January 26, 2002	Saturday	Ziqa’ad 11, 1422

DELMAR (USA): At this very moment, US intelligence personnel are poring over documents, uncovering the depth of the anti-American plotting of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.

Al Qaeda prisoners are being interrogated in an effort to unlock past secrets and interdict future threats to the US and the world. As this investigation proceeds, the web of terrorist networks forged by Osama in his struggle against the West is becoming clear.

Some of the exposed links are not surprising - including Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Notably absent is Iraq. Given the spate of post-Sept 11 media reports linking Iraq with Osama, one would expect a flood of evidence coming from Afghanistan confirming such a relationship.

Even the alleged meetings between Mohammed Atta - a suspected leader of the Sept 11 hijackers - and an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague are inconclusive. The Czech government has sent conflicting reports concerning this meeting and, even if the meeting took place, the supposed topic of discussion - an attack on a Radio Free Europe radio transmitter used to broadcast anti-Hussein programming - is a far cry from the Sept 11 attacks.

The lack of documentation of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection in this intelligence trove should lead to the questioning of the original source of such speculation, as well as the motivations of those who continue to peddle the “Iraqi connection” theory.

Foremost among them are opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and his American sponsors, in particular Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former Undersecretary of State Richard Perle.

Chalabi’s information turned out to be more flash than substance. For example, there was the “engineer” who allegedly worked on Saddam Hussein’s palaces who spoke of a network of underground tunnels where crates of documents were allegedly hidden during inspections. Inspectors did find a drainage tunnel. Despite the fact that no documents were discovered, Chalabi took the tunnel’s existence as confirmation that documents also existed, and spoke as if they were an established fact.

In the same manner, when Wolfowitz and company needed a link between Iraq and the perpetrators of the Sept 11 attacks, Chalabi dutifully trotted out a series of heretofore “undiscovered” defectors who have “information” about the training of “Arab” hijackers by Iraqi intelligence at a facility near the Iraqi town of Salman Pak.

The site is reported to be fully equipped with, among other things, a commercial airliner upon which the trainees can practice their trade, conveniently enough, in “groups of five” and “armed only with knives and their bare hands.” The facility at Salman Pak does exist; its use as an Al Qaeda training camp is unsubstantiated.

More recently, following President Bush’s demand that Iraq permit the return of UN weapons inspectors or else “suffer the consequences,” Chalabi conveniently produced another “defector” who allegedly had access to Saddam’s secret plans to hide underground biological and chemical weapons facilities from international detection.

The UN stopped using Chalabi’s information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. There is a substantial lack of clarity and credible sources on the actual nature of the Iraqi threat to the US. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.