The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America

June 3, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MS. PLETKA:  Good afternoon, everybody.  Welcome to AEI.  I'm Danielle Pletka, our Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies here.

AEI is very pleased to host today's panel on The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.  Steve Hayes has written an excellently researched, scrupulously honest book.  He pieces together a complicated set of data points to paint a clear picture of cooperation between Iraq's intelligence services and al Qaeda.

Where the evidence is ambivalent, he is ambivalent.  Where it is inconclusive, Steve doesn't draw conclusions.  And where the evidence is clear, as it is in many cases, Steve believes what the evidence is telling him.

In glancing over the reviews and commentary about the book, I've been struck by the certitude of the experts about how the world works.  First, we've been led to believe by luminaries such as Dick Clarke that there is no, zero, connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.  I don't know how Clarke explains Abu Muzaf Al Zarkawi [ph] presence in Iraq.  Good hospitals, perhaps.

We've also been told there was no meeting between Iraqi intelligence and Mohammed Atta.  Soon after 9/11, I was told by the CIA that there was a 70-percent chance the meeting had taken place.  But opponents of the Iraq war don't like the idea that their force for stability in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, could actually have been working with America's most determined enemies.

Finally, there are those who continue to insist that secular Saddam, Islamist Osama, could never cooperate, as if there was some ideological litmus test in the "hate America" club.  But before I spend the entire time telling you what I think, let me turn this over to our panel.

Steve Hayes is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.  He ran the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University, and also worked for National Journal's Hotline.  He has been at the Weekly Standard since May 2001.

Our James, Jim Woolsey, is the President and officer in Booz, Allen Hamilton's global assurance practice.  During his 12 years in the United States government, he served as the Director of the CIA, ambassador to the negotiation on the conventional armed forces in Europe, Under Secretary of the Navy, and General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services.

Peter Bergen is a Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Hold War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.  Mr. Bergen is CNN's terrorism analyst and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.  He is also on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.

Judith Yaphe is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, in Washington.  Before joining INSS in 1995, Dr. Yaphe was the senior political analyst in the Office of Near East and South Asia Analysis at the CIA, and received the Intelligence Medal of Commendation for her work on Iraq.

Finally, last but not least, is our moderator, Michael Ledeen, who is a Resident Scholar and the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.  During the Reagan administration, he was a consultant to the National Security Adviser, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and to the Department of State--that wouldn't happen today--and was a special adviser to the Secretary of State.  He is the author most recently of The War Against the Terror Masters.

I'm going to turn this all over to Michael and welcome all of our panelists.  Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Hi.  We'll try to hold each of our panelists to about ten minutes the first time around, and then if anybody feels strongly about anything that has been said, they will have a chance to pick up on that and then we'll have questions.  So everything goes according to plan, we'll have more than an hour for questions.  So we're here until six o'clock, if any of you care to stay that long.

So, Steve, why don't you start?  It's your book, your presentation.

MR. HAYES:  I know there are several authors in the crowd.  I can see faces I recognize who have to have been familiar with the anxiety I felt in the days before this book was released.  You know, you fret over things like typos.  You worry about who you inevitably forgot to thank in the acknowledgements.  In my case, it was my parents; I didn't use their name.

You wonder if anybody will buy it, and most of all you think long and hard about where your critics will try to beat you up.

Neo-con conspiracy theories is how my first review began--garbage full of lies and half-truths, discredited evidence.  On it went.  This was all, of course, terribly distressing for a first-time author and the kind of thing that might have really driven me crazy, except for one important detail.  It was written a week before the book came out.

If Adam from Rhode Island or whoever wrote the Amazon review wishes that all of the evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda are nonsense, he is not alone.  When I wrote about these connections last fall, reporting on a memo from the Pentagon to the Senate Intelligence Committee, well-respected journalists and terrorism analysts attempted to discredit my reporting and the document in several cases without ever actually having seen it.

As a result, their critiques were full of simple factual errors.  One critic wrote that the article was hype and opinion, but then went on to claim that the Pentagon memo, quote, "pointedly omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees, including such notables as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin Alshib [ph], Abu Zubaida [ph] and Farooq Kajazi [ph].

The claim was false.  Although the debriefings didn't make it into my Weekly Standard piece--the Pentagon memo was 16 pages, my article was 4--the memo had, in fact, included discussions of detainee briefings, included two that it had supposedly pointedly omitted, those of Abu Zubaida and Farooq Kajazi.

Another critic, former Clinton administration counter-terrorism official Daniel Benjamin, wrote the following: "Not surprisingly, none of the reports in the Feith [ph] memo mentions the aversion that the Baathists and jihadists felt for one another."  In fact, the Pentagon memo actually makes four separate and specific references to these religious and ideological differences.

So the question was why would well-known journalists and terrorism experts make categorical claims about a document they had never seen?  Good question.

I'd like to thank AEI for hosting this book event and this important discussion today, and for recruiting a panel of experts and scholars who are above those kinds of tactics.  I hope our time will be spent on the evidence as we know it today and not on attempts to discredit our opponents.

So, to the evidence.  Iraqi intelligence documents from 1992 list Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset.  Numerous sources have reported on a 1993 non-aggression pact between Iraq and al Qaeda.  The former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence, now in U.S. custody, says that bin Laden asked the Iraqi regime for arms and training in a face-to-face meeting in 1994.  Senior al Qaeda leader Abu Abdullah al Iraqi [ph] met with Iraqi intelligence officials in 1995.

The National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations between al Qaeda-supported Sudanese military officials and the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program in 1996.  Al Qaeda sent Abu Abdullah al Iraqi to Iraqi to help with weapons of mass destruction in 1997.

The Clinton Justice Department indictment of Osama bin Laden in 1998 cited Iraqi assistance on al Qaeda, quote, "weapons development," unquote.  A senior Clinton administration counter-terrorism official told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was, quote, unquote, "sure" that Iraq had supported al Qaeda chemical weapons programs in 1999.

In 2000, an Iraqi working closely with the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur was photographed with September 11th hijacker Khalid Almidhar en route to a planning meeting for the bombing of the USS Cole and the September 11th attacks.  Satellite photographs showed al Qaeda members in 2001 traveling en masse to a compound in northern Iraq financed, in part, by the Iraqi regime.

Abu Muzaf Al Zarkawi, a senior al Qaeda associate, operated openly in Baghdad and received medical attention at a regime-supported hospital in 2002.  Documents discovered in post-war Iraq in 2003 revealed that Saddam's regime harbored and supported Abdul Rahman Yassin [ph], an Iraqi who helped mix the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attack.

George Tenet, the man of the moment, summarized these and other findings on March 9, 2004, in sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.  The CIA can show that Iraq provided al Qaeda with, quote, "training, funding and safe haven," unquote.  What it cannot show, and what neither I nor the Bush administration has claimed, is that Iraq had command and control of al Qaeda.

Despite all of this, Richard Clarke, in his now famous "60 Minutes" interview, which Danny referred to, made this startling categorical claim: There is absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supported al Qaeda, ever.  Clarke, who should know better, was simply restating the new conventional wisdom.  Al Gore said much the same thing last week.  Tom Brokaw expressed similar doubts in an interview last week with "Larry King Live"--the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Lesley Stahl, Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin.  On it goes.  Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen regularly labels the Iraq-al Qaeda ties fictional.

