Saddam and Osama

An oft-repeated claim of the Left has been that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The argument has been that the secular Saddam and the religious extremist bin Laden would never have anything to do with each other. Stephen Hayes, of the Weekly Standard, has just published a book that details the fallacy of that argument. In an article in this week's Weekly Standard, he describes on element of that fallacy.

In late February 2004, Christopher Carney made an astonishing discovery. Carney, a political science professor from Pennsylvania on leave to work at the Pentagon, was poring over a list of officers in Saddam Hussein's much-feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. One name stood out: Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. The name was not spelled exactly as Carney had seen it before, but such discrepancies are common. Having studied the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda for 18 months, he immediately recognized the potential significance of his find. According to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal, Shakir appears on three different lists of Fedayeen officers.

An Iraqi of that name, Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.

Mohammed Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague was the first bit of the connection that was ignored. And now, as would be expected, this story is receiving absolutely no attention from the mainstream press. As of course neither did the story of last week's find of a Sarin gas artillery shell. Bit by bit all the arguments of the "anti-war" Left are being dismantled, but since they control the press, this story is guaranteed not to get out.