March 26, 2008

Saddam Hussein Iraq files: no assassination plot? No AQ links? No WTC1 links?

I link, you decide:

[There was a] 1993 claim by the Kuwaiti government - accepted by the Clinton administration - that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) had plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush during a trip to Kuwait that spring.

...A just-released Pentagon study on the Iraqi regime's ties to terrorism only adds to the mystery. The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush...

...The failure does not, of course, prove that the Iraqis were not planning such an operation. "It would not have surprised me at all if the Iraqis expunged any record of that—it was an utter embarrassment for them," says Paul Pillar, the CIA's former top analyst on the Middle East. But others have wondered whether the original allegations were exaggerated...

[links to Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad but no apparent links to al Qaeda itself...]

...Perhaps most revealing of all was a tape of Saddam's conversations with his ministers after the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993 - a plot linked to a group of Islamic radicals, one of whom, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was an Iraqi-American who fled to Baghdad after the attack. For years Bush administration officials like Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz charged that Iraq had given "sanctuary" to Yasin, suggesting that the regime may have been complicit in the 1993 bombing. But the newly discovered tape shows that Saddam and his ministers were puzzled by the bombing and wondered whether the "Zionists" or U.S. intelligence were secretly behind it...

Posted to Iraq at March 26, 2008 07:49 PM