>> SAY IT AINT SO...
Report: Saddam Harbored Terrorists Who Killed Americans
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/14/141831.shtml
Saddam Hussein supplied financial support, training and shelter for an array of deadly terrorist organizations right up until the onset of the Iraq war a year ago, including such notorious groups as Hamas, Ansar al-Islam, the Palestinian Liberation Front, the Abu Nidal Organization and the Arab Liberation Front, according to a comprehensive report released by the Hudson Institute.
Titled "Saddam's Philanthropy of Terror," the report details the role played by terrorists supported by Saddam's regime in an array of infamous attacks that have killed hundreds of American citizens both inside and outside the U.S. before and after the Sept. 11 attacks - including the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Palestinian Intifada.
Compiled by Deroy Murdock, a Senior Fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Va., and columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, the report chronicles Saddam's support for:
Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was indicted for mixing the chemicals for the bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six New Yorkers and injured over 1,000. Yasin fled to Baghdad after the attack, where he was given sanctuary and lived for years afterward.
Khala Khadar al-Salahat, a top Palestinian deputy to Abu Nidal, who reportedly furnished Libyan agents with the Semtex explosive used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988. The attack killed all 259 passengers, including 189 Americans. Al-Salahat was in Baghdad last April and was taken into custody by U.S. Marines.
Abu Nidal, whose terror organization is credited with dozens of attacks that killed over 400 people, including 10 Americans, and wounding 788 more. Nidal lived in Baghdad from 1999 till August 2002, when he was found shot to death in his state-supplied home.
Abu Abbas, who masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, during which wheelchair-bound American Leon Klinghoffer was pushed over the side to his death. U.S. troops captured Abbas in Baghdad on April 14, 2003. He died in U.S. custody last week.
Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who ran an Ansar al-Islam terrorist training camp in northern Iraq and reportedly arranged the October 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. Al Zarqawi is still at large.
Ramzi Yousef, who entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and was the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as Operation Bojinka, a foiled plot to explode 12 U.S. airliners over the Pacific. Bojinka was later adopted by Yousef's cousin Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the blueprint for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Arrested in Pakistan in 1995, Yousef is currently serving a triple life sentence in Colorado's Supermax federal lockup.
Mahmoud Besharat, the Palestinian businessman who traveled to Baghdad in March 2002 to collect funding from Saddam for the Palestinian Intifada. Besharat and others disbursed the funds in payments of $10,000 to $25,000 to West Bank families of terrorists who died trying to kill Israelis.
After Saddam announced his Intifada reward plan, 28 Palestinian homicide bombers killed 211 Israelis in attacks that also killed 12 Americans. A total of 1,209 people were injured.
For more details on Saddam Hussein's sponsorship of the terrorist networks that killed hundreds of innocent U.S. citizens, go to: http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/murdocksaddamarticle.pdf
Editor's note:
http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/murdocksaddamarticle.pdf
Saddam Hussein's
Philanthropy of Terror
International
Relations
Emergency workers treat one of the 1,042 individuals injured in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This attack also
killed six people. Abdul Rahman Yasin (inset), indicted for mixing the chemicals in that bomb, fled to Baghdad after the attack and
lived there for years afterward.
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Many critics of the war in Iraq belittle claims of Saddam Hussein's ties to
terrorism. In fact, for years, he was militant Islam's Benefactor-in-Chief.
Deroy Murdock
"Inever believed in the link between Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and Islamist terrorism," former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flatly declared in an October 21 essay published in Australia's Melbourne Herald Sun.i "Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one," said Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) on October 16. "We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from al Qaeda. It was not."ii As President Bush continues to lead America's involvement in Iraq, he increasingly is being forced to confront those who dismiss Saddam Hussein's ties to terrorism and, thus, belittle a key rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Bush's critics wield a flimsy and disingenuous argument that nonetheless enjoys growing appeal among a largely hostile press corps. Hussein did not personally order the September 11 attacks, the fuzzy logic goes, hence he has no significant ties to terrorists, especially al Qaeda. Consequently, the Iraq war was launched under bogus assumptions, and, therefore, Bush should be defeated in November 2004. West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, exemplified this thinking recently when he told the Los Angeles Times that Iraq's alleged al Qaeda ties were "tenuous at best and not compelling."iii In a September 16 editorial, the L.A. Times slammed Vice President Dick Cheney for making "sweeping, unproven claims about Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorism." On August 7, former vice president Albert Gore stated flatly, "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all."iv All of these claims about a lack of ties between Hussein and terrorists, however, are untrue, and it is important that debate on this vital issue be informed After running an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Abu Musab al Zarqawi received medical care in Baghdad once the Taliban fell. He opened an Ansar al-Islam camp in northern Iraq and reportedly arranged the October 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. Zarqawi is at large.
Abu Abbas masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the ocean liner Achille Lauro during which American retiree Leon Klinghoffer was murdered. U.S. troops captured Abbas in Baghdad last April 14. Iraqi Ramzi Yousef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, arrived in America on an Iraqi passport before fleeing after the attack on Pakistani papers.
Abu Nidal's terrorist gang killed 407 people, including 10 Americans, and wounded 788 more. He lived in Baghdad between 1999 and his mysterious shooting death in August 2002.
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by facts. The president and his national security team should devote entire speeches and publications--complete with names, documents, and visuals, including the faces of terrorists and their innocent victims--to remind Americans and the world that Baathist Iraq was a general store for terrorists, complete with cash, training, lodging, and medical attention.
Indeed, this magazine
article could serve as a model for the kinds of communications that the administration regularly should generate to set the record straight about Hussein and terrorism and reassert the reasons behind the Iraq mission. Such an effort to reinvigorate U.S. public diplomacy on Iraq should be easy. After all, the evidence of Hussein's cooperation with and support for global terrorists is abundant and increasing, to wit:
Saddam Hussein's Habitual Support for Terrorists Both supporters and opponents of Islamic terror have provided abundant evidence of Hussein's aid for a wide array of terrorists. Consider the following.
* Hussein paid bonuses of up to $25,000 to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers.