There was a time, though, when such a relationship was not so hard to imagine.  Throughout the late 1990s, news reports and senior Clinton administration officials spoke openly of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda.

Here was a Newsweek headline: "Saddam Plus Bin Laden?," published January 11, 1999.  It read, in part, "Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas."  The article continues, "U.S. sources say he's reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden."

Four days later, ABC News had this to say: "Intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Sudan's fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."  NPR reported Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years to at least 1994.

We're learning more about the relationship everyday.  In the spring of 1992, according to documents recovered in post-war Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group--the 1,400-member team looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--bin Laden met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Syria.  Those Iraqi intelligence officials reported back that they had a good relationship with bin Laden, information that was later included in a paragraph on bin Laden in a second Iraqi intelligence document listing the Kuwaitis and Saudis the IAS considered assets.

According to a "60 Minutes" report which inadvertently broke the story in a long segment criticizing Ahmed Chalabbi [ph], the DIA has authenticated these documents, but considers the inclusion of bin Laden on this list, again according to "60 Minutes," "insignificant," quote, unquote, which is strange.

Reporters who have been given copies of the document have been warned against re-publishing it in full.  Why?  Because the DIA and FBI have launched investigations of several of the other people listed and their relationships with Iraqi intelligence.

The Iraq Survey Group has unearthed other very interesting documents in post-war Iraq.  One undated internal Iraqi intelligence document discusses plans for an upcoming meeting with bin Laden and a representative for the Taliban; on the agenda, quote, "Attacking American Interests," unquote.

Another IAS document demonstrates that Abdul Rahman Yassin, the Iraqi who participated in the first World Trade Center attacks, was given both safe haven and financial support from the Iraqi regime upon his return from the United States shortly after those attacks.

All of these finds came, in a sense, by accident.  There's no Iraq-al Qaeda equivalent of the Iraq Survey Group.  At times, some members of that team--never more than 15 people at a time--have collected information on this connection.  But today, more than 14 months after the fall of Baghdad, there has been no governmental effort to provide a comprehensive look at Iraqi links to al Qaeda.

If there were such an effort, among the things they might explore is an attack on U.S. troops in the Philippines, in October 2002.  An Abu Sayef terrorist killed himself and an American soldier, Mark W. Jackson, in a bombing at a cafe popular with U.S. troops conducting anti-terror operations in Zamboanga City, Philippines.

Exactly one week after that attack, Filipino authorities found an unexploded bomb on the playground of a local elementary school, also in Zamboanga City.  The bomb was to have been detonated by cell phone, but it didn't detonate.  Filipino intelligence analyzed calls to and from the phone, and several calls peaked their interest, including calls to and from two high-ranking Abu Sayef leaders.

One call that stood out above the others had been placed 17 hours after the bombing that killed Sergeant Jackson to an Iraqi intelligence agent named Hisham Hussein [ph], who was working as the second secretary at the Iraqi embassy in Manila.

A Philippine government source told me that Hussein and Abu Sayef leaders were, quote, "always talking," unquote.  Andrea Domingo [ph], head of the immigration service in the Philippines, said the Filipino intelligence service had been studying the movements and activities of Iraqi intelligence assets in the country, including radical Islamists.  They discovered a, quote, "established network," unquote, of terrorists, headed by Hisham Hussein, the Iraqi intelligence operative.  What is more, an Abu Sayef leader boasted on television that his group had received about $20,000 per year since 2000 from the Iraq regime.

All of this information prompted Matthew Daley [ph], a U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to share his worries in Congressional testimony on March 26th.  Said Daley, "We're concerned that they have what I would call operational links to Iraqi intelligence services."

Another place an independent investigative team might look is the story of Ahmed Hekmat Shakir [ph].  Some of you may have seen the Wall Street Journal piece that ran last Thursday, breaking new news on this story.  I'll give you sort of an overview of the Shakir story.

Shakir was hired by Malaysia Airlines in August 1999, ostensibly as a greeter or facilitator at the Kuala Lumpur Airport.  But he didn't get his job alone; he got his job through contacts with the Iraqi embassy, something he talked openly about with his associates.  And his schedule was not controlled by Malaysian Airlines.  It was controlled by the Iraqi embassy.

The Iraqi embassy told Shakir to show up to work on January 5, 2000, which was the same day that Khalid Almidhar, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon, was arriving in Kuala Lumpur for an al Qaeda summit, the summit I talked about earlier which most people believe was a planning session for both the USS Cole attacks and the September 11th attacks.

Shakir escorted Khalid Almidhar both through the onerous paperwork processes at the airport, and then he did something atypical of a greeter.  He got in the car, the waiting car, and took off with Khalid Almidhar to the al Qaeda meeting, to the al Qaeda summit.  We don't know whether he participated in the summit.  We didn't have listening devices there, but there's little question that he was working with Khalid Almidhar at the time.  Unfortunately, he disappeared.  Obviously, Khalid Almidhar disappeared, eventually made his way to Los Angeles and helped to crash the plane into the Pentagon on September 11th.

Shakir was captured in Doha, Qatar, six days after the September 11th attacks, and Qatari officials found in his possession a vast number of contacts for senior al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's brother, Musab Yassin [ph], who is the brother of Abdul Rahman Yassin, and many others.

Despite that, he was released.  He was captured again in Jordan en route to Baghdad, interrogated and released again, after pressure from Baghdad on the Jordanian government.  He has been missing since then, and the story that broke last week was that his name or a similar name was found on three lists of Saddam Fedelin officers discovered in post-war Iraq.

Potential connections to 9/11 are highly speculative and I don't think anybody should make concrete statements about them.  But it's hard to see how that file can be closed without a full investigation of Shakir and his activities.

And I'll quit with one last word on the nature of all this information.  Intelligence is, of course, by its very nature sketchy, murky, whatever description you may choose.  Anyone who claims full knowledge of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda is fooling themselves and trying to fool you.

As George Tenet admitted in his February speech at Georgetown University, the U.S. intelligence community never penetrated the inner circle of the former Iraqi regime.  And despite their best efforts, they never penetrated the inner circle of al Qaeda.

So the picture of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship is, as a consequence, still developing and there's no question that doubts will remain.  But when Richard Clarke and others claim that there is no evidence that Iraq was supported al Qaeda ever, they are wrong.  There is evidence.  They may not find it persuasive, they might not find it threatening.  But to declare that such evidence doesn't exist is to engage in wishful thinking.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you, Stephen.

I'm going to take the path of least resistance and just move down the people, from Judith to Peter to Jim.

So, Judith, tell us.

MS. YAPHE:  I'm not sure if I'm here to represent the counter-culture or just to give a different point of view.  I am delighted to be here to participate on this panel, and as some of you know, I've been outspoken in questioning the thesis on which this book is based, that Iraq provided support to al Qaeda in its terrorist operations against the United States and that Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama bin Laden.

