[iwar] [fc:Every.day,.the.case.mounts.against.Saddam]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-28 14:01:38
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 14:01:38 -0800 (PST)
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               Every day, the case mounts against Saddam
                         (Filed: 28/10/2001)
                           London Telegraph

 Jessica Berry traces the secret contacts between Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda henchmen and the Baghdad regime since the September 11
outrage

THE room was full and the speeches under way when the various
representatives began a resounding chant of "Allah Akhbar!" - God is
great - but it was the banners that gave the strongest indication that
this was no ordinary conference.

They adorned the walls and set the mood in no uncertain terms: "Down
with America", "Down with Israel". The annual terrorist recruitment
conference in Baghdad was under way.

It was just three weeks before the September 11 suicide attacks on
America, and members of the world's most-wanted international
terrorist groups were waiting impatiently to deliver their speeches.

On the dais, beside a row of their intelligence officers, Taha Ramadan
and Izzet Douri, the Iraqi vice-presidents, were seated. Before them
were more than 100 Islamic terrorists, each holding a leaflet listing
the groups represented.

It read like a CIA document. Members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
group sat side by side with those from Gamaa al Islamiya from Egypt,
Jund Al Islam, an Iraqi-based terror group consisting mainly of Afghan
Arabs, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the West Bank and Gaza. Less
notable Islamic terror groups from Bangladesh, Sudan, the Philippines
and Somalia were also there. Names of individuals were not given for
security reasons.

Many had journeyed for several days to be present. A twice-weekly
ferry from the United Arab Emirates to the Iraqi port of Basra had
brought some, while others had travelled by land through Syria and
Jordan. All carried fake identities.

For the first time in the conference's five-year history, its
convenor, Saddam Hussein, had decided to invite only extremist
elements. The former Algerian president and conference regular, Ben
Bella, who is regarded as a moderate in Iraqi circles, was not
invited.

Saddam, still furious at British and American attempts to impose new
sanctions on Iraq, used the August 19 meeting as an opportunity to
find terrorists willing to exercise their lethal skills to foment
unrest from the West Bank to Asia. He needed Muslims to unite in a
common cause to protest against the regime's treatment by the West.

To this end, as the ruckus emanated from the main convention suite,
Iraqi intelligence officers got down to the real business in the back
rooms. Here, they were hard at work recruiting potential terrorists
and pinpointing potential targets for attack.

Since the conference, Western intelligence officers estimate that
6,000 volunteers have been recruited to Iraq's "cause". "What really
counts," one officer says, "is not what happens during the
conferences. It is what happens before and after and on the sidelines
that matters."

The revelation that Saddam convened a terrorist recruitment conference
shortly before the attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon heightens
suspicions that the Iraqi dictator helped carry out the September 11
and anthrax attacks. It will no doubt be of interest to James Woolsey,
the former CIA director who last week, in reference to Iraq and its
possible links, said it was vital that America should "look under that
rock".

It also lends support to the belief of Richard Spertzel, a former
United Nations weapons inspector, that the anthrax attacks were not
homegrown. "It has to be someone with an existing biological
programme," he told The Telegraph last night. "These are Russia,
Syria, Iran and Libya. Top of my list, though, is Iraq. There are
known associations with intelligence personnel and al-Qaeda. Also they
have the capability, and the know-how."

Mr Spertzel added that he and other inspectors, who were expelled from
Iraq in 1998, were able only to destroy items specifically identified
with Iraq's past programme.

He said: "Some of the items that we had to exclude, we subsequently
found had anthrax made in them. Furthermore, from October 1996 we had
virtually no support from the UN security council. Nothing has been
accomplished since then, except playing footsie with the Iraqis."

Reports yesterday appeared to back up Mr Spertzel's hunch, when
American media revealed that the letter sent to Tom Daschle, the
Senate Majority leader, contained traces of betonite.

If it is confirmed that the potent additive has only ever been used by
Iraq, as is believed, Timothy Trevan, another UN weapons inspector,
said: "It means to me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the
source of the anthrax used in these letters."

What needs no verification is that Saddam still has biological weapons
capability. Only this month he took the precaution of moving much of
his biological weapons industry to underground bunkers in the north
and west of the country, concealed and protected from any allied air
strikes.

Neither is it a secret that Saddam has a long track record of hosting
and recruiting terrorists. The 6,000 men who volunteered two months
ago are now, according to intelligence officials, undergoing rigorous
training in the arts of explosives and guerrilla warfare.

It is understood that some of the men recruited in August are
attending two of Iraq's most sophisticated camps at al Safar and al
Habaniya, both beside expansive lakes.