"President Saddam Hussein has recently told the head of the Palestinian political office, Faroq al Kaddoumi, his decision to raise the sum granted to each family of the martyrs of the Palestinian uprising to $25,000 instead of $10,000," Iraq's former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, announced at a Baghdad meeting of Arab politicians and businessmen on March 11, 2002, Reuters reported two days later.v
Mahmoud Besharat, who the White House says disbursed these funds across the West Bank, gratefully said, "You would have to ask President Saddam why he is being so generous. But he is a revolutionary and he wants this distinguished struggle, the intifada, to continue."vi
Such largesse poured forth until the eve of the Iraq war. As Knight-Ridder's Carol Rosenberg reported from Gaza City last March 13: "In a graduation-style ceremony Wednesday, the families of 22 Palestinians killed fighting Israelis received checks for $10,000 or more, certificates of appreciation and a kiss on each cheek--compliments of Iraq's Saddam Hussein." She added: "The certificates declared the gift from President Saddam Hussein; the checks were cut at a Gaza branch of the Cairo-Amman bank." This festivity, attended by some 400 people and organized by the then-Baghdad-backed Arab Liberation Front, occurred March 12, just eight days before American-led troops crossed the Iraqi frontier.vii
Hussein's patronage of Palestinian terror proved fatally fruitful. Between the March 11, 2002, increase in cash incentives to $25,000 and the March 20, 2003, launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 28 homicide bombers injured 1,209 people and killed 223 more, including 12 Americans.viii
* According to the U.S. State Department's May 21, 2002, report on Patterns of Global Terrorism,ix the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), the Arab Liberation Front, Hamas, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization, and the Palestine Liberation Front all operated offices or bases in Hussein's Iraq. Hussein's hospitality toward these mass murderers directly violated United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, which prohibited him from granting safe haven to or otherwise sponsoring terrorists.
* Key terrorists enjoyed Hussein's warmth, some so recently that Coalition forces subsequently found them alive and well and living in Iraq. Among them:
* U.S. Special Forces nabbed Abu Abbas last April 14 just outside Baghdad. Abbas masterminded the October 7-9, 1985, Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking in which Abbas's men shot passenger Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year old Manhattan retiree, then rolled him, wheelchair and all, into the Mediterranean. Abbas briefly was in Italian custody at the time, but was released that October 12 because he possessed an Iraqi diplomatic passport.
Since 2000, Abbas
September 11 hijackers Nawaz al-Hamzi (left) and Khalid al-Midhar (right) were on American Airlines Flight 77 when it slammed into the Pentagon and killed 216 people. The two terrorists reportedly met Iraqi VIP airport greeter Ahmad Hikmat Shakir in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, on January 5, 2000, whereupon he escorted them to a 9-11 planning summit with other al Qaeda members.
Khala Khadar al-Salahat, a top deputy to Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal,
reportedly furnished Libyan agents the bomb that demolished Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988. That attack killed all 259 on board and 11 on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. Baghdad resident al Salahat surrendered to U.S. Marines last April. Delaware exchange student John Buonocore, age 20, was among those killed when the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) used guns and grenades to attack a TWA ticket counter at Rome's Leonardo Da Vinci airport in December 1986. The ANO maintained offices in Baghdad until U.S. troops liberated the Iraqi capital.
American Abigail Litle, the 14-year-old daughter of a Baptist minister, was killed by a Palestinian homicide bomber while riding a bus in Haifa, Israel, on March 5, 2003. Saddam Hussein paid bonuses of up to $25,000 to the families of terrorists who killed at least 223 people, including 11 other Americans.
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resided in Baghdad, still under Saddam
Hussein's protection.x
* Khala Khadr al Salahat, a member of the ANO, surrendered to the First Marine Division in Baghdad on April 18. As the Sunday Times of London reported on August 25, 2002, a Palestinian source said that al Salahat and Nidal had furnished Libyan agents the Semtex bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing 259 on board and 11 on the ground. The 189 Americans murdered on the sabotaged Boeing 747 included 35 Syracuse University students who had spent the fall semester in Scotland and were heading home for the holidays.xi
* Before fatally shooting himself in the head with four bullets on August 16, 2002, as straight-faced Baathist officials claimed, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal (born Sabri al Banna) had lived in Iraq since at least 1999. As the Associated Press's Sameer N. Yacoub reported on August 21, 2002, the Beirut office of the ANO said that he entered Iraq "with the full knowledge and preparations of the Iraqi authorities."xii Nidal's attacks in 20 countries killed 407 people and wounded 788 more, the U.S. State Department calculates. Among other atrocities, an ANO-planted bomb exploded on a TWA airliner as it flew from Israel to Greece on September 8, 1974. The jet was destroyed over the Ionian Sea, killing all 88 people on board.xiii
* Coalition troops have shut down at least three terrorist training camps in Iraq, including a base approximately 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, called Salman Pak.xiv Before the war, numerous Iraqi defectors had said that the camp featured a passenger jet on which terrorists sharpened their air piracy skills.xv
"There have been several confirmed sightings of Islamic fundamentalists from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states being trained in terror tactics at the Iraqi intelligence camp at Salman Pak," said Khidir Hamza, Iraq's former nuclearweapons chief, in sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 31, 2002. "The training involved assassination, explosions, and hijacking."xvi "This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world," former Iraqi army captain Sabah Khodada told PBS's Frontline TV program in an October 14, 2001 interview.xvii Khodada, who worked at Salman Pak, said, "Training includes hijacking and kidnapping of airplanes, trains, public buses, and planting explosives in cities . . . how to prepare for suicidal operations." Khodada added, "We saw people getting trained to hijack airplanes. . . . They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane." A map of the camp that Khodada drew from memory for Frontline closely matches satellite photos of Salman Pak, further bolstering his credibility.xviii These facts clearly disprove the above-quoted statements by Senator Kennedy and the Los Angeles Times and similar claims made by others. The Bush administration could advance American interests by busing a few dozen foreign correspondents and their camera crews from the bar of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel to Salman Pak for a guided tour. Network news footage of that might open a few eyes.