My views reflect my own independent judgment as an intelligence analyst on Iraq for 20 years, which included 3 years in the Counter-Terrorist Center at CIA, and as someone who has worked on Iraq in various capacities for the past 30 years.

I'm not here to represent the views of the CIA or any government agency.  That's not official disclaimer.  That is a statement.  My views are my own and I will not excuse, apologize or defend the agency.  They can do that well enough on their own.  But I have to admit it's nice to be somewhere where Tenet's name is not going to be raised for the next hour, maybe.  Or maybe it will.

Now, I was very interested to hear that a new book was published on what has become a controversial subject--the links that I described above.  And I was even more curious because I've been long wondering what will come out or has come out of the confessions of two key points of contact in this story which is so mysterious.

We have the two, I think, key observers or participants, if you will.  We have the Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague under custody and we have Farooq Kajazi, someone I would love to be a fly in the room when they question him.  Both of them are the ones who had the contacts with--it is claimed to have the contacts with representatives of the al Qaeda organization.

Now, to my knowledge, no information has come out from their interrogations, but I was hoping that Mr. Hayes had found the connection.  Unfortunately, I don't think that appears to be the case.  His evidence rests on the memo prepared by Mr. Feith, U.S. Under Secretary for Policy, that he prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee last October, and was released.  I guess "leaked" is the correct term if you're talking about technical terms.

It was based on classified, uncorroborated, raw intelligence reports hand-picked by the Office of Special Plans, which is not part of the intelligence community, but was an organization within the Pentagon that was looking at intelligence reporting going back many years to link Iraq to terrorism--and there's no question about Iraq state sponsorship of terrorism for many years--but more recently to look at the recent links of al Qaeda.

The choices of information made for this report which is so much the body of material in The Connection, as I said, is based on classified, uncorroborated, raw reporting.  The choices of information made were highly selective, intended to convince the reader of a point of view without mentioning the standard intelligence caveats or citing any analysis by professional intelligence officers, officers who would have been familiar with the targets and topics.

And herein I think lies some of the flaws of the study.  And I want to do this from two points of view, one from I guess you call a technical perspective; in other words, what the skill sets that I had to acquire as an intelligence officer taught me about examining these kinds of reports, because very often when a person who doesn't read from insight sees an intelligence report, one assumes it is all the truth, and it's not.

And a few of these things came up in Stephen's book and I wanted to point them out because I think there's a little bit of confusion in the assumptions made about reporting.

The reports are incomplete--I want to underscore that to begin with--and meant to convince, because there is no mention of other reporting that says the opposite.  And as an intelligence analyst, I have to look at all sources, all subjects to see what is said on both sides.  And I only see one side of the story here.

There's nothing about bin Laden rejected the Hijazi [ph] overture to come and base yourself in Baghdad, to refuse to work with Saddam Hussein, nor anything about Saddam's known statements that he also rejected any kind of cooperation.

But let me get to a few other points.  Orcon [ph] material.  What are we talking about?  What are these arcane or technical terms, if you will.  It's a classification and it says that, "Warning: This information contained in this report can only be used if cleared by the owner of the information."

Now, most Orcon reports are humint and they're the results of CIA collection, which means that if they're going to be used, except in the case of being used for or by the President of the United States, who is the ultimate declassifier, you have to get approval.  It doesn't mean that makes the material true.  It doesn't give it validation.  It simply says, yes, you have our permission to use this for the specific request, as in, yes, you have the permission to release this information to the Senate Intelligence Committee or for use in such-and-such a document in such-and-such a place.  It does not say this also means, by the way, the reports are accurate and perfect.

That kind of judgment is usually made by intelligence analysts, not reports officers who will give the permission, analysts who would have background and perhaps a closer eye, a wider breadth of knowledge and reading and understanding than this reports officer who simply looks at the paper and checks to see that everything is obeyed.

These reports should describe the reliability of the source, his access to the information, whether the information was intended to inform, influence or manipulate the receiver, in this case the United States government.  Orcon clearance is a one-time-only approval.  It's not blanket permission to use any time, anywhere you want.  And in my experience over 20 years of analyzing clandestine reporting on Iraq, I will tell you that few reports, in my judgment, ever merited the attention given the items by Mr. Feith and touted by Mr. Hayes.

Now, objectivity of analysis is very important.  What you don't select can be as important as what you do select, but I think you have to show both sides to get an objective point of view.

Who screened the reporting?  If this reporting was released by the CIA, the intelligence community, as I've noted, the office within the Pentagon would not have been a part of that apparatus, at least to my knowledge.  I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

The only fit products that are coordinated community products where, say, someone from the Pentagon would have had to go to the community--the CIA, NSA, INR, Intelligence and Research Bureau at the State Department--is in the case of a national intelligence estimate, a community memo, something done by the Office of the National Intelligence Officer, or something done for the daily publications, which used to be called the National Intelligence Daily.  I'm not sure if it is anymore, but the point is those need community coordination.

Now, I want to say one more point just on the technical side, if you will.  The U.S. intelligence community has long been skeptical of open-source reporting.

I think you got that one wrong, Stephen.

From the time I entered the agency in 1975, through the 1990s, open-source reporting--press, media, Saddam's speeches, expertise from many different sources, anything in the public domain--was always a rich source of information, especially on Iraq, which was a virtually totally denied area for so long.  So I just think that one has to be aware; open-source, always important.  I always wanted a ouija board when I did this account.

Now, just a few things on substance.  I don't think there's anything new here.  I think Laurie Milroy [ph] covered a lot of this information very thoroughly in her book.  I do think that the emphasis on the critiquing of what the press said about this and what the media said about that is misleading.  I'm not a great fan of the press.  I guess it's a holdover from my agency days, but it's just a feeling I have that I never trust fully what I read, what I read as a thing of the moment.

There are statements in the book that I think are inaccurate.  There are things that are quoted that the President said that were inaccurate, and we can talk about those in more detail because I don't want to eat up my time with all of that.

Is there any possibility that Iraqi intelligence officers had contacts with al Qaeda?  Of course, there is.  There should have been.  I don't think there should be any denial of Iraqi intelligence efforts to try to learn about, penetrate, see if they could control this organization.  The Iraqis certainly did that with many terrorist organizations.

They needed to determine who can be turned, who can not, what can be controlled, what cannot.  Is this group or individual a risk or an opportunity?  In my own judgment, Saddam and his supporters saw links to al Qaeda more as a risk, a risk to their own future control, than they saw as an opportunity here.

Saddam would only take on those groups he could totally control.  If you followed Abu Nidal's checkered path in and out of Iraq, when he didn't cooperate he was in Syria or Libya.  And when he would, he was in Baghdad.

Now, it's the job of an intelligence agency and organization to do this, to determine all these things.  Any intelligence operat [ph] worth its salt does that.  So I don't think we should waste time with did they or didn't they, was there an attempt or wasn't.  They also were in areas where it would have been hard to avoid each other, like Khartoum, for example, where everybody was running around in the 1990s--Iranian operates, Iraqi, Palestinian.  You name it, they were there.

