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What Michael Scheuer has to say about bin Laden and Saddam--and what that says about the CIA's performance.

11:00 PM, Nov 21, 2004 • By STEPHEN F. HAYES
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MICHAEL SCHEUER, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit and until recently a senior analyst, said something remarkable last week on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Scheuer told Matthews that he "happened to do the research on links between al Qaeda and Iraq," and Matthews asked him, "and what did you come up with?"


It was a strange and troubling response. As Thomas Joscelyn points out, Scheuer argued in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes, that Iraq and al Qaeda worked together regularly. His claims were unequivocal. A few examples:

[Bin Laden] "made a connection with Iraq's intelligence service through its Khartoum station." (p. 119).


There is information showing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began to work with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda. (p. 124)


In pursuing tactical nuclear weapons, bin Laden has focused on the FSU (former Soviet Union) states and has sought and received help from Iraq. (p. 190)


So how can Scheuer now say Iraq and al Qaeda did not collaborate? Tim Russert noted that Scheuer seems "to lay out a pretty strong case of connection between al Qaeda and Iraq," and asked him about the apparent contradiction on Meet the Press. Here is the entire exchange:

Russert: So you saw a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden?

Scheuer: I certainly saw a link when I was writing the books in terms of the open-source literature, unclassified literature, but I had nothing to do with Iraq during my professional career until the run-up to the war. What I was talking about on "Hardball" was I was assigned the duty of going back about nine or 10 years in the classified archives of the CIA. I went through roughly 19,000 documents, probably totaling 50,000 to 60,000 pages, and within that corpus of material, there was absolutely no connection in the terms of a--in terms of a relationship--in the terms of a relationship . . .

Russert: But your book did point out some contacts?

Scheuer: Certainly it was available in the open-source material, yes, sir.

This is nonsense. Scheuer would have us believe that although he never saw an Iraq-al Qaeda connection in the classified intelligence as head of the bin Laden unit, he wrote a book in 2002 including numerous examples of that connection based solely on open sources. Is it true that Scheuer did not see classified intelligence about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship before 2002? That seems highly unlikely.

The Clinton administration cited intelligence on Iraq-al Qaeda to justify its strikes on the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan on August 20, 1998. Those officials stand by their decision today. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen told the September 11 Commission that he saw intelligence that the head of the al Shifa plant traveled to Baghdad to meet with the head of Iraq's VX nerve gas program. Such intelligence also led the Clinton Administration to include the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in its first indictment of bin Laden.