A Western intelligence official said: "These are not just places where
you learn how to use a bomb or suchlike. Here, they are even taught
underwater swimming, communications and how to use sophisticated
eavesdropping equipment."

Such "schools" for budding terrorists have a long pedigree, stretching
back to the 1970s, when Iraq became the refuge of Carlos the Jackal.
At that time, it was also home to the more extreme Palestinian terror
groups, such as Abu Nidal and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, which has now claimed responsibility for the October 17
assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi, the Israeli tourism minister.

It was also in the early 1970s that Saddam began to have expansionist
dreams of extending Iraq's borders. In 1973, he formed the Al Hassan
Ibn Al Haithem Institute, which was responsible for two programmes:
nuclear energy and the manufacture of toxins and poison gases. It was
the forerunner to the Military Industrialisation organisation which
now develops weapons of mass destruction. It was built with funds
gained from the rise in oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

If that war provided the necessary finance, it was the Iran-Iraq war
of the 1980s that provided the trigger for the birth of Islamic
terror. Saddam needed support to fight Iran and he needed a new
tactic.

In the previous decade, terror groups had been mainly Arab. In order
to compete with the Islamisation of Iran after the 1979 revolution,
Saddam needed to follow suit. The first of the many Islamic terrorist
groups to move to Iraq in the 1980s was the Mujahideen Helk, which was
dismayed by events in Iran and vowed to fight.

Not content with recruiting from only Middle Eastern organisations,
Saddam also explored Muslim Africa for possibilities. He began to
provide extensive funding for groups in Somalia, Zanzibar and Sudan,
as well as for those nearer home in Syria. Much of the finance, again,
came from his oil revenues.

Two decades on, American newspaper reports last week quoted an Iraqi
former intelligence officer, now in Turkey, recounting details of
"Islamicists" training in a suburb of Baghdad in the arts of hijacking
and assassination last year. Which brings us back to the August
conference in Baghdad, where Saddam's 20 years' experience in training
and recruiting terrorists was much in evidence: for him, they have
become an art form.

While Mr Woolsey studies the implications of this summer's three-day
event, the Bush administration is closely examining Saddam's deadly
game of espionage, notably the dispatching of his senior intelligence
officials to meet abroad with members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network.

Farouk Hijazi, a senior intelligence officer and Iraq's ambassador to
Turkey, is known to have met bin Laden in 1998 in Afghanistan. Before
his appointment as ambassador, Hijazi was given the role of
establishing links with Islamic movements. "His appointment to
Turkey," said one Western diplomat, "simply gave him more room to
operate."

Further suspicions were raised this week when Czech officials
confirmed that Mohammed Atta, believed to be the hijacker flying the
first plane to hit the World Trade Centre, met Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al
Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer posing as an Iraqi diplomat, in
Prague, who was later expelled for "engaging in activities beyond his
diplomatic duties".

Now The Telegraph can reveal that similar meetings have taken place
since September 11. Just one week after the attacks, Mohammed Nouri, a
colonel in Iraqi intelligence, travelled to Bangkok. "He went in a
great rush," says a Western intelligence officer. "We know he met an
al-Qaeda representative, though we are not sure what else he has been
up to."

Four days later, on September 24, Brigadier Abdul Khader Majid took
three senior intelligence officers with him to Bangladesh, a week
before the country's general elections.

"We know for certain that Iraq was instrumental in some of the worst
violence ahead of the elections there," says the intelligence officer.
"That includes paying recruits to organise anti-Western riots, to
flare up Islamic tensions. They know that the more the Muslim world
protests against the Western coalition's attacks on Afghanistan, the
less likely the coalition will find support to risk attacking Iraq. It
would only flare Muslim tensions even more." Similar street riots took
place at the same time in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

A week after Majid's successful mission, Lt Col Qassim made one of the
Baghdad regime's most important trips since September 11. He took four
junior intelligence officers to Pakistan on October 5, where they,
too, met members of al-Qaeda. "The visit was an essential
intelligence-sharing mission," the Western intelligence officer said.

There is no doubt that Iraq has been involved in terrorism in the
past. President Bush must now decide whether the evidence of Iraqi
terrorist links in recent weeks still passes merely as circumstantial.

As Mr Woolsey warned last week: "This war began with the direct and
immediate murder of thousands of Americans, and, if we find that we
have a reasonable target along with Osama bin Laden in the government
of Iraq, we must wage this war quickly. We must wage it powerfully. We
must wage it cleverly. And we must wage it ruthlessly."

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Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] Israel and the Jews in the schoolbooks of the Palestinian Authority"
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