Now, one thing.  I was surprised to find my testimony to the 9/11 Commission in this book at the second to the last page.  Thank you, but I would note that from my statement you draw a wrong conclusion, asserting that if Iraq provided al Qaeda training on weapons of mass destruction, it was only to penetrate an organization opposed to Saddam.  I never said that.  I never said Iraq provided WMD training or weapons to al Qaeda and there's no way that could be inferred from my testimony, and that part I doubt happened.

Now, I've said the meeting--I'm finishing up, okay.  This always happens.  Darn.

Apparent cooperation before.  I have deep problems with that.  Cooperation after the occupation?  No, I have no problem there.  We're seeing a new age and new needs and new cooperation, and you can't apply the same kind of judgments that existed when Saddam was in power to what is happening now.

One of the most troubling claims I found in there was the Ansar al Islam [ph], which existed in the Kurdish extremist group that existed in northern Iraq linked to al Qaeda.  Of that there is no question, but I do have a problem.  All of the claims made about what they were doing there--that was one of the first targets, I think, that the special forces hit when the war started and nothing was found to corroborate these claims, to my knowledge.

I want to deal with the Zarkawi legend for 1.5 minutes--seconds, I mean.  Sorry.  Zarkawi.  I think there's a legend here.  Did he have a missing leg or not?  Was he treated in Baghdad or not?  We continue to see evidence, including some that I just saw over the weekend in press, has both legs, never treated in Baghdad.  What are we talking about?  So I think that the window is still open to this and to what went on.

Now, let me conclude, finally.  Mr. Hayes links Iraq to every attack on U.S. interests in the 1990s, including Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.  Now, I have no intention, as I said, of being a staunch and simple defender of the CIA or any other intelligence organization.

But when I hear the expression "intelligence community says" and I read the evidence produced on this and other issues by Mr. Feith, I have to ask myself what intelligence agency are we talking about, who said this, who approved it.  And I think that is a question that needs to be examined.

I think Mr. Hayes is absolutely spot-on to point out the multiple intelligence failures that left us vulnerable that made 9/11 possible.  I think the story in the Philippines is a very intriguing one that I would like to know more about because that has a great ring of truth in it.

But in conclusion, let me put it in this sense.  An Islamic tradition, the veracity and authenticity of the stories about the saying and the practices of the prophet Muhammad, Islam, all of the sects of Islam are based in the Koran, the sayings of the prophet, the Hadi [ph], and on the practices; what did the prophet say and how did he live, what did he do, the Suna [ph].

Now, the accuracy of those stories is based on something called isnad [ph], the chain.  Can you verify the chain, the authenticity of the people who are telling these stories, to know if they are true or not?  Bad isnad, bad story, bad chain.  I think it's the same with The Connection and on many stories about Iraq's involvement here.  There's not one that is based on really good isnad.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.

Peter, tell us.

MR. BERGEN:  Well, thank you very much.  First of all, I wanted to say that I enjoyed Stephen Hayes' book a great deal.  I thought it was well written and it attempted, I think, balance.  But I sort of disagree with his conclusions.  I mean, the subtitle is How Al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.  I'm not really sure that's the case.

I haven't prepared anything exactly.  I'm going to jump around a couple of different thoughts.  First of all, I think the most important thing we should talk about is outcomes.  What major terrorism attack of the last decade can we lay at the feet of Iraq?

I don't think we can lay 9/11.  I don't think we can lay the U.S. embassy bombing attacks.  I don't think we can lay the USS Cole.  I don't think we can lay Oklahoma City.  I know that Mr. Woolsey will disagree with that.  I don't think we can lay World Trade Center Number 1, nor can we lay Khobar Towers, which was an Iranian operation, it seems, not an Iraqi operation.

So even if we accepted that every single thing that Stephen Hayes has said is correct, I don't think we can point to a single outcome of a serious terrorist operation that involved Iraq and al Qaeda together.  I do think that Mr. Hayes raises a very good and interesting story about this guy Hekmat Shakir who was at this Malaysia meeting, this key planning meeting.  If indeed Shakir was a lieutenant colonel, as Mr. Hayes suggests, or may have been at this key 9/11 planning meeting, of course, that is something that, you know, cries out for further investigation.

But I do think this point about outcomes is important.  There is no denying the fact that Saddam Hussein was funding Palestinian--you know, the families of Palestinian suicide terrorists.  He was also giving safe haven to people like Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas.  Somebody described Baghdad as sort of a hospice for these aging Palestinian terrorists.  Of course, Abu Nidal committed suicide in the run-up to the Iraq war, which I think we Saddam's sort of ham-handed effort to say, hey, I'm not involved in terrorism.

One of the striking things to me when I was researching a book on al Qaeda and bin Laden is how few Iraqis there were in al Qaeda.  We can only point to one, only one important member.  His name is Salim.  You may remember him as the guy who stabbed a prison guard in the eye, paralyzing him.  He was one of the original founders of al Qaeda and he played a very important role in al Qaeda.

However, he was arrested in '98, in Germany, which means that he obviously played no role in any of the subsequent attacks--the Cole, 9/11, the Bali attacks, the Madrid attacks.  The Bali attacks and the Madrid attacks also, of course, had no Iraqi involvement.

So when I was researching my book, another thing struck me.  There were no Iraqis.  There were more Americans than Iraqis.  Al Qaeda had deeper roots in Brooklyn than in Baghdad.  Al Qaeda had a main headquarters office in Brooklyn, on Atlantic Avenue above the unfortunately named Fu King Restaurant, and that was closed down only in '93.

In fact, some very senior members of al Qaeda were Americans, not Iraqis--Ali Mohammed [ph], after all, the main trainer of al Qaeda; also, Wadi Al Haj [ph], bin Laden's personal secretary, and the list goes on.

When I say this, I'm not making an argument for bombing downtown Brooklyn.  I'm simply saying that there are lots of, lots of different nationalities in al Qaeda and very few Iraqis.  And, in fact, there is a rather good study that has just come out that I recommend you read by Mark Sageman [ph], a CIA case officer, who is also a forensic psychiatrist, called "Understanding Terror Networks."

And he has written an authoritative account of who joins al Qaeda based on the known biographies of 172 al Qaeda members or associates.  He only found one Iraqi, lots of Saudis, lots of Yemenis, lots of Algerians.  His sample has now expanded from the 172 in the book to 400; again, only one Iraqi, so very few Iraqi members.

And, of course, then there was bin Laden's attitude himself.  Now, my attitude to all this is somewhat colored by the fact that when I met bin Laden in '97, when this was a subject of zero interest, we asked him, what do you think of Saddam?  And he said, well, he's a bad Muslim and he took Kuwait for his own self-aggrandizement.

Now, both of these statements have the truth defense.  Saddam was a bad Muslim and he did take Kuwait for his own self-aggrandizement.  Believe me, there's no love lost.  Now, I'm not of the school that--of course, it's a ridiculous sort of a straw man to say that these people would never cooperate.  Of course, people will cooperate.  The question is did they cooperate.

I'm not saying that Saddam and bin Laden wouldn't cooperate.  I'm just saying what's the real evidence?  I think the evidence is rather thin.  These people are meeting in Sudan, Khartoum.  When Tenet testified, by the way, that there had been meetings between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade, that was an interesting construction.  It's sort of true.  He testified in 2002.

