Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations

This article is about issues concerning allegations of pre-invasion links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. For the al-Qaeda presence involved in the Iraqi insurgency, see the article for the group called "Al-Qaeda in Iraq"

Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were alleged by U.S. Government officials to have established a highly secretive relationship between 1992 and 2003, specifically through a series of meetings reportedly involving the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). In the lead up to the Iraq War, U.S. president George W. Bush alleged that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda might conspire to launch terrorist attacks on the United States, basing the administration's rationale for war, in part, on this allegation and others. The consensus of intelligence experts has been that these contacts never led to an operational relationship. Critics of the Bush Administration have said Bush was intentionally building a case for war with Iraq without regard to the facts.

Viewpoints

Template:Totallydisputed Two main questions have been raised from evidence of contacts between the Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda. The first asks whether the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda had a cooperative relationship, and the second whether Saddam Hussein's government supported the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• The intelligence community (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc) view, confirmed by the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission Report and the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq, is that there was not a cooperative effort between the two and that Saddam did not support the 9/11 attacks. According to this view, the difference in ideology between Saddam and al-Qaeda made cooperation in any terrorist attacks very unlikely. The Senate Report discussed the possibility of Saddam offering al-Qaeda training and safe-haven, but confirmed the CIA's conclusion that there was no evidence of operational cooperation between the two. A minority view held by some intelligence analysts is that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda did have a cooperative relationship, but that Saddam Hussein's government did not support the 9/11 attacks. According to this view Saddam and al-Qaeda had an on-again, off-again cooperative relationship and were willing to use the other for their own purposes.
• The Bush administration view, as defined by the Colin Powell speech before the UN, postulated that there might have been a cooperative relationship, but that Saddam was not supportive of the 9/11 attacks. Powell presented several credible intelligence reports vetted by the Intelligence Community showing contacts between Iraq's Intelligence Service and al-Qaeda. Powell pointed out that Saddam had already supported Islamic Jihad, a radical Islamist group and that there was no reason for him not to support al-Qaeda. Powell discussed concerns that Saddam may provide al-Qaeda will chemical or biological weapons. The Bush Administration view was influenced in part by the "false flag" view of Laurie Mylroie, whose answers to the questions followed along the lines that not only did Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda have a cooperative relationship, but also that the Iraqi regime supported the 9/11 attacks as well. Very few people share Mylroie's view but her book on the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was very influential among several top Bush Administration officials. Mylroie claims Saddam used a "false flag" to attack the US on 9/11 and blame al-Qaeda for it. Conservative terrorism expert Dr. Robert S. Leiken of the Nixon Center noted that Mylroie "also believes Saddam perpetrated 9-11 in spite of the fact that the joint FBI-INS-police PENTBOM investigation, the FBI program of voluntary interviews and numerous other post-9-11 inquiries, together comprising probably the most comprehensive criminal investigation in history—chasing down 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people -- has turned up no evidence of Iraq's involvement; nor has the extensive search of post-Saddam Iraq by the Kay and Duelfer commission and US troops combing through Saddam’s computers."[2]

The question of a working relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda is still being debated. While some meetings between agents of Saddam's government and members of al-Qaeda have been documented, the consensus of experts and analysts has held that those contacts never led to an "operational" relationship. On the more specific question of whether Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, the consensus view is that there is no evidence of his government's involvement. President Bush has made clear that while his Administration saw evidence of ties to al-Qaeda, it did not have any evidence of Saddam playing a role in those attacks.[3]

For a full timeline of possible contacts, see Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda timeline.

