The Saddam-Osama "connection"

The Progressive Daily Beacon dissects the Washington Post's new piece by Christina Shelton alleging that there really was a working relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Naturally, the right-wing blogs have lapped up her work. (Example.)

Who is Shelton? She was hand-picked to work directly under Doug Feith in the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, established by Cheney and Rumsfeld to bypass or to "out-shout" the insufficiently hawkish CIA. In his book, former CIA Director George Tenet calls Shelton a Naval Reserve Officer when she is, in fact, a career analyst. (He probably confused her with her partner, Christopher Carney.)

In 2004, the Washington Post published a story which painted her in an (arguably) unflattering light.

In the run-up to the war, Shelton presented an analysis arguing that the CIA had discounted evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In her recent piece, Shelton is concerned, in large part, with countering Tenet, who believes that Shelton had leaped to conclusions based on raw intelligence of uncertain quality. The CIA's analysts came to very different assessments of the same data.

The Progressive Daily Beacon does not link to this fine piece from 2006, by Walter Uhler, who discusses Shelton's approach to intelligence. Uhler reports that the Al Qaeda/Iraq linkage claims were based, in substantial part, on testimony from a captured jihadist named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Alas, it seems that Libi suffered "rendition" to an Egyptian prison, where he told his brutal captors anything they wished to hear. He later recanted.

In her Washington Post piece, Shelton writes: "Such testimony should not be taken at face value." She implies that the recantation, not the confession under duress, is dubious.

Another Defense Intelligence Agency unit debunked the claimed linkage:

Two of the report's declassified sentences read as follows: (1) "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," and (2) "Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

I would add this. In the years since the invasion, as Shelton notes, we have uncovered Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that speak of meetings between Bin Laden and IIS personnel in the 1990s. But these documents are suspiciously few. To my knowledge, they have not been made public and scrutinized independently.

We know that the neocons worked closely with Achmed Chalabi, who ran a shop specializing in faked documents. I need not remind the readers of the phony Niger "yellowcake" documents that provided a foundation for Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat.

Given this history, we would be foolish to place much trust in unseen pages.

To my knowledge, we have received no confirmatory information from anyone in Saddam's regime hoping to ingratiate himself with the new wielders of power. While I wouldn't be surprised if there were other "Libi" situations, further prisoner confessions have been either non-existent or were deemed non-credible. Even though Saddam's intelligence service must have been a prime target for electronic eavesdroppers, no published reports that I've seen mention any NSA intercepts which would buttress the "link" idea.

Even if we grant the assertion that an IIS chief met Bin Laden in 1995 -- or even if we grant the dubious tale about Atta in Prague -- what of it? I once met a Playboy Playmate; that doesn't mean we slept together. How many times have you had coffee with someone you considered a rival, or even an adversary? Such things happen -- especially in the world of intelligence, where meetings between the damnedest people have been known to occur.