Saddam Hussein's al Qaeda Connections
As for Hussein's supposedly imaginary ties to al Qaeda, consider these disturbing facts:
* The Philippine government expelled Hisham al Hussein, the second secretary at Iraq's Manila embassy, on February 13, 2003. Cell phone records indicate that the Iraqi diplomat had spoken with Abu Madja and Hamsiraji Sali, leaders of Abu Sayyaf, just before and just after their al Qaeda-allied Islamic militant group conducted an attack in Zamboanga City. Abu Sayyaf's nail-filled bomb exploded on October 2, 2002, injuring 23 individuals and killing two Filipinos and U.S. Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Wayne Jackson, age 40. As Dan Murphy wrote in the Christian Science Monitor last February 26, those phone records bolster Sali's claim in a November 2002 TV interview that the Iraqi diplomat had offered these Muslim extremists Baghdad's help with joint missions.xix
* The Weekly Standard's intrepid reporter Stephen F. Hayes noted in the magazine's July 11, 2003, issue that the official Babylon Daily Political Newspaper published Iraqi diplomat Hisham al Hussein was expelled from the Philippines last February after cellphone records showed he was in contact with leaders of Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda-allied terrorist group. An October 2002 Abu Sayyaf bomb injured 23 and killed three, including U.S. soldier Mark Wayne Jackson.
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by Hussein's eldest son, Uday, had revealed a terrorist connection in what it called a "List of Honor" published a few months earlier.xx The paper's November 14, 2002, edition gave the names and titles of 600 leading Iraqis and included the following passage: "Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence offi- cer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan." That name, Hayes wrote, "matches that of Iraq's then-ambassador to Islamabad."
Carter-appointed federal appeals judge Gilbert S. Merritt discovered this document in Baghdad while helping rebuild Iraq's legal system. He wrote in the June 25 issue of the Tennessean that two of his Iraqi colleagues remember secret police agents removing that embarrassing edition from newsstands and con- fiscating copies of it from private homes.xxi The paper was not published for the next 10 days. Judge Merritt theorized that the "impulsive and somewhat unbalanced" Uday may have showcased these dedicated Baathists to "make them more loyal and supportive of the regime" as war loomed.
* Abu Musab al Zarqawi, formerly the director of an al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan, fled to Iraq after being injured as the Taliban fell. He received medical care and convalesced for two months in Baghdad. He then opened an Ansar al Islam terrorist training camp in northern Iraq and arranged the October 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman, Jordan.
* Although Iraqi Ramzi Yousef, ringleader of the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center (WTC) bombing plot, fled the United States on Pakistani papers, he came to America on an Iraqi passport.
* As Richard Miniter, author of this year's bestseller Losing bin Laden, reported on September 25, 2003, on the Tech Central Station webpage, "U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, which shows Iraq gave [al Qaeda member] Mr. [Abdul Rahman] Yasin both a house and a monthly salary." The Indiana-born, Iraqi-reared Yasin had been charged in August 1993 for mixing the chemicals in the bomb that exploded beneath One World Trade Center, killing six and injuring 1,042 individuals.xxii Indicted by federal prosecutors as a conspirator in the WTC bomb plot, Yasin is on the FBI's Most- Wanted Terrorists list.xxiii ABC News confirmed, on July 27, 1994, that Yasin had returned to Baghdad, where he traveled freely and visited his father's home almost daily.xxiv
* Near Iraq's border with Syria last April 25, U.S. troops captured Farouk Hijazi, Hussein's former ambassador to Turkey and suspected liaison between Iraq and al Qaeda. Under interrogation, Stephen Hayes reports, Hijazi "admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994."xxv
* While sifting through the Mukhabarat's bombed ruins last April 26, the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter, the London Daily Telegraph's Inigo Gilmore, and their translator discovered a memo in the intelligence service's accounting department. Dated February 19, 1998, and marked "Top Secret and Urgent," the document said that the agency would pay "all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden, the Saudi opposition leader, about the future of our relationship with him, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The memo's three references to bin Laden were obscured crudely with correction fluid.xxvi These facts directly refute the claims of Senator Rockefeller and Secretary Albright mentioned at the top of this article. The ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda are clear and compelling. Saddam Hussein's Ties to the September 11
Conspiracy
Despite the White House's inexplicable insistence to the contrary, tantalizing clues suggest that Saddam Hussein's jaw might not have dropped to the floor when fireballs erupted from the Twin Towers two years ago.
* His Salman Pak terror camp taught terrorists how to hijack passenger jets with cutlery, as noted earlier.
* On January 5, 2000, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir--Terrorist Organizations Given Funds, Shelter, and/or Training by Saddam Hussein Organization Total Total Americans Americans killed wounded killed wounded
Abu Nidal Organization 407 788 10 58
Ansar al-Islam 114 16 1 --
Arab Liberation Front 4 6 -- --
Hamas 224 1,445 17 30
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) 44 327 -- 2
Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) 17 43 7 1
Palestine Liberation Front 1 42 1 --
Total 811 2,667 36 91
Sources:
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, "1968 - 2003: Total
Persons Killed/Wounded--International and Accepted Incidents." Figures prepared for author
November 17, 2003.
Statistics on Ansar al-Islam:
Jonathan Landay, "Islamic militants kill senior Kurdish general." Knight-Ridder News Service, February 11, 2003.
Catherine Taylor, "Saddam and bin Laden help fanatics, say Kurds." The Times of London, March 28, 2002.
