MICHAEL SCHEUER, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit and until recently a senior analyst, said something remarkable last week on Hardball with Chris Matthews.
Scheuer told Matthews that he "happened to do the research on links between al Qaeda and Iraq," and Matthews asked him, "and what did you come up with?"
"Nothing."
It was a strange and troubling response. As Thomas Joscelyn points out, Scheuer argued in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes, that Iraq and al Qaeda worked together regularly. His claims were unequivocal. A few examples:
[Bin Laden] "made a connection with Iraq's intelligence service through its Khartoum station." (p. 119).
In Sudan, Bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF [Sudan's National Islamic Front], Iraq's intelligence service and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad with its intelligence officers in Sudan and by a [Hassan] Turabi-brokered June-1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors. Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed a good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s. (p. 124)
There is information showing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began to work
with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda. (p. 124)
Regarding Iraq, bin Laden, as noted, was in contact with Baghdad's intelligence service since at least 1994. He reportedly cooperated with it in the area of chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear [CBRN] weapons and may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin al-Khalq. (p. 184)
In pursuing tactical nuclear weapons, bin Laden has focused on the FSU (former Soviet Union) states and has sought and received help from Iraq. (p. 190)
We know for certain that bin Laden was seeking CBRN [chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear] weapons . . . and that Iraq and Sudan have been cooperating with bin Laden on CBRN weapon acquisition and development. (p. 192)
So how can Scheuer now say Iraq and al Qaeda did not collaborate? Tim Russert noted that Scheuer seems "to lay out a pretty strong case of connection between al Qaeda and Iraq," and asked him about the apparent contradiction on Meet the Press. Here is the entire exchange:
Russert: So you saw a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden?
Scheuer: I certainly saw a link when I was writing the books in terms of the open-source literature, unclassified literature, but I had nothing to do with Iraq during my professional career until the run-up to the war. What I was talking about on "Hardball" was I was assigned the duty of going back about nine or 10 years in the classified archives of the CIA. I went through roughly 19,000 documents, probably totaling 50,000 to 60,000 pages, and within that corpus of material, there was absolutely no connection in the terms of a--in terms of a relationship--in the terms of a relationship . . .
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