History of claims

The prewar CIA testimony was that there was evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade involving Iraq providing al-Qaida with various kinds of training-combat, bomb-making, and [chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear] CBRN, but that they had no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaeda strike.[4][5]. The CIA's report on Iraq's ties to terrorism noted in September 2002 that the CIA did not have "credible intelligence reporting" of operational collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA reported that "al-Qaida, including Bin Ladin personally, and Saddam were leery of close cooperation," but that the "mutual antipathy of the two would not prevent tactical, limited cooperation." (p. 338) The current consensus view of experts is that although members of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service may have met with al-Qaeda terrorists over the last decade or so, that there was no evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda were linked operationally.[6] It is now known that the main source for the CIA's claim that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases included the now recanted claims of captured al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The CIA has since recalled and reissued all its intelligence reporting about al-Libi’s recanted claims.[7] Likewise, the DIA communicated to President Bush in February 2002 its stance that al-Libi "was intentionally misleading his debriefers."[8]

The U.S. government has released documents, called the 'Operation Iraqi Freedom documents', regarding which the Pentagon has cautioned it has made 'no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy.'" [9] Some claim the information contained in some of the documents suggest Saddam and al Qaeda may have been willing to work together.[10] 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey changed his position due to the release of these documents.[11]

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has already looked at the documents and warned that "amateur translators won’t find any major surprises, such as proof Hussein hid stockpiles of chemical weapons." Intelligence expert Steven Aftergood suggested that many are using the release of these documents as an opportunity to find "a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq." [12]

In the summer of 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded that "to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." (p. 66)[13] [14]

This conclusion is consistent with the findings of various investigations into specific aspects of the Saddam Hussein/al-Qaeda relationship, including those conducted by the CIA, DIA, FBI, and NSC. The Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq also reviewed the intelligence community's conclusions[15] and found that they were justifiable, although the Committee found gaps in the intelligence-gathering methods used.

In addition, Bush received on 21 September 2001 a classified Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), indicating the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks and that "there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." [16] Polls have shown that many Americans believe that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda, although the number who do so has been slowly declining. [17][18] This discrepancy has been attributed by some to the way in which the U.S. mainstream media presented facts and opinion regarding the war on terror. [19][20] (See also 2003 invasion of Iraq media coverage#Criticism)

On March 21, 2006, Bush sought to distance himself from the allegation of any link. He said: "First, just if I might correct a misperception, I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." [21] Opponents of his Iraq policy charged that his statement was inconsistent with his letter to Congress of March 21, 2003. [22] And a Minority Staff Report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform concluded that "in 125 separate appearances, they [Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice] made ... 61 misleading statements about Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda."[23]

Questions about the plausibility of the link

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Osama bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia by sending "jihadist" warriors from Afghanistan to repel Saddam's forces. After the Gulf War, bin Laden continued to criticize Saddam's Ba'ath regime, emphasizing that Saddam could not be trusted. Bin Laden told his biographer that "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother."[24]

The 9/11 Commission stated in its report that Bin Ladin had been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army. Those forces mostly operated in areas not under Saddam's control. In 2001, Bin Ladin re-formed the group into an organization called Ansar al Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.

Osama bin Laden's expressed hostility to Saddam's regime, critical assessment of evidence from the Iraqi National Congress (the source of most of the claims of cooperation between the two) as well as the paucity of evidence for the alleged links, particularly for any substantial collaboration, have led most journalists and intelligence analysts not associated with or supporters of the Bush administration to dismiss the claimed links.

Robert Pape's exhaustive study of suicide terrorism found that "al-Qaeda's transnational suicide terrorists have come overwhelmingly from America's closest allies in the Muslim world and not at all from the Muslim regimes that the U.S. State Department considers 'state sponsors of terrorism'." Pape notes that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from Iraq. Daniel Byman's study of state sponsorship of terrorism similarly did not list Iraq as a significant state sponsor, and called the al-Qaeda connection "a rationale that before the war was strained and after it seems an ever-weaker reed." The conclusion of counterterrorism experts Rohan Gunaratna, Bruce Hoffman, and Daniel Benjamin, as well as journalists Peter Bergen and Jason Burke (who have both written extensively on al-Qaeda), has been that there is no evidence that suggests any collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That was similar to the conclusion of specific investigations by the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the 9/11 Commission, among others. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed the CIA's investigation and concluded that the CIA's conclusion that there was no evidence of operational collaboration was justified.