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an Iraqi VIP facilitator reportedly dispatched from Baghdad's embassy in Malaysia--greeted Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi at Kuala Lampur's airport, where he worked. He then escorted them to a local hotel, where these September 11 hijackers met with 9-11 conspirators Ramzi bin al Shibh and Tawfiz al Atash. Five days later, according to Stephen Hayes, Shakir disappeared. He was arrested in Qatar on September 17, 2001, six days after al Midhar and al Hamzi slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 216 people. Soon after he was apprehended, authorities discovered documents on Shakir's person and in his apartment connecting him to the 1993 WTC bomb plot and "Operation Bojinka," al Qaeda's 1995 plan to blow up 12 jets simultaneously over the Pacific.xxvii
* Although the Bush administration has
expressed doubts, the Czech government stands by its claim that September 11 leader Mohamed Atta met in Prague in April 2001 with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al Ani, an Iraqi diplomat/intelligence agent. In a February 24 letter to James Beasley Jr., a Philadelphia lawyer who represents the families of two Twin Towers casualties, Czech UN Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek embraced an October 26, 2001, statement by Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross:
In this moment we can confirm, that during the next stay of Mr. Muhammad [sic] Atta in the Czech Republic, there was the contact with the official of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Al Ani, Ahmed Khalin Ibrahim Samir, who was on 22nd April 2001 expelled from the Czech Republic on the basis of activities which were not compatible with the diplomatic status."xxviii Al Ani was expelled two weeks after the suspected meeting with Atta for apparently hostile surveillance of Radio Free Europe's Prague headquarters. That building also happened to house America's anti-Baathist station, Radio Free Iraq. The Czech government continues to claim, in short, that the 9-11 mastermind Atta met with at least one Iraqi intelligence official in the months during which the attacks were orchestrated.
* A Clinton-appointed Manhattan federal judge, Harold Baer, ordered Hussein, his ousted regime, Osama bin Laden, and others to pay $104 million in damages to the families of George Eric Smith and Timothy Soulas (clients of Beasley, the aforementioned attorney), both of whom were killed in the Twin Towers along with 2,750 others. "I conclude that plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, `by evidence satisfactory to the court' that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda," Baer ruled. An airtight case? Perhaps not, but the court found that there was sufficient evidence to tie Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks and secure a May 7 federal judgment against him.xxix If one takes the time to connect these dots--as is the professional duty of journalists and politicians who address this matter--a clear portrait emerges of Saddam Hussein as a sugar daddy to global terrorists including al Qaeda and even the 9-11 conspirators. As Americans grow increasingly restless about Washington's continuing military presence in Iraq, to say nothing of what people think overseas, the administration ought to paint this picture. So why won't they?
Bush Administration Needs to Educate the World on Hussein and Terror
One Bush administration communications specialist told me that the government is bashful about all of this because these links are difficult to prove. And indeed they are. But prosecuting the informational battle in the War on Terrorism is not like prosecuting a Mafia don, which typically requires rock-solid exhibits such as wiretap intercepts, hidden-camera footage, DNA samples, and the testimony of deep-cover "Mob rats." On the contrary, it is important to emphasize, as strongly as possible, that the United States need not--and in fact should not--hold itself to courtroom standards of evidence except when appearing before domestic or international judges. The administration merely has to demonstrate its claims and refute those of its opponents, not convict Saddam Hussein before a jury of his peers. Moreover, those who argue that Hussein was no terror master do not hold themselves to such lofty standards of proof, as the examples noted earlier demonstrate. The appropriate standard of evidence, then, to be entirely fair to both sides in this controversy, is not that of a trial, but rather that of a hearing on whether a criminal suspect should be indicted. In this respect, the "prosecution" defi-nitely has a prima facie case that Hussein's Iraq indeed was a haven for terrorists until the moment U.S. troops invaded. Terrorist attacks, of course, are meant to be at least as shadowy as Cosa Nostra hit jobs. Although this makes Just 15 miles from Baghdad, Salman Pak served as a Baathist training facility for terrorists. According to numerous defectors, foreign Islamic militants at Salman Pak used an actual jet fuselage to learn how to hijack airliners using knives and forks from their in-flight meals.
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Notes
i Madeleine Albright, "How we tackled the wrong tiger." Melbourne Herald Sun, October 21, 2003, page 19.
ii Anne E. Kornblut, "Kennedy to assail Bush over Iraq war." Boston Globe online, October16, 2003,
iii Greg Miller, "No Proof Connects Iraq to 9/11, Bush says." Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2003, part 1, page 1.
iv CBS 2 homepage, "Gore Takes Aim At Bush: Former Veep Addresses New York Audience." August 7, 2003,
v Reuters, "Hussein vows cash for martyrs." March 12, 2002. Published in The Australian, March 13, 2002, page 9.
vi The White House, "Saddam Hussein's Support for International Terrorism."
vii Carol Rosenberg, "Families of slain Palestinians receive checks from Saddam." Knight-Ridder News Service, March 13, 2003. Published in Salt Lake City Tribune, March, 13, 2003.
viii Facts of Israel.com, "Chronology of Palestinian Homicide Bombings."
ix U.S. Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism. May 21, 2002,
x Saud Abu Ramadan, "Call for Abbas release, also extradition." United Press International, April 16, 2003.
xi Marie Colvin and Sonya Murad, "Executed." Sunday Times of London, August 25, 2002, page 13. See also: Republican Study Committee, "American Citizens Killed or Injured by Palestinian Terrorists: September 1993 - October 2003." October 17, 2003.
xii Sameer N. Yacoub, "Iraq claims terrorist leader committed suicide." August 21, 2002 Associated Press dispatch published in Portsmouth Herald, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, August 22, 2002,
xiii Associated Press, "Palestinian officials say Abu Nidal is dead." Posted on USAToday.com, week of August 19, 2002,
xiv Ravi Nessman, "Marines capture camp suspected as Iraqi training base for terrorists." Associated Press, April 6, 2003, 4:14 p.m. EST. Posted by St. Paul Pioneer Press on April 7, 2003,
xv Deroy Murdock, "The 9/11 Connection: What Salman Pak Could Reveal." National Review Online, April 3, 2003,
xvi Khidhir Hamza, "The Iraqi Threat." Statement before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 31, 2002,
xvii PBS online, "Gunning for Saddam: Should Saddam Hussein Be America's Next Target in the War on Terrorism?" November 8, 2001,
xviii Deroy Murdock, "At Salman Pak: Iraq's Terror Ties." National Review Online, April 7, 2003,
xix Stephen F. Hayes, "Saddam's al Qaeda Connection: The evidence mounts, but the administration says surprisingly little." The Weekly Standard, September 1, 2003, volume 008, issue 48,
xx Stephen F. Hayes, "The Al Qaeda Connection, cont.: More reason to suspect that bin Laden and Saddam may have been in league." The Daily Standard July 11, 2003,
xxi Gilbert S. Merritt, "Document Links Saddam, bin Laden." The Tennessean, June 25, 2003,
xxii Richard Miniter, "The Iraq-Al Qaeda Connections." Tech Central Station, September 25, 2003,
xxiii Federal Bureau of Investigation, profile of Abdul Rahman Yasin on FBI's Most-Wanted Terrorists list,
xxiv Sheila MacVicar, "`America's Most Wanted' - Fugitive Terrorists." ABC News' "Day One," July 27, 1994.
