed Iraq/al-Qaeda ties or connections and sent them to the chairman and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (Roberts and Rockefeller respectively). The Committee is currently examining pre-war US intelligence in regards to Iraq, so this is an entirely understandable request. More to the point, the memo was sent in reference to testimony made over the summer and as the latest entry of actual data on the memo refers to the events of May 2003, this is by no means new information for the US intelligence community.

3. "The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA." Some have interpreted this as meaning that the information cited in the memo is inaccurate or false, when in reality what it means is that what we are looking at is raw "unhyped" intelligence. The allegations of intelligence distortion or manipulation that have been made against the administration are certainly disturbing, but because this is simply raw information we can safely view this memo knowing that if such manipulation did occur that this is the "pre-spun" version of it.

4. "The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee�s question." This means that the evidence being presented was that in favor of the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection, which would explain why the memo (or at least those elements of it printed in the Standard)does not include for example mention either Abu Zubaydah or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's reported denials of a link between the terrorist network and Iraq, it simply was not intended to.

5. This memo was not intended as an analysis and drew no conclusions, it simply listed the raw data that supported the assertion that Iraq and al-Qaeda were working with one another. The Committee is already presumably aware of the conclusion of US intelligence in this regard and now they want to see the raw data in order to view how that conclusion was reached.

For more discussion on the memo, I would kindly direct readers to the comments section of my colleague Robin Burk's Iraq Reconstruction Report. Also recommended are this story from Slate and Stephen F. Hayes' own clarifications on the Weekly Standard's website.

Iraqi Intelligence?

"According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes."

To begin with, this comes from a "senior Iraqi intelligence officer" now in US custody who presumably either a member of the deck of cards or one of the 200 other most wanted Iraqis. This is what the officer told US interrogators in May 2003, implying that if the officer had been in custody when or shortly after the regime fell in early April that there would have been more than enough time to break him.

The mention of Farouk Hijazi as the middleman is also extremely interesting because the last time that his name surfaced in press reports as the liaison between Iraq and al-Qaeda prior to him being taken into custody was in 1999, so if this officer was only trying to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear, he apparently has a much longer memory than the international media because Hijazi's name wasn't mentioned at all as a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda during the run-up to war, though one could easily argue that it should have been.

Egyptian Islamic Jihad

The claims of a connection between Iraq and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) are a little bit more complicated, largely because the EIJ is run by bin Laden's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, and has extremely robust ties to Saddam Hussein's archenemy Iran. According to Iranian defector Hamid Reza Zakiri's interview with al-Sharq al-Awsat, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) first met up with the EIJ in Lebanon during the 1980s after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The senior Iraqi intelligence officer claims that Iraq established relations first with EIJ, and later with al-Qaeda in Sudan in 1992, but the time frame that is being established here is either during or immediately after the Iran-Iraq War.

So was the Iraqi officer lying or trying to tell his interrogators what he thinks that they want to hear? Possibly, but one should keep in mind three things.

The first is Saddam's personal goal, and the official goal of Ba'athist facism: to unite the Arab race under the banner of a single great leader, and lead the Arab world into battle against its enemies.

Nasserite socialism was a direct ideological competitor to the Ba'athists for many years, and Egypt's traditional standing as a key center of gravity for the Islamic world has long represented a formidable obstacle to both Iraq and Syria's Ba'athist aspirations. Then there's Egypt's role as America's "ally" in the region, and their participation in Gulf War I. Keeping one's enemy busy and weakened, as could be achieved by supporting anti-regime elements like EIJ, makes sense as a strategy under these circumstances. One backs them not because they are likely to win, but because they aren't and so represent no threat� and in the meantime, they serve as a useful distraction and punishment for one's enemy.

Welcome to the realities of international diplomacy, and especially the Persian-Arabic tradition which has historically made secret societies and covert action a mainstay of its statecraft over the centuries.

The second thing to consider is that al-Qaeda (and by extension the EIJ) have an extremely pragmatic approach towards their relationships with various governments willing to act as its patron, thereby explaining why the terror network has been willing to work with both a nominally Christian despot like Charles Taylor in Liberia as well as, according to the October 6, 2003 issue of US News and World Report, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. As such, one can easily imagine an individual like al-Zawahiri agreeing to enter into a "highly secretive relationship" with the secular Baathist regime in Iraq even as he was establishing ties with the Shi'ite Khomeinist theocracy of Iran.

Finally, immediately following its disastrous defeat in the Gulf War and status as an international pariah, Iraq would have been eager to cultivate ties to Islamic extremists as a means to both achieve revenge against the United States as well as to ensure that such extremists remained focused on fighting the Great Satan abroad rather than the tyrant currently occupying the center of the Caliphate at home. As it happened, this convergence of interests suited the objectives of both al-Zawahiri and bin Laden perfectly.

Tomorrow: Part II: Analyzing the al-Qaeda Alliance

Persons wishing to contact the author of this article for reprints etc. should put a request in the Comments section, or send an email to "joe", over here @windsofchange.net.