Yes, these meetings went back a decade, but they stopped in '96 because that's when bin Laden left to go to Afghanistan.  And other than this supposed meeting with Hijazi, who is now in our custody and I think he would have mentioned--if he had told his interrogators that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan, I don't think that is something the Bush administration would be keeping secret.

So the fact is that bin Laden wasn't meeting with Iraqis after '96, and it was only in August of '96 that bin Laden became truly radicalized, when he started, A, calling for a world Islamic front against the crusaders and the Jews; B, sending his suicide attackers to the embassy attacks in Africa; D, the USS Cole; D, 9/11.

Now, what's interesting about the conspirators in these attacks--they're all Saudis, Algerians and Yemenis.  Not a single conspirator in any of these attacks is an Iraqi.  Now, of course, the Iraqi spy agency, which by the way is regarded as sort of Inspector Clousseau by people in the intelligence business--these are people who are very good at killing Iraqi dissidents, but not very good at doing operations outside their own country.

It is, of course, possible that there would be non-Iraqis recruited by Iraq to do things on behalf of al Qaeda, but I'm not seeing that.  And I think one of the things I'm not seeing is sort of this black hole, a black hole of information that would prove this Iraqi-al Qaeda connection.

Obviously, Stephen has done a very good job of reporting what's out there, but I think if there was a real connection--al Qaeda was one of the most bureaucratic terrorist organizations in history.  You had to sign an application form to join.  The New York Times recovered 5,000 pages of documents after the fall of the Taliban.  The Wall Street Journal actually got Ayman Alzawari's [ph] main computer, with thousands of documents, many of them encrypted.

CNN found the entire al Qaeda videotape collection.  Now, in none of these collections of videotapes or on the main al Qaeda computer, many of which documents were encrypted, or in the 5,000 documents the New York Times recovered--and I'm just talking about the more obvious ones.  There were also stories in many, many papers about recovered documents in Afghanistan.

None of these stories and none of these journalists--after all, some of the aggressive journalists in the world were in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban--did they find a connection to Saddam.  And we're sort of seeing the same thing again in Baghdad.  We've been there a year.

The Iraq Memory Foundation has recovered six million documents, a third of them since the fall of the Iraq regime.  And if you talk to the people who run it, they will say we are not seeing it.  And these are the people that are being asked to authenticate documents found by people like Stephen or the U.S. government and they are not seeing the Iraqi-al Qaeda alliance.  In fact, what they're seeing is something almost counter-intuitive, which is that al Qaeda was maybe making sort of signs that it wanted to be on board with Iraq, but Iraq was very, very hesitant even up to the eve of the war.

In conclusion, you know, I guess two points.  One, Stephen has written, I think, a very well-written book and a book well worth reading.  Two, it's largely based on the Feith memo which the Pentagon officially disavowed very swiftly after it came out.

Three, we do have moles inside al Qaeda now and they're talking to us.  They're called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaida, and they have produced actionable intelligence that has put people behind bars; first of all, Iymam Faris [ph], a Chicago trucker, who is spending 20 years in prison because of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told American interrogators about his plans to bring down the Brooklyn; and, secondly, Abu Zubaida, who has put Jose Padilla behind bars.  We're not really sure what the charges against Padilla are yet, but the Justice Department says that he was trying to blow up a radiological bomb.  At the same that they're putting people behind bars, they're also denying any link to Saddam, and I think that sort of speaks for itself.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Jim, please tell us.

MR. WOOLSEY:  I think it's important to focus in these debates on the nature of the claims because people slide very readily from talking about sponsorship to talking about connections, to talking about support, without distinguishing what it is they are alleging or denying.

Now, we should start, I believe, with George Tenet's two statements on the subject, the first, on October, I believe, 2nd of 2002, not only, as Peter Bergen mentioned, that connections, meetings between Iraq, Iraqi intelligence, went back a decade--and he did not mention that they stopped in '96; he said they went back a decade--but also that Iraqi intelligence had provided training in, quote, "poisons, gases and conventional explosives"--training in poisons, gases and conventional explosives.

Then in Tenet's subsequent statement that was mentioned, I believe, by Stephen, he said in March of this past year that Iraqi intelligence had provided, quote, "training, funding and safe haven."

Now, those statements together, I would submit, constitute that the intelligence community of the United States formally and definitely believes there was a connection between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.  There was not only a connection; there was, over time, training, funding, provision of safe haven, and training precisely in poisons, gases and conventional explosives.

So when someone such as Dick Clarke says no connection of any kind ever, he is not quarreling with Stephen Hayes or Laurie Milroy, or to far lesser matter of importance, me.  He's quarreling with the intelligence community and their considered and formal judgment expressed to the Congress twice.

Now, the intelligence community got used to, back in the '70s and '80s, talking about state-sponsorship--quote, "sponsorship" of terrorist organizations.  There are examples of state sponsorship.  I believe certainly Hizbollah, sponsored by Iran, is a perfectly fine example.

When you sponsor something, you pay for it and direct it to some extent.  Texaco decides it's going to be the Marriage of Figaro on Saturday afternoon opera; it will not be Die Fledermaus.  It will begin at two o'clock, it will end at 5:00 p.m., and we will pay for it.  That's sponsorship.

Virtually no one I know in this debate has argued that Iraq, quote, "sponsored" al Qaeda.  There are several reasons for that.  First of all, al Qaeda is far too wealthy to be sponsored.  Indeed, when they were in Afghanistan, and to some extent in Sudan, I think what we had was terrorist-sponsored states, not state-sponsored terrorism.

So if you passionately and firmly deny that there was sponsorship of al Qaeda by the government of Iraq, you were denying something that I think none of the reasonable participants in this debate would allege.

So the first thing I think we have to get clear is the nature of the connections that are being alleged.  And Stephen is careful.  He talks about connections, he talks about ties, he talks about things with precision.  He does not allege, nor has George Tenet, control, direction and the like.  That, to me, is the first and most important point to focus on.

The second thing is that groups of intelligence analysts--and here I have some experience in this matter, briefer than Judith's, but nonetheless some of these cases are rather salient in my mind.  Groups of intelligence analysts can develop an idee fixe [ph].

It came to be, I believe, over the years an idee fixe among many intelligence analysts, and I would say some journalists, that the religious does not cooperate with the secular; that al Qaeda and Hizbollah, for example, are religious fundamentalist terrorist organizations, and they and secular Baathists hate one another.  And this is true.  They hate each other all the time.  They call one another bad Muslims.

But, you know, history is rather rife with examples of groups of intelligence analysts and journalists and public officials with an idee fixe who said that people of one ideology would never cooperate in any way with another.

The history of the Popular Front and the events of the 1930s up until the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 was one in which all, essentially all of the better people in Europe who looked at these issues were sure that the Nazis and the communists would never cooperate with one another on anything.  The Poles and others found out to the contrary, to their great dismay, in September of 1939.