xxv Stephen F. Hayes, "The Al Qaeda Connection: Saddam's links to Osama were no secret." The Weekly Standard, May 12, 2003,
xxvi Inigo Gilmore, "The Proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden." London Daily Telegraph, April 27, 2003,
xxvii Stephen F. Hayes, "Dick Cheney Was Right: `We don't know' about Saddam and 9/11." The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2003,
xxviii Hynek Kmonicek, letter to James Beasley Jr., February 24, 2003. In author's possession. A scanned image of the letter is available on the Hudson Institute's website, www.hudson.org.
xxix CBS News, "Court Rules: Al Qaida, Iraq Linked." May 7, 2003,
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After Haiti, Venezuela is wary of US interference
The US response in Haiti has divided Latin Americans over US policy - especially in politically torn Venezuela.
By Mike Ceaser | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
CARACAS, VENEZUELA - Whether Washington is a hero or hangman of democracy in Latin America may be a matter of political perspective.
Haitians watched last week as US agents whisked leftist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide off to the heart of Africa in what Mr. Aristide describes as a kidnapping. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, another leftist who has antagonized Washington, has harshly accused the White House of backing coup-plotters against him. Critical of US action in Haiti, he warned the US on Friday to "get its hands off Venezuela."
The Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, an organization of mostly English-speaking nations, is calling for Aristide's departure to be investigated. More than a dozen Caribbean nations have refused to join any peacekeeping force there.
Washington has reformed from the days when it supported vicious Latin American dictatorships, but it has not embraced democracy unreservedly, says Robert Fatton, a Haitian-American professor of politics at the University of Virginia.
"There have been changes in support for democracy, but they have to be democracies that the US likes," he says.
Haitians and Venezuelans alike are divided over US actions. What Ch?vez and Aristide loyalists may consider American intrusion and coup-mongering is simply support for democracy in the eyes of many of their opponents, who have accused both presidents of ruling authoritatively and violating human rights.
Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marched on Saturday to protest the denial of a presidential recall vote. The demonstration was more peaceful than last week's rioting when Ch?vez critics burned tires and blockaded streets.
Protester Anais Viloria, an attorney, says he favors US involvement in Venezuela. "The United States is a guarantor of democracy," he says.
But across town at the National Electoral Council's headquarters, pro-Ch?vez demonstrators waved banners saying "CIA out of Venezuela." Security guard Otilio Bencomo charges the US with plotting to remove Chavez by any means in order to cheaply obtain Venezuela's oil.
"[Washington] wants a government which will kneel down before them, in order to take Venezuela's natural resources," he says.
Ch?vez is trying to derail the effort to hold a recall vote. Opposition organizations turned in 3.4 million signatures last December, but the electoral council ruled last week that only 1.8 million of those were valid - far below the 2.4 million required. Ch?vez opponents charge the government-dominated council with using unfair technicalities. Those whose signatures were ruled doubtful will have an opportunity to confirm their signatures during a "repair period," but the opposition claims the electoral council has set conditions designed to frustrate that goal.
The US has earned Ch?vez's ire by sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-Ch?vez organizations here and by issuing a steady stream of criticisms of Ch?vez policies. On Saturday, President Bush expressed support for the referendum process.
At the same time, Washington's abandonment of Aristide has set a dangerous precedent for other leaders, Mr. Fatton says. "It generates a lot of problems for a government which was elected and becomes unpopular," he says.
In Chile, where dictator Augusto Pinochet's government murdered thou- sands of leftists - and enjoyed US backing during much of his regime - the public attitude toward Washington is moving on, says Guillermo Holzman, a University of Chile professor of politics. Chileans are dubious about the US's democratic values, he says, but for new reasons: the Bush administration's unilateral actions on issues such as the Kyoto Protocol and the war in Iraq.
"It's not clear whether [US actions] are to support democracy or protect its interests," Mr. Holzman says.
Michael Shifter, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, says the White House has repeatedly fumbled - and damaged its image - in Latin America because the terror war has distracted its attention. "[A problem] reaches a crisis point and then it's too late, and Washington reacts badly," he says.
Carlos Gervasoni, a political science professor at Catholic University in Buenos Aires, says Washington's response to Venezuela's 2002 coup caused it much more damage in Latin America than did its recent actions in Haiti. In Haiti, he argues, the democratic succession was preserved following Aristide's departure. But Washington gave an extremely negative signal two years ago when it welcomed the de facto government that ousted Chavez and dissolved the constitution and parliament.
"Venezuela was the Bush administration's one opportunity to support democracy, and it didn't," he said.
But, Mr. Gervasoni says, by restricting itself to a peacekeeping force in Haiti, Washington avoided another international relations disaster in a region sensitive about its role in history as the US's backyard. "A military intervention would have been rejected in Latin America," he says. "That is Latin America's greatest fear."
* Material from Reuters was used for this report.
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The spread of nuclear know-how
How key nuclear secrets were leaked and copied all over the world.
By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - In the early 1970s, at a factory in the Dutch town of Almelo, the governments of Britain, West Germany, and the Netherlands were perfecting a secret uranium-enrichment technology: the ultracentrifuge.
The machines were made of precisely crafted tubes of metal that spun at fantastic speeds.
The centrifugal force this spinning created was so great it could physically separate the different isotopes of natural uranium.
Naturally, this technology was housed in a factory that was supposed to be secure.
But in practice the atmosphere at Almelo was relaxed. The centrifuge building housed a snack shop, and workers without full clearance routinely filtered through - including a well-liked Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Other workers thought nothing of their repeated sightings of Dr. Khan walking through the centrifuge facility, notebook in hand.
Fast forward to 2004. Khan, who became the father of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program, has admitted to peddling nuclear know-how for profit - and the secrets of the centrifuges of Almelo have leaked all over the world.
