The murky case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man behind the neocons’ Sept. 11 obsession
European intelligence agencies say that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi operates independently of al Qaeda.
Lebanonwire, December 13, 2003 The Daily Star
By Ed Blanche BEIRUT: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a one-legged Jordanian Palestinian who by all accounts has become one of the most active of the terrorist commanders fighting the Americans and their allies, has been identified by Turkish authorities as the mastermind for the Istanbul bombings in November that killed 61 people and wounded more than 700. The Bush administration has long branded him as the key link between Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda and the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001 an allegation that has been largely discredited but which hard-line conservatives, pushed onto the defensive by the anarchy in Iraq they failed to foresee, are resurrecting in a politically charged debate that could impact the 2004 electoral campaign. The Americans insist that Zarqawi is a close associate of Osama bin Laden, but European intelligence agencies say that while he may share bin Laden’s ideology and pathological hatred of the West, and fought like the Al-Qaeda leader against the Soviet Army in the 1979-89 Afghan war, he operates independently and has his own fundamentalist organization, Al-Tawheed. The Palestinian-based group is dedicated to overthrowing the Jordanian monarchy and government. Several Al-Tawheed cells have been rounded up in Western Europe and in Jordan in recent years. Zarqawi, whose real name is Ahmed Fadeel Nazzal al-Khalayleh, has been central to the Bush administration’s allegations since Oct. 20, 2002, when George W. Bush made the case for the global terrorist threat allegedly posed by Saddam. As an example of high-level contacts between the Baghdad regime and Al-Qaeda, Bush identified Zarqawi as “one very senior Al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year and who has been associated with planning chemical and biological attacks.” Zarqawi was wounded in a US air strike in Afghanistan in late 2001, and made his way to Baghdad via Iran in March 2002. While in Baghdad one of his legs was amputated and he now uses an artificial limb. On Feb. 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had shown little enthusiasm for going to war with Iraq, told the UN Security Council that the administration had undeniable proof of a connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, and identified Zarqawi as the head of “a deadly terrorist network” based in Iraq, and as an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda lieutenants.” US intelligence insiders, European intelligence officials who were tracking Zarqawi long before the Americans, and even Israeli intelligence, all cast considerable doubt on the US claims, and still do. Zarqawi, 36, first became known as a player in the world of terrorism in 1999, when Jordanian authorities rounded up a cell of Islamic extremists who were later convicted mostly in absentia for plotting attacks on US and Israeli targets in the Hashemite kingdom. Four years later, he was considered a key terrorist leader and on Oct. 28, 2003, the Americans put a bounty of $5 million on his head. He has been linked to a multitude of terrorist atrocities since 1999, and Turkey’s claim that he orchestrated the Istanbul bombings, albeit without any hard evidence provided, was a major boost to US conservatives who claim that he, and thus Al-Qaeda, were linked to Saddam. Faced with the humiliation of failing to find any evidence that Saddam had active programs to develop weapons of mass destruction that threatened the “free world,” a primary justification for invading Iraq to which the administration clings with theological conviction, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration are once more trying hard to prove another of their pre-war claims, that Saddam was an international terrorist threat that had to be eliminated. The irony is that the Americans, now grappling with an escalating insurgency in Iraq that is driving them to distraction, appear to have created in that country the very Frankenstein they conjured up to warrant their war there in the first place. It is probably true that among the insurgents are Islamic zealots and followers of bin Laden, for whom the conflict in Iraq, on Arab soil, has become part of the jihad against the United States and its allies. But the involvement of fighters with ideological links to Al-Qaeda hardly proves that Saddam had anything to do with the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001. It seems that the post-invasion anarchy in Iraq has energized the neoconservatives in the administration to revive that claim. But it may also be a desperate ploy to counter their apparently diminishing influence in the White House because of the flawed strategy they provided regarding the invasion of Iraq. There have been reports of contacts between Saddam’s inner circle and Al-Qaeda officials, including bin Laden, dating back long before Sept. 11. And in that time, Al-Qaeda operatives appear to have moved in and out of Baghdad without problems, but no concrete evidence of state sponsorship by the Baathist regime has ever surfaced. Still, US neocons continue to believe that Saddam was behind just about every terrorist attack on the US over the last decade. The State Department says the last such attack was the abortive attempt to assassinate George Bush the elder in Kuwait in 1993. Amid growing pressure from Democrats, who charge that the Republican administration cooked intelligence to justify the