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MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS
FROM: GARY SCHMITT
SUBJECT:
Saddam –
bin Laden Connection
Last Friday, David Ignatius published an op-ed in the Washington Post commenting on the Weekly Standard article by Stephen Hayes that drew on a Defense Department document detailing contacts between Saddam’s Iraq and Bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The crux of Ignatius’s criticism of Hayes claim of an Iraq – al Qaeda connection is that the CIA and British intelligence had “an unusually well-placed source in Iraq who told them before the war that in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had indeed considered such an operational relationship with bin Laden – and then decided against it.”
We don’t pretend
to know either whether this source is as well-placed as Ignatius had been
told or whether the source’s information is reliable. What we do
know is that the CIA has been routinely duped by “high level”
sources in the past, be it in Iran, Nicaragua, or Cuba. Given the amount
of intelligence on Saddam that has not proven to be accurate over the
past three years – including on the eve of the war – some skepticism
is appropriate when it comes to an argument resting on a single source.
The Department of Defense memo discussed in Hayes’s article, in contrast,
draws on multiple sources. |
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