The characteristics of the machines can be as distinctive as fingerprints. Parts and plans related to centrifuges have proved crucial clues linking Iran, Libya, and Pakistan together in a web of nuclear proliferation.
Their dissemination is particularly dangerous because they can solve the most daunting aspect of building nuclear weapons - acquiring the fissile core.
"There is no secret to making a nuclear bomb," says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "The hard part is getting the [fissile] material."
Libya has admitted to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials that it first bought centrifuges and centrifuge parts in 1997. This initial batch - enough for at least 220 machines, according to IAEA documents - was similar in design to the first centrifuge model produced by the British-German-Dutch Urenco consortium.
Beginning in 2000, Libya set its sights on a more advanced centrifuge. This design, dubbed "L-2" in IAEA documents, was itself based on a second- generation Urenco centrifuge that uses super strength maraging steel instead of aluminum for rotors. Libya ordered parts for 10,000 L-2s. These components began to arrive in large quantities in December 2002.
Iran, for its part, has some 920 centrifuges of the less-sophisticated aluminum rotor design, according to the IAEA. It declared ownership of these machines to the IAEA last year.
But further investigation - including interviews with ex-Iranian officials - led international inspectors to suspect that Iran knew more than it was saying about advanced steel rotor centrifuges. This January Iranian officials admitted that they had received blueprints from foreign sources for advanced "P-2" machines.
The Iranians said that they decided they weren't capable of making the finely machined rotors out of steel, and instead had tried to make them from carbon composites. This failed. So they did what any backyard inventor frustrated with a balky whiz-bang might do - they threw the whole thing in the garbage.
According to Iran, after June 2003 "all of the [P-2] centrifuge equipment was moved to the Pars Trash Company in Tehran," says the IAEA's recent Iran report.
Centrifuges in the trash? Right.
The IAEA - not to mention the Bush administration - isn't buying this part of the story. They want the Iranians to talk more about what they really have in terms of P-2 equipment.
But Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program is meant only to produce electricity. Squeezing them too hard at this point might be counterproductive, say some experts. They're like someone hauled in by law enforcement for an interview who can leave at any moment, since they haven't officially been charged with a crime.
"We want them to continue cooperating with the police," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Agency.
The development of gas centrifuges was an attempt to solve a problem which has dogged scientists since the beginning of the atomic age: the tremendous expense and energy involved in refining fissionable material.
The enriched uranium thus produced can be used in nuclear power plants. Urenco began its own work so that Western Europe would not have to depend on the US to supply reactor fuel, for example. But centrifuges can also produce higher enriched uranium. This, or plutonium, is the material necessary for the core of a bomb.
Clues in a technology trail
The presence of centrifuges doesn't establish intent to make weapons. But combined with other clues they can be a powerful indicator of an intention to develop a home-grown arsenal.
"The technology is inherently dual-use," says Corey Hinderstein, a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). Thus Western intelligence agencies were suspicious of Iran as early as 13 years ago. In 1991, Italian intelligence reported that Sharif University in Tehran had ordered a sophisticated ring magnet from the Austrian firm Tribacher, according to an ISIS article.
The magnet in question was suitable for use in the upper bearing of a Urenco-like centrifuge.
Centrifuges work by spinning at a very high speed - close to or surpassing the speed of sound. Uranium gas is pumped inside the spinning cylinders.
The gravitational force is so strong that the heavier molecules of U-238, the most-common isotope in natural uranium, move toward the outside. The lighter, much rarer, and highly fissionable isotope U-235 collects closer to the center.
A stream of gas slightly enriched in U-235 is withdrawn and then fed into the next of a train of centrifuges, and so on until it becomes more than 90 percent pure.
This is simple in theory but highly difficult in practice. The precision necessary to keep intact a rotor moving at more than 100,000 revolutions a minute is at the limits of modern engineering methods.
In fact, the Urenco P-1, the base design for the first machines acquired by Libya and Iran, was never all that great, according to David Albright, head of ISIS and a former international weapons inspector.
Thus the proliferation network which provided them may have been selling off the centrifuge equivalent of bug-ridden version 1.0 software.
"The P-2 - now that worked like a charm," says Mr. Albright, former international weapons inspector.
* Faye Bowers contributed to this report.
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US drives effort to prevent another Pakistani breach
Bush may talk Wednesday about countries that have not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
By Faye Bowers | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - Leakage of nuclear secrets out of Pakistan makes at least one thing clear, US experts say: Today it's more important than ever to plug such proliferation holes.
The steady drip of revelations about Pakistani scientists' activities also may call into question the nature of US relations with a country that is both an ally in the war on terror and a fount of Islamic fundamentalism.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, former head of Pakistan's nuclear program, has expressed sympathy with terror groups known to want nuclear weapons - as have some of Mr. Khan's key military supervisors.
President Bush may address these delicate questions as early as Wednesday. "It is necessary that Pakistan in general, and Khan in particular, provide every shred of information necessary to roll up this network outside of Pakistan," says Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear weapons at Harvard University's Kennedy School. "Locking down stockpiles of materials to make bombs is all the more critical if terrorists could have access to a bomb design."
Pakistan's reaction so far causes concern among experts. It's not at all clear, they say, that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf will turn over information necessary to locate all the links in the chain. Nor is it clear that he will prosecute Pakistani scientists and military or intelligence officials who may have aided Khan's transfers.
The current relationship between Pakistan and the US is slightly curious, these sources say. To this point the US has been oddly restrained about the Pakistani revelations, for one thing.
"Waving the fear of an Islamic fundamentalist state isn't good enough," says David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "We cannot risk an attack by a nuclear bomb."
Earlier this week, General Musharraf said the US made him aware of Khan's suspected proliferation activities three years ago, but didn't provide sufficient evidence until last October. That revelation follows Khan's confession that he alone was responsible for transferring technology to Libya, North Korea, and Iran, as well as Musharraf's pardon of Khan.
