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Stephen F. Hayes, author of the Weekly Standard article which first reported on the memo, comments on it in today’s LA TIMES.
Nor do the Democrats appear to have taken into account this piece of information from a U.S. interview with Farouk Hijazi, former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence: “He said that in a 1994 meeting with Bin Laden in the Sudan, Bin Laden had requested that Iraq assist Al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured anti-ship limpet mines Bin Laden also requested the establishment of Al Qaeda training camps inside Iraq.”
According to other reporting in the Feith document, Bin Laden eventually got at least some of those training camps. What happened there? “An Iraqi intelligence officer said that as of mid-March, the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] was providing weapons to Al Qaeda members located at a training camp in northern Iraq, including rocket-propelled grenade (RPG-18) launchers.”
Other information in the document points to a secret operational relationship between Bin Laden and the Iraqi leader that goes well beyond mere “contacts” or “links” or “connections.” According to one entry, a “sensitive source” reported that “Iraq’s contacts intensified after Al Qaeda’s successful attacks against the U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998.”
The LA TIMES also prints a rebuttal, from Christopher Scheer. Scheer’s article makes no attempt to refute any point made by Hayes. He starts by saying that the leak of the memo was timed purposely to back up the Bush administration position. Duh. Most leaks are made to back up someone’s position. This doesn’t refute the points in the leaked memo.
Scheer concludes with this:
The simple fact is, Al Qaeda didn’t need Iraq to pull off 9/11 or any of its other savage attacks, and even if all the anonymous statements in Feith’s memo panned out, there still would be no evidence Iraq significantly aided the extremists. We are, whatever the neocons might want us to believe, waging the wrong war in the wrong way.
So his conclusion is that all the points in the memo might be true; Al Qaeda may have been helped by Iraq; but Al Qaeda didn’t “need” Iraq. Therefore, Scheer concludes, we were wrong to attack Iraq.
So according to Scheer, most people who help terrorists kill Americans should be left in peace unless Scheer says they were “needed”. A brilliant military strategy.
So what is Mr. Scheer’s plan? How would he prevent another 9-11? I’d like to hear his suggestions on that. But that subject doesn’t appear to interest him.
