In March 1998, after Bin Ladin’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties on his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December. Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban.
Has the intelligence community made any progress in getting answers to the following questions: Who were the “al Qaeda members”? Who were the “Iraqi intelligence” officials? Who were members of the “Iraqi delegation”? Zawahiri “had ties of his own to the Iraqis.” Who were they? Who were the “Iraqi officials”? Who were the Bin Ladin “aides”? A November 24, 1997 Time magazine piece, “America the Vulnerable,” stated that:
officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call “strategic crime.” By that they mean the merging of the output from a government’s arsenals, like Saddam’s biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them.
Who were these officials? Intelligence community officials? Clinton White House officials? What intelligence did these officials base their “deep worry” on? And did President Clinton base his November 15, 1997 remarks in Sacramento on the same intelligence that prompted government “officials” to be “deeply worried” about a Saddam-supplied bioterror attack on U.S. soil?
think about it [Iraq’s disarmament] in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.