Still, many questions remain over who else in Pakistan may have been involved with the proliferation ring, and when the US discovered it. For example, in a speech defending the Central Intelligence Agency last Thursday, Director George Tenet said the CIA has known about Khan's activities for some time. In fact, he said he provided testimony to an open session of Congress in February 2003 about the threat posed by "private proliferators," euphemistically referring to Khan.
Mr. Tenet went on to say, "We discovered the extent of Khan's hidden network ... stretching from Pakistan to Europe to the Middle East to Asia.... Our spies penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years."
Those kinds of statements are what makes it hard for experts here to believe there won't be much more revealed about this underground network. And it raises the question: If the Bush administration knew about it earlier, why did it wait until October to confront Musharraf?
"Tenet is saying they knew more than what was publicly revealed," says Paul Kerr, a researcher at the Arms Control Association in Washington. "I would be willing to bet more will be revealed. [Khan] had a fairly clever clandestine network built up in this string of suppliers."
Others agree with that assessment about additional disclosures. In fact, many experts believe there had to be more complicity within the Pakistani government.
Those kinds of transfers, they say, could not have taken place without the aid of the powerful military - charged as protectors of Pakistan's nuclear program - and possibly its intelligence service.
These experts also worry about the possible transfer of plans and technology to terror groups. Khan, as well as his former military supervisors, has long been known to sympathize not only with other Muslim nations trying to obtain a nuclear weapon, but also with Islamic groups.
In a 1984 interview with the Pakistani newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt, for example, Khan accused the West of trying to dampen Pakistan's efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon. "All this is part of the crusades which the Christians and Jews had initiated against the Muslims 1,000 years ago," Khan said. He went on to say that the West was afraid that Pakistan might share its technology with Iraq, Libya, and Iran.
Moreover, the military general who oversaw Khan's work, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, has publicly sympathized with Al Qaeda leaders. After the US bombed Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in 1998, General Beg spoke to reporters. "By the grace of God," he said, Osama bin Laden escaped the attacks. Beg has denied he knew of any nuclear technology or information transfers. But he also told The New York Times that the government "would not dare" to ask him about it.
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No evidence: Levin's latest accusations against Pentagon blow up in his face
Washington Post debunks more of Levin's allegations.
Yet another congressional "investigation" of the administration's anti-terrorism efforts has blown up in the faces of the accusers.
The Washington Post finds no truth to the allegations, led by Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), that Pentagon leaders set up their own unauthorized bureaucracy to collect their own intelligence and shape the rationale for the war effort.
"Congressional Democrats contend that two Pentagon shops -- the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group -- were established by [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, [Under Secretary of Defense for Polich Douglas] Feith and other defense hawks expressly to bypass the CIA and other intelligence agencies," according to the Post. "They argue that the offices supplied the administration with information, most of it discredited by the regular intelligence community, that President Bush, Cheney and others used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
"Neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees, for example, which have been investigating prewar intelligence for eight months, have found support for allegations that Pentagon analysts went out and collected their own intelligence, congressional officials from both parties say," the Post reports. "Nor have investigators found that the Pentagon analysis about Iraq significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war."
Levin is considered the key operator in a scandal over Senate Democrats' use of the intelligence committee for partisan political purposes.
The scandal, which has paralyzed the Senate intelligence oversight process, erupted in a scandal last fall when a memo by the staff of Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V), the top Democrat on the committee, outlined a plan to use the investigative processes to destabilize the Bush administration as it tried to carry out the war on terror.
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Democrats Subvert War Intelligence
Posted Dec. 22, 2003
By J. Michael Waller
Mellon, above, is using his position as Democrat staff chief on the Senate intelligence panel to undermine the leadership of Rumsfeld, Feith and Bolton.
It's one of the unsolved political mysteries of 2003: Exactly who drew up the plan for Democrats to abuse the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) as a stealth weapon to undermine and discredit President George W. Bush and the U.S. war effort in Iraq?
The plot, authored by aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the committee, has poisoned the working atmosphere of a crucial legislative panel in a time of war, Senate sources say. It centered on duping the panel's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, into approving probes that in actuality would be fishing expeditions inside the State Department and Pentagon. The authors hoped to dig up and hype "improper or questionable conduct by administration officials." According to a staff memo, the committee then would release the information during the course of the "investigation," with Democrats providing their "additional views" that would, "among other things, castigate the majority [Republicans] for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry."
In other words, they would manufacture and denounce a cover-up where none existed. The Democrats then would drag the issue through the 2004 presidential campaign by creating an independent commission to investigate, according to the memo.
The plan, made public by Fox News on Nov. 6, went like this: "Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time - but we can only do so once. The best time to do so will probably be [in 2004]."
Even before the memo was written, Rockefeller's staff already was off on its own, well outside the traditional bipartisan channels. According to the memo, the "FBI Niger investigation" of reports that Saddam Hussein's regime had tried to buy uranium from West Africa "was done solely at the request of the vice chairman."
The plan wrecked more than two-and-a-half decades of unique bipartisanship on the SSCI, whose job is to oversee the CIA and the rest of the nation's intelligence services. In fact the SSCI, according to the Wall Street Journal after the revelation, was "one of the last redoubts of peaceful coexistence in Congress." But that bipartisanship ended last year when Democrats demanded that the committee staff be split. Instead of reporting directly to the chairman, it now was bifurcated, with Republicans answering to the GOP chairman and Democrats working for the Democratic vice chairman. Roberts didn't like the change, warning at the time that the Democrats wanted to divide the committee into "partisan camps." But the Republicans caved and the staff director of the Democrats, Christopher Mellon, built his own autonomous apparatus.
Insight has pieced together how the Democrats' fishing expedition worked. According to insiders, Mellon, a former Clinton administration official, is part of a network of liberal operatives within the Pentagon and CIA who reportedly are seeking to discredit and politically disable some of the nation's most important architects of the war on terrorism and their efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorist hands. Mellon already was a SSCI staffer when the Clinton administration tapped him to work as a deputy to the assistant secretary of defense for C3I (command, control, communications and intelligence), where he was responsible for security and information operations. In the C3I office, where he held a civilian rank equivalent to a three-star general, Mellon worked on intelligence-policy issues, or in the words of a former colleague, Cheryl J. Roby, "things like personnel, training and recruiting for intelligence." The office is under the purview of the undersecretary of defense for policy, a post now held by conservative Douglas J. Feith.