Then it was said, look at Stalin; he would never work with any religious institution.  I mean, he was tearing down churches and cathedrals right and left.  The main killing ground for much of what went on in Moscow was at the site of a ruined and destroyed cathedral--totally different ideologies.  And then he needs the Russian Orthodox Church because Germany attacks.  And so what happens?  Stalin decides to wrap himself in the cloak of Russian Orthodoxy, and throughout the rest of World War II you couldn't find a better buddy from the communists' point of view than the Russian Orthodox clergy.

History is full of cases of people who study these issues, who are themselves intellectually inclined, who believe that the intellectual roots of something are so terribly important that they will never be bridged in the interest of totalitarian cooperation against democracies or otherwise.

My own judgment is different.  My own judgment is that there is a lot more commonality among totalitarians, whether they come at things from a religious base, such as some in al Qaeda do, or a secular base, such as the Baathists, and that there is no more reason to deny the possibility of their working together than there is to deny the possibility, as Michael Ledeen has used the analogy, of Mafia families, who hate each other and kill each other and insult each other all the time, cooperating from time to time against a common enemy.

We notice, I think, in both Peter's and Judith's comments, a fairly substantial reliance on what Osama bin Laden said, on what Saddam Hussein said, on what various al Qaeda prisoners, Iraqi prisoners have said.

I'm frankly not entirely inclined to take those individuals at their word.  I would say Stephen has written a very detailed and thorough and well-done gloss on those two George Tenet declarations of connections between al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.

As one assesses these connections, I think one has to pay attention to the proposition that this set of connections was certainly something that both sides for their own reasons were doing their very best to hide, and that when one sees such examples as Zarkawi getting his leg treated and being taken care of in Baghdad, when one sees an example such as Abdul Rahman Yassin participating in the 1993 bombing, one of the two principal   ?    bombing of the World Trade Center, flying back via Jordan to Iraq--and we now know, didn't know until recently, being not only permitted to live in his home, but being paid by the Iraqi government--when we see such steps as Shakir, apparently now a lieutenant colonel in Saddam's Fedelin, attending the terrorist summit in Malaysia in January of 2000, where 9/11 and perhaps other attacks were planned, we should do more in the interests of understanding this war we are in than dismiss them with a quip because these types of indicators are things that should demand of us, not suggest, demand of us further detailed investigation in order to understand.

We are, in my judgment, in a long war here in the 21st century against totalitarian movements in the Middle East, at least two of Islamist roots--the ruling Guadido Faqi [ph] of Iran, the Islamist terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and their Wahabbi underpinnings, and the fascists such as the Baathist regime residuals in Iraq and the regime of Syria.

This struggle is going to go on, I think, for decades.  We're going to have to understand how these groups relate to one another.  Dismissing the possibility of connections that have formally and in detail been declared by the Director of Central Intelligence, I believe, is unwise.

[Applause.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Okay.  I'm going to ask Stephen Hayes if he has a few remarks to make and then we'll see what you all think.

MR. HAYES:  I'll just clean up a little bit.  I want to respond to a couple of things.  I'll start with what Judith Yaphe said.  She said that the books attempts to make links from Iraq to every attack in the 1990s.  Not true.  I know she read the book.  She must have just missed that.  I don't say anything about several attacks in the 1990s and I'm very careful about what I do say about the attacks that I believe Iraq may have had a hand in.  So that's just not the case.

With respect to Zarkawi, I wrote this down as close as I can.  I don't want to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I get it wrong.  But she said he appears to have both legs, which means he never received medical treatment in Baghdad.  And I would say that that's not the case.

Is that what you said?  No?

MS. YAPHE:  [Inaudible.]

MR. HAYES:  Well, I thought that's what you said.

The Zarkawi story, I think, is the perfect example of how, you know, we learn more everyday.  This is a developing story.  My book, much as I hoped that it was comprehensive, changes and the information changes.  Now, it looks as though Zarkawi indeed had surgery; it was not an amputated leg, but had nasal surgery.  I was told that from my sources.  It was also reported--those of you snickering--by ABC News, a more esteemed, perhaps, journalist outfit.

MR.           :  [Inaudible.]

[Laughter.]

MR. HAYES:  I am very, very sensitive to   ?     that I somehow misrepresented or misled or gave people the wrong impression about your testimony.  I certainly don't want to do that, and if I could, I would just submit it for the record.  But since I can't, I'd like to just read it.  It's very brief.

The question came from John Lehman on the September 11th Commission.  Lehman says, there have been many press reports of the recovery of materials in Afghanistan and in Baghdad that indicate that al Qaeda received technical training in weapons of mass destruction, and received not only training, but some ability to manufacture them.  Have you seen such evidence that the Iraqis are involved in this, and if not Iraqi intelligence, who?

Yaphe: "No.  I've seen the press reports just as you have, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the Iraqis did provide some kind of training.  And that would be a perfectly normal thing.  Train them, see if you can suborn them, see if you can take them over.  But that wouldn't mean that they trusted them or that they did operational planning.  I think you have to be careful to sort out what you try to do to win the hearts and minds of these groups to work for you and your objectives and where you draw the line.  But, again, as I say, that's almost what you'd expect to be part of the trade craft and the mission of intelligence of these groups and being in contact or trying to win over and find out a lot about to penetrate these groups.  And we know that the Iraqis were highly successful in penetrating organizations that were opposed to them--the dissidents abroad, other terrorist groups.  Why wouldn't they have tried that with al Qaeda?  I mean, what did they have to lose?

And here's my sort of summary: "So even if Iraq provided al Qaeda with training on weapons of mass destruction, the argument goes, it was only to penetrate an organization opposed to Saddam's regime.  And that might be an appropriate line for a CIA analyst or an academic, but it doesn't work for the policymakers who have to act upon suspected threats."  So I do hope I didn't misrepresent what you had to say.

And the last sort of clean-up has to do with this Feith memo that both of the dissenters suggest--you might think that I just republished the entire memo and didn't actually write a book.  That's not the case.  The book is 200 pages long, 194 pages long.  The Feith memo takes up perhaps 15 pages of it.  It's important.

I used the parts of the Feith memo that appeared to me to be the best corroborated.  But, you know, to argue that the book is somehow not credible because it relies too heavily on the Feith memo--I just think that doesn't wash.

Last point.  In the book, I actually scrutinize a couple points in the Feith memo that didn't seem to track with me or don't work, given the historical record.  So in a sense, I've done more to criticize that memo than many other journalists.

So, thanks.

MR. LEDEEN:  Okay, we'll take questions.  There are people with microphones floating around.  Try to get their attention, speak into the microphone.  Please, identify yourself.  Please, do not give speeches.  Please, ask questions.

MR. HUSEY:  I'm Peter Husey [ph] and I'm from the National Defense University Foundation, and I am not speaking for either the Foundation or the university.  I have to say that all the time.

My question is for both Jim and to some degree Judy, is that in 1995 an NIU was produced by the CIA saying there was no missile threat from North Korea and Iran for 15 years.  Bob Walpole [ph] at my breakfast in 1999 admitted that the information in the NIE that said North Korea could build an ICBM by the year 2000 was omitted and never submitted to Congress.

