Another Iraq/al-Qaeda Link Ignored By The MSM

In 2004 the MSM met this with a yawn:

A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein’s fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam’s envoy to al-Qaeda.

So it should not surprise you that they meet another article about another interview with Shamari with a big yawn.  Why?  Because don’t you know Saddam was secular?

Sigh…..

Al-Shamary was emphatic that Saddam’s son ran the local al Qaeda operation. “He directed it, he ran it.” Qusay controlled Jund al Islam, he said, by supplying money, weapons,and providing diplomatic passports and by sending documents via “diplomatic pouches” to Iraq embassies world-wide. From there, the messages would be passed to local cells.

Al-Shamary told me what he saw. I insisted that I only wanted to know what he was an eyewitness to—no hearsay, office gossip or news accounts recirculated as inside information. He understood. That is how you are supposed to operate in intelligence, he told the translator.

“In 2001 I was an information officer, between the leadership of Jund al Islam (which
became Ansar al Islam) and our office. I was the liaison. Just an information officer. Abu Wail was the brigadier general in charge of funding” the group.

Abu Wail is the son-in-law of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam’s handpicked vice president and the highest-ranking Saddam-era official still at large. On very important missions, al-Shamary said, “Abu Wail would go alone.”

Abu Wail himself is still at large. Capturing him might reveal a good deal about Iraq’s pre-war relationship with al Qaeda.

In addition to Abu Wail, three other trusted Mukhabarat officers worked inside the al Qaeda camp, al-Shamary said. They were selected by Qusay, he said. And perhaps by Saddam himself.

Al-Shamary’s role was relatively minor. “I carried orders from Baghdad to Kurdistan” and back. “These were written orders, usually on a computer disc.”

[…]No matter what the contents of the disks, the fact that they moved back and forth between Saddam’s intelligence service and Krekar’s terrorist outfit speaks for itself. Intelligence analysts may debate whether it was truly an “operational relationship” (although it certainly looks like one), the fact al-Shamary regularly visited the camp to pick up and drop off computer disks indicates a relationship.

Just as Jonathan Schanzer wrote in 2004:

subsequent conversations with U.S. government officials in Washington and Baghdad, as well as several articles written well before this one, indicate that al-Shamari’s claims have been echoed by other sources throughout Iraq.

So too does the information check out in Richard Miniter’s new interview.

In this new interview Miniter discusses Abu Wail, as did Jonathan in 2004.  They both received the same answers.  This man was a conduit between Saddam and al-Qaeda.  From 2004:

I then picked up a picture of a man known as Abu Wael that I had acquired from Kurdish intelligence. In the course of my research, several sources had claimed that Abu Wael was on Saddam’s payroll and was also an al Qaeda operative, but few had any facts to back up their claim. For example, one Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, stated flatly before the Iraq war, "all information indicates [that Abu Wael] was the link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime" but neglected to provide any such information. Agence France-Presse after the war cited a Kurdish security chief’s description of Abu Wael as a "key link to Saddam’s former Baath regime" and an "intelligence agent for the ousted president originally from Baghdad." Again, nothing was provided to substantiate this claim.

In my own analysis of this group, I could do little but weakly assert that Wael was "reportedly an al-Qaeda operative on Saddam’s payroll." The best reporting on Wael came from a March 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, who had visited a Kurdish prison in northern Iraq and interviewed Ansar prisoners. He spoke with one Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammed, whom Kurdish intelligence captured while he was on his way to the Ansar enclave. Muhammed told Goldberg that Abu Wael was "the actual decision-maker" for Ansar al Islam and "an employee of the Mukhabarat."

"Do you know this man?" I asked al-Shamari. His eyes widened and he smiled. He told me that he knew the man in the picture, but that his graying beard was now completely white. He said that the man was Abu Wael, whose full name is Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani. The prisoner told me that he had worked for Abu Wael, who was the leader of a special intelligence directorate in the Mukhabarat. That directorate provided assistance to Ansar al Islam at the behest of Saddam Hussein, whom Abu Wael had met "four or five times." Al-Shamari added that "Abu Wael’s wife is Izzat al-Douri’s cousin," making him a part of Saddam’s inner circle. Al-Douri, of course, was the deputy chairman of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council, a high-ranking official in Iraq’s armed forces, and Saddam’s righthand man. Originally number six on the most wanted list, he is still believed to be at large in Iraq, and is suspected of coordinating aspects of insurgency against American troops, primarily in the Sunni triangle.

Why, I asked, would Saddam task one of his intelligence agents to work with the Kurds, an ethnic group that was an avowed enemy of the Baath regime, and had clashed with Iraqi forces on several occasions? Al-Shamari said that Saddam wanted to create chaos in the pro-American Kurdish region. In other words, he used Ansar al Islam as a tool against the Kurds. As an intelligence official for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (one of the two major parties in northern Iraq) explained to me, "Most of the Kurdish fighters in Ansar al Islam didn’t know the link to Saddam." They believed they were fighting a local jihad. Only the high-level lieutenants were aware that Abu Wael was involved.

I bold that part to point out the importance of the sentence.  Saddam used groups such as AQ to facilitate a result he wanted.  That result was chaos in the Kurdish area.

Is it really that hard to believe that he would use them for other anti-American reasons?

I know, if your a lefty then all this is rightwing lies.  Nevermind all the evidence I have provided in my many posts on the matter.  Nor the many books written about this matter.  Or even Saddams own memo’s and orders.  Nevermind all this, because to actually believe that Saddam would associate with AQ would mean to admit that Bush was right.

And that’s a mortal sin for the left.

Instead the MSM and the left will continue to walk around in a fog of their own creation.

Curt

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