While Saddam was not involved in the September 11 attacks, members of his government did have contacts with al-Qaeda over the years; many of the links, as will be seen below, are not considered by experts and analysts as convincing evidence of a collaborative operational relationship. Former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke writes, "[t]he simple fact is that lots of people, particularly in the Middle East, pass along many rumors and they end up being recorded and filed by U.S. intelligence agencies in raw reports. That does not make them 'intelligence'. Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports. Did al-Qaeda agents ever talk to Iraqi agents? I would be startled if they had not. I would also be startled if American, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Jordanian agents had somehow failed to talk to al-Qaeda or Iraqi agents. Talking to each other is what intelligence agents do, often under assumed identities or 'false flags,' looking for information or possible defectors." Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Voice of America that "Saddam Hussein had his agenda and al-Qaida had its agenda, and those two agendas were incompatible. And so if there was any contact between them, it was a contact that was rebuffed rather than a contact that led to meaningful relationships between them."[25]

Background

After the Gulf War, as Iraq experienced internal unrest, Saddam turned to religion perhaps to bolster his government (for example, adding the words "God is Great" in Arabic to the flag, and referring to God in his speeches).

Some sources allege that several meetings between top Iraqi operatives and bin Laden took place, but these claims have been disputed by many other sources, including most of the original intelligence agencies that investigated these sources in the first place. Many in the intelligence community are skeptical about whether such meetings, if they took place at all, ever resulted in any meaningful relationship. Many of the claims of actual collaboration seem to have originated with people associated with the Iraqi National Congress whose credibility has been impeached and who has been accused of manipulating the evidence in order to lure the United States into war on false pretenses. In addition, many of the raw intelligence reports came to the awareness of the public through the leaking of a memo sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence , the conclusions of which have been disputed by intelligence agencies including the CIA. Former head of the Middle East section of the DIA W. Patrick Lang told the Washington Post that the Weekly Standard article which published Feith's memo "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" And, according to the Post, "another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather 'data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true.'"[26]

Some have suggested that an understanding was reached between Iraq and al-Qaeda, namely that al-Qaeda would not act against Saddam in exchange for Iraqi support, primarily in the form of training. Some reports claim that six of the 9/11 hijackers, including their leader Mohamed Atta al-Sayed, met with Iraqi intelligence operatives on several separate occasions, but the evidence that any of these meetings actually took place is sketchy. A training camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, was said by a number of defectors to have been used to train international terrorists (assumed to be al-Qaeda members) in hijacking techniques using a real airplane as a prop. The defectors were inconsistent about a number of details. The camp has been discovered by U.S. Marines, but intelligence analysts do not believe it was used by al-Qaeda. Some believe it was actually used for counterterrorism training, while others believe it was used to train foreign terrorists but not al-Qaeda members.

Robert S. Leiken noted that a lot of the claims connecting Saddam and al-Qaeda — and specifically Saddam and the 9/11 attacks — were based on the controversial theories of Laurie Mylroie which had been thoroughly vetted and dismissed by the CIA and FBI. He notes in Frontpage Magazine, "she also believes Saddam perpetrated 9-11 in spite of the fact that the joint FBI-INS-police PENTBOM investigation, the FBI program of voluntary interviews and numerous other post-9-11 inquiries, together comprising probably the most comprehensive criminal investigation in history—chasing down 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people -- has turned up no evidence of Iraq's involvement; nor has the extensive search of post-Saddam Iraq by the Kay and Duelfer commission and US troops combing through Saddam’s computers."[27]

