In the past two days, administration officials have appeared to qualify their case that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have paired up to threaten the United States, a key argument for going to war against Iraq.
CIA Director George J. Tenet twice told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday that Abu Musab Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associate who last year sought medical care in Baghdad and then disappeared, is in the Iraqi capital. But after the hearing, intelligence officials said they did not know where Zarqawi was because he moves around a lot.
On Tuesday, Tenet said at another hearing that Zarqawi was not
under the control
of Hussein. Yesterday, he added that
it’s inconceivable
that Zarqawi and two dozen Egyptian
Islamic Jihad associates are sitting there without the Iraqi
intelligence service’s knowledge of the fact that there is a
safe haven being provided.
The CIA director said Zarqawi took money
from bin Laden, but he later said Zarqawi and his network were
independent.
Under questioning by Democratic senators about the strength of the
link between al Qaeda and Iraq, Tenet said Zarqawi was on my list
of top 30 individuals
the CIA is targeting, a reference to a
presidential directive the CIA has been given to kill these
individuals.
On the matter of a new tape of bin Laden broadcast by the al-Jazeera
network—and considered authentic by
U.S. officials—Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Tuesday
the tape showed the al Qaeda leader is in partnership with Iraq.
But intelligence analysts inside and outside the government said that
bin Laden went out of his way in the recording to show his contempt
for Hussein and his Baath Party regime, whom he referred to as
infidels
and one of several infidel regimes
that should be
aided not for themselves but for the sake of Allah.
Tenet said yesterday that the tape is unprecedented in terms of the
way he expresses solidarity with Baghdad.
But he added, whether
he is aligning himself with the Iraqi government, as it appears, or he
is speaking to the Iraqi people . . . I need a little more time to do
a little bit more work on that.
On the tape, bin Laden discussed the U.S. preparations for a possible
coalition attack on Iraq and encouraged Iraqis to take up arms against
what he called crusaders
who were going to occupy Baghdad to
rob the wealth of Muslims and to appoint over you an agent government
that follows Washington and Tel Aviv . . . in preparation for the
founding of the greater Israel.
The crusaders,
bin Laden said, are targeting Islam,
irrespective of whether the Baath Party and Saddam were deposed or
not.
Last week, Powell used sensitive intercepts to show the U.N. Security Council that Iraq was hiding chemical and biological weapons. But in two cases, senior administration officials said yesterday, they did not know what military items were discussed in the intercepts.
One tape of an intercepted message had two senior officers of
Hussein’s elite Republic Guard discussing a modified
vehicle
with IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei coming for an
inspection. One officer asks what to do if ElBaradei sees it, and the
other worries that it had not been evacuated from the facility along
with everything else.
A senior administration official familiar with the intelligence said
CIA analysts do not know what vehicle is being discussed. But because
it came from a factory where weapons were built, he said, it would
be gullible to think something else
other than a proscribed weapon
was involved. The official said the conclusion was it is illegal,
otherwise they would have explained it.
In another taped radio transmission, two Republican Guard officers
talk about destroying a message that mentions the possibility there
are forbidden ammo
at a site where the message was sent. The
original message was to clean out all the areas, the scrap areas,
the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.
The radio
order was to destroy that previous message.
Powell, in presenting this intercept, said the only reason to destroy
the message was so they can claim that nothing was there,
not
even the original message.
A senior official said yesterday that U.S. intelligence does not know
whether there was forbidden ammo
at the site where the radio
message was received. The tape recording was included in
Powell’s presentation to show that there was concern such ammo
could turn up.
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