The Rumsfeld report of 1998 said exactly that, that North Korea was five years away from building a nuclear--an ICBM.  It turns out Bob Walpole in our breakfast said, I can't disagree with anything the Rumsfeld Commission said.

It is, as Jim said, mythology, because the Rumsfeld Commission was wrong and the NIE in 1995 is right.  And if you talk to Graham, of the Washington Post, Pincus, anybody, and you ask them, was the Rumsfeld Commission of 1998 correct, they say no, when, in fact, the question is the NIE, according to Bob Walpole, said, without it being revealed in retrospect, that the Rumsfeld Commission was very right.  And yet that is not part of the popular wisdom.

MR. WOOLSEY:  Popular wisdom is often wrong.  I don't find that surprising.  I served on the Rumsfeld Commission.  The '95 NIE not only, I think, missed with respect to its mirror-imaging of foreign ICBM ballistic missile programs by assuming they were going to be as detailed and as focused on reliability, and so forth, as earlier programs.  It also forgot about Alaska and Hawaii.  It assessed only the threat to the lower 48 states.  It was an altogether, I think, extremely poor piece of work and we said so in the Rumsfeld Commission.  But I don't have anything further to say, except that one should always be ready to challenge official wisdom, especially as it comes out in the press.

MS. YAPHE:  I'll agree with Jim on that and I'll go further than you, Peter.  First of all, everything the intelligence community says should be taken with, I think--many things should be taken with a grain of salt.

And I'll bring it home to this point.  This is not about Korea, but looking at Iraq, the intelligence community was wrong on how long it would take Iraq to get the bomb, so that as of, what, the late '80s, 1990, oh, what, they are 5 to 10 years away?  It turns out they were six months away.

So after the war when I heard us saying, well, Iran, they're a decade away, if anyone was going to--you know, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

MR. LEDEEN:  Well, anyway, raise your hands for the next question.

We have always been surprised at the speed with which other countries have developed nuclear weapons.  I don't know a single case where we have not been surprised.

Yes?

MS. ROSAT:     ?    discriminating toward this side of the room.  That's great.

Claudia Rosat [ph].  I'm a journalist and I have a question involving the UN Oil for Food program that ran under Saddam for the final seven years.  And during certainly the last four, there's considerable evidence that there was a huge amount of room through his oil sales and relief purchasing to finance almost anything via 75 companies registered to buy oil in Dubai, more than 50 in Switzerland, Panama, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, et cetera.

My question is has our intelligence community carefully looked at that business for the possibility that funding went to al Qaeda via those contracts.

Thank you.

MS. YAPHE:  It was known for some time that Saddam was demanding kickbacks.  You want contracts, you send 5 percent or 10 percent to my Swiss bank account or whatever.  That was known.  And I will say quite candidly that when informationally that was brought to the administration, sometimes they didn't want to hear it.  I'll tell you when it's a violation or it's something to worry about.

But, anyway, that was the kickback problem, but that that money went to al Qaeda--I have never seen anything to suggest that.  The assumption--and I think it's a good one--it went right into his private account.

MS.          :  [Inaudible.]

MS. YAPHE:  Considering the number of people in the CIA and in the counter-terrorism community that are focused on al Qaeda, I would be surprised if they didn't look for that, but I cannot answer that.  I don't have knowledge of that.

MR.          :  I don't know.

MR. LEDEEN:  He's coming.

MR. ERMART:  I have a question for Jim Woolsey.  My name is Fritz Ermart [ph].  I'm the director of national security programs at the Nixon Center, also a veteran of some of this business.

Jim, by the way, your point about ideology is right on.  I mean, there are even more recent and dramatic evident examples of that in Soviet support of ideologically very distasteful terrorist movements in Europe and elsewhere in the '70s and '80s.

My question, Jim, is directed at you, but others may have something to say about it.  I'm not aware of any published analysis of the attack scenario itself of 9/11 for clues as to its provenance and sources of support.

Now, conceptually, it was very elegant in its simplicity.  You know, of the two or three different ways you could use planes as bombs with a suicide squad aboard, they picked the best.  There are some other ones we won't go into possibly still available.

But while elegant and simple, it was operationally sophisticated and complex.  I mean, if you don't think it's kind of tricky for five or six people to kill a few with very small cold weapons, to intimidate everybody else and then seize control of an airplane, you know, you haven't done martial arts or anything like that.  This required training.

MR. LEDEEN:  And so your question is?

MR. ERMART:  My question is have any of the commissions examined the attack scenario itself; I think that, you know, probable cause just in the attack scenario itself to look for the kind of support, training, operational reconnaissance that al Qaeda probably couldn't do for itself.

MR. BERGEN:  For that, by the way, there's a 900-page report by the Congressional inquiry into 9/11 which says--I mean, it doesn't mention Iraq at all as being involved.  There's also a bipartisan committee that will report on July 27th which also indicates no Iraqi involvement.

And there were 175,000 interviews conducted for the 9/11 inquiry; no Iraqi connection following up 500,000 leads.  So there's sort of an absence of this Iraq thing in terms of the question you're asking.

MR. WOOLSEY:  I don't know, Fritz, of scenario planning, unless something comes out in one of these reports, or any model scenario or anything involving that.  I would say I continue to believe that one should keep an open mind on the possibility of the April 8, 2001, meeting that Al Ani [ph] had with someone in Prague.

What we know is that there were two previous Atta trips to Prague after he had begun the planning for 9/11.  We know that Atta was last seen four days before that April meeting in the United States checking out of a hotel, and then next on April 11th back in the United States.  We know that George Tenet has said that he did not travel during that week on any of his known aliases.  That's it.

There are statements from Czech officials that they believe that it is a substantially greater than 50-percent likelihood that the person he met with on April 8th was--that Al Ani met with was Atta.  There are certainly people who doubt that.

There are new reports that Atta may have been provided with Moroccan passports by some of those who were involved.  And that should be checked out to see, A, whether it's true, and, B, if a Moroccan traveled from Florida to Prague during that period of time.

And, finally, there are reports from Prague--those who follow Edward J. Epstein's [ph] website on this will know this--that at least some current BIS officials--I believe the head of BIS in Prague--believe that there are records of Al Ani's meetings that have turned up that indicate that he met on that date in April with, quote, "a Hamburg student," which was the way Atta filed his earlier visa request for Prague.

I don't know whether that's true or not yet.  I haven't seen any public reports or documentation of that Al Ani day book.  But if one is looking at the issue of possible Iraqi involvement in 9/11 itself, again, I make only this case.  But I do make this: It is something about which we should for the time being suspend judgment and pursue inquiries, not that it is an article of faith that Iraq led or even participated in the 9/11 attacks, but that it is a possibility there was a connection and that there are things to run down that I would stand behind.

MS. YAPHE:  I'd like to just say one thing because Fritz asked the question.  One of my early mentors at CIA taught me never assume and always look to the higher level of analysis.  And I think that you have to do it in this case.

The question, I think, is more like did al Qaeda need things or the kinds of information, support and assistance that Iraq might provide.  I don't think so, because if they had worked with the Iraqis, probably the operation wouldn't have worked.  Peter suggested that.  But I think that we tend to underestimate their capabilities, their educational skills, backgrounds, that they could pull this off.  They didn't need that kind of assistance.