Timeline

Main article: Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda timeline

Much of the evidence of alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda is based on speculation about meetings that may have taken place between Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda members. What took place at those meetings is unclear, but often the mere act of meeting has been taken as evidence of substantial collaboration. As terrorism analyst Evan Kohlman points out, "While there have been a number of promising intelligence leads hinting at possible meetings between al-Qaeda members and elements of the former Baghdad regime, nothing has been yet shown demonstrating that these potential contacts were historically any more significant than the same level of communication maintained between Osama bin Laden and ruling elements in a number of Iraq's Persian Gulf neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Kuwait." [28]

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council

Template:Totallydisputed On February 5, 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council on the issue of Iraq.[29] In the address, Powell made several claims about Iraq's ties to terrorism. The following are quotations from the speech:

• Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associated in collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida lieutenants. When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. These Al Qaida affiliates, based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they've now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months.
• We asked a friendly security service to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi and providing information about him and his close associates. This service contacted Iraqi officials twice, and we passed details that should have made it easy to find Zarqawi. The network remains in Baghdad. Zarqawi still remains at large to come and go. Since last year, members of this network have been apprehended in France, Britain, Spain and Italy. By our last count, 116 operatives connected to this global web have been arrested.
• Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaida source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaida would no longer support activities against Baghdad. Saddam became more interested as he saw Al Qaida's appalling attacks. A detained Al Qaida member tells us that Saddam was more willing to assist Al Qaida after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Saddam was also impressed by Al Qaida's attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
• Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan. A senior defector, one of Saddam's former intelligence chiefs in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the mid-1990s to provide training to Al Qaida members on document forgery. From the late 1990s until 2001, the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan played the role of liaison to the Al Qaida organization.
• The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two Al Qaida associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.
• As I said at the outset, none of this should come as a surprise to any of us. Terrorism has been a tool used by Saddam for decades. Saddam was a supporter of terrorism long before these terrorist networks had a name. And this support continues. The nexus of poisons and terror is new. The nexus of Iraq and terror is old. The combination is lethal.

The major claims set forth in Powell's speech -- that Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi constitutes a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and that Saddam's government provided training and assistance to al-Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad, are generally considered by terrorism experts and intelligence analysts to be false. The CIA issued a report in August 2004 that concluded that, according to Knight-Ridder reporters, stated that there was "no conclusive evidence that the regime harbored Osama bin Laden associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Intelligence experts point out that Zarqawi had few ties to Osama bin Laden either, noting that he was a rival, rather than an affiliate, of al-Qaeda. A former Israeli intelligence official described the meeting between Zarqawi and bin Laden as "loathing at first sight." (For further details on Zarqawi, see Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda timeline May-July 2002). And the other major claims in the speech are attributed by Powell to "an al-Qaeda source." This source turned out to be captured al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was handed over to Egypt for interrogation. Both the CIA and the DIA separately concluded that al-Libi's statements were lies fabricated under harsh interrogation procedures.[30] Al-Libi himself recanted his claims in January 2004.[31] Two U.S. counter-terrorism officials told Newsweek that they believe the information that Powell cited about al-Iraqi came exclusively from al-Libi.[32] (For more information, see Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda timeline for 1995 and December 2005).

9/11 Commission Report

The official report issued by the 9/11 Commission in July 2004 addressed the issue of a possible conspiracy between the government of Iraq and al-Qaeda in the September 11 attacks. The report addressed specific allegations of contacts between al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government and concluded that there was no evidence that such contacts developed into a collaborative operational relationship, and that they did not cooperate to commit terrorist attacks against the United States. The report includes the following information:

Bin Ladin was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda—save for his opportunistic pose as a defender of the faithful against "Crusaders" during the Gulf War of 1991. Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army. To protect his own ties with Iraq, Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad’s control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin’s help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam.There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.

With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary, Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995. Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request. As described below, the ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.

There is also evidence that around this time Bin Ladin sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperation. None are reported to have received a significant response. According to one report, Saddam Hussein’s efforts at this time to rebuild relations with the Saudis and other Middle Eastern regimes led him to stay clear of Bin Ladin. In mid-1998, the situation reversed; it was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative. In March 1998, after Bin Ladin’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December.

Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban. According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq

Looking at pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence examined "the quality and quantity of U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, ties to terrorist groups, Saddam Hussein’s threat to stability and security in the region, and his repression of his own people;" and "the objectivity, reasonableness, independence, and accuracy of the judgments reached by the Intelligence Community".[33]

In Section 12 of the report, titled Iraq's Links to Terrorism, the Senate committee examined the CIA's "five primary finished intelligence products on Iraq’s links to terrorism." In a subsection titled Iraq's Relationship with al-Qaida, the report states the following:

Regarding the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship, reporting from sources of varying reliability points to a number of contacts, incidents of training, and discussions of Iraqi safehaven for Usama bin Laden and his organization dating from the early 1990's...

Iraq's interaction with al-Qaida is impelled by mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family and by bin Ladin's interest in unconventional weapons and relocation sites. In contrast to the patron-client pattern between Iraq and its Palestinian surrogates,the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other -their mutual suspicion suborned by al-Qaida's interest in Iraqi assistance, and Baghdad's interest in al-Qaida's anti-U.S. attacks . . . .

The Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike, but continues to pursue all leads.

The report continued by stating, "Due to the limited amount and questionable quality of reporting on the leadership intentions of Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Ladin, the CIA was unable to make conclusive assessments in "Iraqi Support for Terrorism" regarding Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida. The CIA stated in the Scope Note: Our knowledge of Iraq's ties to terrorism is evolving...This paper's conclusions-especially regarding the difficult and elusive question of the exact nature of Iraq's relations with al-Qaida-are based on currently available information that is at times contradictory and derived from sources with varying degrees of reliability...While our understanding of Iraq’s overall connections to al-Qaida has grown considerably, our appreciation of these links is still emerging."

In Section 13 of the report, titled Intelligence Community Collection Activities Against Iraq's links to Terrorism, the report stated the following:

Notwithstanding four decades of intelligence reporting, IC officials and analysts expressed frustration over the lack of useful intelligence collected on Iraq’s involvement in terrorism, particularly on links to al-Qaida. A January 2003 IC assessment of Iraqi support for terrorism explained, "Our knowledge of Iraq’s ties to terrorism is evolving and (REDACTED)".

Based on information provided to Committee staff, these gaps had three main causes:

1. a late start collecting against the target,

2. the lack of a U.S. presence in Iraq, and

3. reliance on foreign government services, opposition groups and defectors for current intelligence.

Analysts told Committee staff that in late 2002, the IC (Intelligence Community) developed what they described as a comprehensive, robust collection program. (REDACTED). When asked to characterize the collection effort against terrorism and Iraq, an IC analyst said "I don't think we were really focused on the CT (counterterrorism) side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS (Iraqi Intelligence Service) going out and pro-actively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was a possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that." (REDACTED).

"Iraqi Support for Terrorism" described a network of more than a dozen al-Qaida or al-Qaida-associated operatives in Baghdad, and estimated that 100-200 al-Qaida fighters were present in northeastern Iraq in territory under the control of Ansar al-Islam. As a result, collection continued to focus on understanding the historical context of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and trying to understand the nature of contacts between the two. CTC told staff that they relied heavily on foreign government services, and increasingly on detainee debriefs to look into an al-Qaida/Iraq relationship. CTC noted that questions regarding al-Qaida’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed following his capture. When asked if the IC had any unilateral sources that could provide information or the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship, the CTC analysts stated that they were entirely dependent on foreign government services for that information.

