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Bush dismisses facts by linking 9/11, Iraq

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published June 30, 2005

Sept. 11 was a terrible day and Saddam Hussein was a terrible ruler. Yet to link the two, as President Bush tried to do in his speech Tuesday, disregards compelling evidence to the contrary.

Even the 9/11 Commission, which conducted the most exhaustive study of the events that morning, could find "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."

In rallying support for the Iraq war this week, Bush mentioned Sept. 11 five times. The emphasis on 9/11 was particularly striking compared to his March 17, 2003, address to the American people, three days before the Iraqi invasion.

The president never mentioned Sept. 11 then, instead saying a U.S. attack was justified because there was "no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

No weapons were ever found. Thus the president's current reasons for war: the push for democracy and the need to rid Iraq of the same breed of terrorists "who took the lives of our citizens in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania" on 9/11.

For the most part, the case for an Iraqi link to the hijackings rests on two flimsy supports: the presence of some al-Qaida operatives in Iraq; and a purported meeting in the Czech Republic between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and an Iraqi intelligence agent.

In his presentation to the U.N. Security Council six weeks before the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Iraq "harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants."

Powell's case was weakened by the fact that Zarqawi's camp was in an area of northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds, not Hussein's government. Moreover, it was part of the no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. fighter jets. If the camp was such a threat, critics wondered, why didn't the United States simply bomb it into oblivion?

As further evidence of links between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime, Powell said Zarqawi had undergone medical treatment in Baghdad, where - according to U.S. intelligence - he had a leg amputated. When photos later showed him walking normally on two feet , Newsweek commented: "The fact is, we don't even know for sure how many legs Musab al-Zarqawi has."

Even more intriguing, at least initially, was Atta's purported visit to the Czech Republic.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, New York Times columnist William Safire reported that Atta met with the Iraqi consul in Prague on April 8, 2001. The Weekly Standard expanded on Safire's account, saying there were even photos of the meeting.

But the story soon unraveled. In its report, the 9/11 Commission said the FBI had evidence that Atta was in the United States in April 2001: On April 4, a bank surveillance camera in Virginia showed him withdrawing $8,000 from his account, and by April 11, he was in Florida, judging from cellular phone calls.

"Based on the evidence available - including investigations by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainees' reporting - we do not believe that such a meeting occurred," the commission said.

The panel did find evidence of contacts between al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence agents in the early and mid '90s, including bin Laden's purported request to establish training camps in Iraq. However, the contacts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," the commission said.

Indeed, many experts found it implausible that a secular dictator like Hussein would have anything to do with unpredictable Islamic radicals.

Hussein was unlikely to share weapons of mass destruction with "terrorists who would use them for their own purposes ... and open him and his entire regime to a devastating response by the U.S.," Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2002.

Even Kenneth Pollack, author of a bestseller that made the case for war, discounted claims that Hussein had ties to terrorists, much less the 9/11 hijackers.

"If the only problem the United States had with Saddam Hussein's regime were its involvement with terrorism, our problems would be relatively mild," Pollack said in his 2002 book.

"On the grand list of state sponsors of terrorism, Iraq is pretty far down - well below Iran, Syria, Pakistan and others."

If the links between Iraq and 9/11 are extremely shaky, President Bush was right on one point Tuesday: Iraq is a haven for terrorists today. Since the United State occupied it in 2003, the country has become a magnet for Islamic militants who are honing their deadly skills in an urban environment, according to a classified CIA report revealed last week. And once Iraq returns to normalcy, battle-hardened extremists are apt to move on to other countries - including the United States.

Ironically, the president's speech came the same day as a U.S. helicopter with 17 aboard crashed in Afghanistan after big hit by ground fire, apparently from the Taliban. It was a reminder that the Taliban remain a threat - and that Osama bin Laden, the man really behind the 9-11 attacks, is still on the loose.

--Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified June 30, 2005, 00:59:15]