war, the conservatives have been hitting back as the campaigning for the 2004 presidential election heats up. On Sept. 14, as US forces in Iraq reeled from one blow after another from an escalating insurgency against occupation, Vice-President Dick Cheney brought the debate back into sharp focus. Cheney, whose power within the administration remains formidable and who avidly propagated the claim that Saddam was allied to Al-Qaeda, not only reasserted that allegation but claimed Baghdad helped, and probably financed, the Islamic terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993. The neocons, including former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, have been saying that for the last decade, but Cheney’s assertion added a new twist to the administration’s conspiracy theory. The 1993 attack, the first act of international terrorism within the US, has never been attributed to Al-Qaeda, which at the time was in its formative stages, although some of those involved later became part of bin Laden’s network. One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who became a senior operational chief for Al-Qaeda until he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. During interrogation, according to intelligence sources, he repeatedly denied any operational Al-Qaeda links with Baghdad. A new book, Bush vs The Beltway, by Laurie Mylroie, an American academic, Iraq specialist and rabidly devout believer in Saddam’s sponsorship of terror, and involvement in Sept. 11, claims that Mohammed was an Iraqi agent, but US authorities refuse to investigate. On Sept. 17, Bush himself finally conceded that there was no firm evidence that Saddam was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks disputing for the first time the claims made by his administration to justify the war against Iraq and, one could argue, distancing himself from the neocons in his administration. But he also insisted: “There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had Al-Qaeda ties.” Then in late November, the right-wing US magazine The Weekly Standard, which has close ties to administration hawks, reported that Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary for defense for policy and planning and a key architect of the war with Iraq, had provided the US Senate Intelligence Committee with a 16-page memorandum of classified material that he claimed showed an operational link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. The Oct. 27 memo listed 50 items of raw intelligence pointing toward such an unholy alliance. With the disclosure of the Feith memo, some conservative US commentators, including William Safire in The New York Times, have resurrected claims of linkage between Saddam and Sept. 11. Safire wrote on Nov. 25 that the memo buttressed those claims, and noted: “With so much connective tissue exposed some the result of ‘custodial interviews’ of prisoners the burden of proof has shifted to those grimly in denial.” Bush may have rowed back on those claims, but a recent poll showed that 70 percent of Americans firmly believe Saddam had a hand in the suicide attacks of 2001, and as Safire notes, “in the murder of 3,000 Americans.” Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration, still insists there was an operational terrorist alliance between Saddam and bin Laden just as he remains unabashed about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction when all the evidence now points the other way. Among the items cited in the Feith memo was the Czech intelligence service claim that Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian who led the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers, met at least twice in Prague in 2001 with Ahmed al-Ani, a senior Iraqi intelligence official then operating under diplomatic cover as the vice consul at Iraq’s embassy in the Czech capital, before the attacks on the US. Ani supposedly gave Atta access to $100,000. The CIA has said it cannot confirm those meetings and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has said that at the time of one of the alleged contacts in Prague, on April 9, 2001, Atta was traveling between Virginia and Florida. Ani has been in the hands of the US Justice Department since July, but there has been no indication that he has confirmed meeting Atta on the dates cited. Farouk Hejazi, former head of external operations in the Iraqi intelligence service who reportedly met bin Laden and his Egyptian No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, during a secret mission to Afghanistan in December 1998, has also been in US custody since late April. If anyone could confirm any links between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda it is Hejazi but again, nothing. Ani’s predecessor in Prague, Jabr Salem, has defected to the British and has been interrogated by the Secret Intelligence Service, but there has been no whisper from that quarter to substantiate the alleged Baghdad link with Al-Qaeda. The large number of CIA operatives now in Baghdad has access to tons literally of meticulous files kept by Iraqi intelligence, but there has been no whiff of anything to validate the neocons’ claims. In the meantime, the elusive Zarqawi remains at large, with his secrets. But even so, the betting is that the conservatives’ renewed claims that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden on Sept. 11 will haunt Bush as the election campaign gathers momentum and he will distance himself from them, further eroding their influence.
Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, has covered Middle Eastern affairs for many years and is a regular contributor to The Daily Star
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