Clinton-era personnel reforms allowed officials of his administration to burrow into vital Pentagon posts as careerists, administration officials say, where they have been maneuvering to keep Bush loyalists out of key positions and/or undermine their authority while pushing their own political agendas that run contrary to those of the president. This network, Insight has discovered, extends to the Pentagon's outer reaches such as the National Defense University and far-flung academic and influential policy think tanks, or "CINC tanks," serving the commanders ("CINCs") of the U.S. military theaters around the world [see "Clinton Undead Haunting Pentagon," June 17, 2002].
Senate and Department of Defense (DoD) colleagues say Mellon has a beef against Feith and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, under whom he served briefly until the new Bush administration made its full transition into office. Intelligence sources say he tried to keep conservatives out of key Pentagon posts and to undermine tough antiterrorism policies after 9/11. Back at the SSCI, Mellon's chief targets for criticism have been Feith and his like-minded State Department colleague, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who holds the nonproliferation portfolio. Both Feith and Bolton are strong supporters of President Bush's advocacy of "regime change" for rogue states and are considered to be among the most faithful advocates in the administration of his personal policy positions.
DoD civilians loyal to the president have complained for more than two years about Mellon, both while he was at the Pentagon and at his new perch in the Senate. Upon his return to the SSCI, bipartisan staff cooperation broke down almost completely. "The parties aren't talking to one another," according to a committee source. After the memo became public, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) ordered an end to cooperation with the Democrats on the Iraq investigations.
Mellon's public record doesn't indicate any hard-core partisan leanings, showing instead a bipartisanship as a sometime floater on the liberal Republican side. Federal Election Commission records show he donated $1,000 to the George H.W. Bush re-election campaign in 1993 and $1,000 to the Republican National Committee in 1992. In his first tour on the Senate intelligence committee, he served as an appointee of the late liberal Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.) when George Tenet, a Democrat who now is director of the CIA, was committee staff director. Mellon then took the C3I post at the Pentagon when William Cohen, the liberal Republican senator from Maine, became secretary of defense for Clinton.
So what might have motivated Mellon to become involved in the memo scandal to politicize the intelligence committee against the current president? Mellon did not return Insight calls for comment.
Asked whether Mellon wrote the plan, Rockefeller's spokeswoman Wendy Morigi did not attempt to exonerate the staff director. "The senator has not stated who the author of that memo is," Morigi said, "and I don't think he intends to." She spoke with Rockefeller and then called Insight again to say Sen. Rockefeller would not comment.
In any case Rockefeller, a strong liberal who had enjoyed a reputation of bipartisanship on committee matters, surprised colleagues when he allowed the Democrats on the committee staff
to use the supersecret body as a political weapon. Sources with firsthand knowledge say that Rockefeller broke the committee's bipartisan custom of requesting information from government agencies over the signatures of the chairman, representing the majority party, and the vice chairman, representing the minority.
"Rockefeller sent out his own request for information - the first time a request to the administration for information was not signed by both the chairman and vice chairman of the committee," according to a source involved with the requests. The source says the requests were worded in ways designed to elicit specific answers of a sensitive nature. When the senior Pentagon and State Department officials answered the requests, Democrats on the intelligence committee "leaked it, though some of it was top secret," the source said without citing examples.
When the targeted officials caught on to the game, Senate Democrats led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a scrappy SSCI member, denounced them for failure to provide Democrat senators with information about the war. They publicly acted outraged at what they alleged was a certain deception and demanded even more information, telling the press that top Bush officials were forcing the CIA and other intelligence agencies to skew intelligence analysis to fit a preconceived conclusion.
Some Democrats see through this political warfare and are troubled by it. Keeping the SSCI and its House counterpart nonpartisan, wrote former senator Robert Kerrey (D-Neb.) in the New York Post in the midst of the memo controversy, "is vital for the nation's security because much of what is done to collect, process and disseminate intelligence needed by civilian and military leaders is done under conditions of rigorously regulated secrecy." Kerrey is a former vice chairman of the committee.
"Of all the committees, this is the one single committee that should unquestionably be above partisan politics," said an angry Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.). "The information it deals with should never, never be distorted, compromised or politicized in any shape, form or fashion. For it involves the lives of our soldiers and our citizens. Its actions should always be above reproach; its words never politicized."
Rockefeller defended his staff and the outrageous document itself, calling it a "private memo that nobody saw except me and the staff people that wrote it for me." He rebuffed calls from Frist, Miller and others that the staffers responsible be exposed, let alone fired, and instead accused Republicans of stealing the document from his aides' computers. "Mr. Rockefeller refuses to denounce the memo, which he says was unauthorized and written by staffers. If that's the case, at the very least some heads ought to roll," declared the Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Firing Mellon as the staff director for the culprits, the Journal said, would be "a good place to start."
Miller went even further: "I have often said that the process in Washington is so politicized and polarized that it can't even be put aside when we're at war. Never has that been proved more true than the highly partisan and perhaps treasonous memo prepared for the Democrats on the intelligence committee."
The Georgia Democrat measured his words, continuing: "If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin. The ones responsible - be they staff or elected or both - should be dealt with quickly and severely, sending a lesson to all that this kind of action will not be tolerated, ignored or excused."
Chairman Roberts sees a danger to the nation through such politics: "If we give in to the temptation to exploit our good offices for political gain, we cannot expect our intelligence professionals to entrust us with our nation's most sensitive information. You can be sure that foreign intelligence services will stop cooperating with our intelligence agencies the first time they see their secrets appear in our media."
Kerrey, once a shining star among Senate Democrats, wrote, "The production of a memo by an employee of a Democratic member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is an example of the destructive side of partisan politics. That it probably emerged as a consequence of an increasingly partisan environment in Washington and may have been provoked by equally destructive Republican acts is neither a comfort nor a defensible rationalization."
Senate Majority Leader Frist called for the culprits to come forward and apologize, angrily announcing he would suspend cooperation on the Iraq investigation. That wasn't enough for Sen. Miller, who demanded, "Heads should roll!"
J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
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