Based on the information the CIA made available to the Senate Committee, the committee published a series of conclusions in the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq. These included the following:

Conclusion 91. The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) assessment that Iraq had maintained ties to several secular Palestinian terrorist groups and with the Mujahidin e-Khalq was supported by the intelligence. The CIA was also reasonable in judging that Iraq appeared to have been reaching out to more effective terrorist groups, such as Hizballah and Hamas, and might have intended to employ such surrogates in the event of war. (Page 345)

Conclusion 92. The CIA's examination of contacts, training, safehaven and operational cooperation as indicators of a possible Iraq-al-Qaida relationship was a reasonable and objective approach to the question. (Page 345)

Conclusion 93. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship. (Page 346)

Conclusion 94. The CIA reasonably and objectively assessed in Iraqi Support for Terrorism that the most problematic area of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida were the reports of training in the use of non-conventional weapons, specifically chemical and biological weapons. (Page 346)

Conclusion 95. The CIA’s assessment on safehaven — that al-Qaida or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control — was reasonable. (Page 347)

Conclusion 96. The CIA's assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al-Qaida attack was reasonable and objective. No additional information has emerged to suggest otherwise. (Page 347)

Conclusion 97. The CIA's judgment that Saddam Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with a global reach — al-Qaida — to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of war, was reasonable. No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ al-Qaida in conducting terrorist attacks. (Page 348)

Conclusion 99. Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaida. (Page 355)

Conclusion 100. The CIA did not have a focused human intelligence collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no (REDACTED) sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism. The lack of an official (REDACTED) U.S. presence in the country (REDACTED) curtailed the Intelligence Communities human intelligence collection capabilities. (Page 355)

Conclusion 103. The information provided by the Central Intelligence Agency for the terrorism portion of Secretary Powell's speech was carefully vetted by both terrorism and regional analysts. (Page 369)

Conclusion 104. None of the portrayals of the intelligence reporting included in Secretary Powell's speech differed in any significant way from earlier assessments published by the Central Intelligence Agency. (Page 369)

Sources

• ABC News video report by Sheila MacVicar on RealOne Player from January 14, 1999
• Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view - Jane's Foreign Report, September 19, 2001
• Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies by Daniel Benjamin, New York Times September 30, 2002
• Saddam and al Qaeda the link we've all missed by David Rose, The Evening Standard London, December 9, 2002
• The Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq by Jeffrey Goldberg, February 3, 2003
• Star finds bin Laden-Iraq links by Mitch Potter, Toronto Star, April 28, 2003
• Opinion and Order U.S. District Court Judge Harold Baer, Jr., May 2003
• Saddam and bin Laden by Joseph Farah, August 18, 2003
• The Iraq — Al Qaeda Connections by Richard Miniter, September 23, 2003
• Case Closed: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden by Stephen F. Hayes, November 17, 2003
• Case Decidedly Not Closed Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball MSNBC, November 19, 2003
• Iraq-al Qaeda link comes in focus by Rowan Scarborough Washington Times, December 1, 2003
• Does this link Saddam to 9/11? Daily Telegraph, December 14, 2003
• DoD Statement on News Reports of Al Qaeda and Iraq Connections Dept. of Defense, December 15, 2003
• Dubious link between Atta and Saddam MSNBC, December 19, 2003
• The Clinton View of Iraq-al Qaeda Ties by Stephen F. Hayes, December 29, 2003
• Iraq and Al Qaeda: Allies or Not? Congressional Research Service, February 5, 2004
• Saddam's Ambassador to al Qaeda by Jonathan Schanzer March 1, 2004
• Iraq On the Record - The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Gov't Reform - Minority Staff, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)), March 16, 2004
• The Connection by Stephen F. Hayes, June 7, 2004
• 9/11 panel sees no link between Iraq, al-Qaida MSNBC June 16, 2004
• Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, Washington Post June 17, 2004, p. A1
• Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, July 7, 2004
• The Truth About the Saddam-Al-Qaeda Connection, Robert S. Leiken, November 2004
• It's all about 9/11 By Andrew C. McCarthy, June 29, 2005
• The ties that bound Iraq to bin Laden By Stephen F Hayes, July 18, 2005
• The Four-Day War by Thomas Joscelyn, July 19, 2005
• Saddam's Terror Training Camps by Stephen F. Hayes, Weekly Standard, January 16, 2006