MR. HAYES:  Yes.  If I could just add my two cents, I actually agree with Judith.  I don't think al Qaeda needed state sponsorship, necessarily, to pull this off.  I think they have shown over the years--and Peter's book points this out--increasing sophistication which would suggest that they could indeed pull off an operation like this without state sponsorship.

That said, I do think it's important to keep an open mind about the Atta meeting.  I mean, one thing that seems to have gotten lost in the sort of momentum of current conventional wisdom on the Atta meeting is that five Czechs remain on the record claiming the meeting took place.

Now, when I interviewed some of these folks, I think it's fair to say that they were less emphatic about--they were less certain perhaps about the case, but they seemed to suggest that at least in their view, the meeting likely did take place.  And one of the other things that I report in this book is that George Tenet says privately that he believes the meeting took place, when pressed.

I have also done some checking into this story of the Al Ani day book and I don't have anything really new to report.  The Czechs I've spoken with are not familiar of this new discovery.

MR. LEDEEN:  Next.  Where is the microphone?

MR. CORN:  Hi.  David Corn [ph] from the Nation magazine.  And it seems to me that it's very hard to get into issues of accuracy of intelligence reporting.  We've heard that the '95 NIE on Korea was wrong.  Yet, Director Woolsey wants us to take Director Tenet at his word when he talks about the al Qaeda training linked with Iraq.

But yet the NIE produced in October 2002 on weapons of mass destruction certainly contained some major errors.  At least it seems that way at this state of time.  So it seems like on each side of any issue, you be rather selective in pointing out when to believe an NIE or the director and when not to.

And, you know, trying to get your book more directly, Steve, it seems in intelligence reporting, as in journalism, a key thing is trying to find out what a connection means and how to evaluate a source.  If there was a meeting with Atta, unless you knew what was said in that meeting, what transpired, how could you tell what it really meant in significance, unless you could sort of trace it back to other members of Iraqi intelligence or not?  I mean, the meeting would certainly be worth looking into and grounds for further investigation.

MR. LEDEEN:  And your question is?

MR. CORN:  Well, I want to know, when looking at connections, you know, if you just have dots and links, how do you build a better story, particularly when you see what happened with the Chalabbi case.  And when we had--

MR. LEDEEN:  No, no, no, that's fine.

MR. CORN:  Wait, wait, wait.

MR. LEDEEN:  No, we're not going to have--

MR. CORN:  Let me round the corner on the question, Michael, and I'll be finished.

MR. LEDEEN:  No.  Please, turn off the microphone.  I think we've got the question.

MR. CORN:  Okay.  At Michael's request, I won't, but I can understand why you don't want me to get into that.

MR. HAYES:  Those are interesting and important issues and questions.  And, you know, sort of if you flipped your formulation, one could then ask, given all of this uncertainty, how are people like Richard Clarke out there making categorical statements that there absolutely could not have been a relationship, no matter what.

And it seems to me that if you're talking about murkiness and you're talking about the unknown, those of us arguing for further examination and further exploration of these questions, of these issues, are the ones who are on your side, not those who are saying there was no connection, there could be no connection, this is absolutely ridiculous, you know, let's drop it.

And ultimately I think, you know, what your question comes down to is a question of proof versus evidence.  And I think we've seen in the past that when we wait for proof of an attack, we often don't find it.

And, you know, the President has been criticized, I think, viciously for missing the dots, for failing to connect the dots before September 11th.  And I would say that the dots around that particular event were certainly a lot less clear than the constellation that we have that is this connection.

And while we're not talking about a specific event necessarily, we're talking about a relationship that I think was threatening and that I think presented a unique threat, given the history of both al Qaeda and Saddam.

MR. WOOLSEY:  Could I try to deal a mortal blow to this terrible analogy of connecting the dots?

MR. HAYES:  That wasn't mine.

MR. WOOLSEY:  I know.  It's lots of people's.

If you get a children's magazine and it has a picture of a bunny rabbit in it and you follow the line to connect the dots to have the picture show up to be a bunny rabbit, the dots are numbered.  Failing to connect the dots and find the bunny rabbit is pretty dumb because all you have got to know is that 2 comes 1 and 3 comes after 2, and you need to be able to use a pencil.  Intelligence is nothing like that.  There are no numbers on the dots.

MR. LEDEEN:  We have some people in the front here.

MR. GEDRICH:  Frank Gedrich [ph], Freedom Alliance.  Every year, the State Department puts out a report called The Patterns of Global Terrorism, and Iraq has been listed on that particular report for quite a few years now, over a decade.  And, also, in each of the annual reports you'll see that the State Department believes there were at least a minimum of five terrorist organizations operating in Iraq.

Now, regarding al Qaeda and looking at the 2002 report, it doesn't say specifically that those were one of the groups, but it does mention that al Qaeda operated in no less than 60 countries.

Is there any evidence from the State Department of the CIA that's available that would indicate what those countries--who they are?

MR. WOOLSEY:     ?    with the State Department report.  I have no idea how they put it together.

MS. YAPHE:  I know how that report used to be put together, and that was to look at statistics that were compiled and then weighed and measured.  But I have no idea how the State Department goes about it today, and I'm sure if one were to do some kind of a literature search, open-source, you could come up with probably close to those 60 countries, many of them in Europe and in Asia.

MR. BERGEN:  Another point about that report.  It also points out that Iraq has not been involved in any active anti-American terrorism since '93--a botched attempt to assassinate President Bush.  These are yearly reports, authoritative, put together by the Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism in the State Department.  So I think that kind of speaks for itself.

MR. HAYES:  It does indeed speak for itself, except for one of those--I think you're probably referring to the 2000 State Department report.  In the previous year, the State Department report sketches out a plot by Al Ani's predecessor, the top Iraqi intelligence official, in Prague in the late '90s, Javir Salim [ph], to blow up Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, in Prague.

And as far as I know from the folks that I've talked to, that was a legitimate plot, a legitimate threat.  The Czechs were on high alert.  They put Jersey barriers up.

I guess I'm done.

[Laughter.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Where's the mike?

MR. KINCAID:  Les Kincaid [ph], Accuracy in Media.  You know, here we are, two-and-a-half years after the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, and in the spirit of further inquiry I was wondering if Ms. Yaphe and Mr. Bergen and others would agree that maybe it's about time to look at some possible foreign connections to those attacks, since all the government has done is ruin the career and life of a former government scientist and drain a Maryland pond and find an old bicycle.  Isn't that a major intelligence failure?

And one follow-up to Mr. Bergen about the documents discovered by the New York Times in Afghanistan.  I understand one of the al Qaeda documents did have an elaborate description of the Oklahoma City bomb.  Now, what is the significance in your mind of that?

MR. BERGEN:  I don't know.  On the anthrax, you know, it's a disgrace that no one has been found for this.  So, you know, obviously the investigation is stalled, and I couldn't agree with you more.

MS. YAPHE:  I may be wrong because I'm not a biological or scientific specialist, but I thought when they analyzed the anthrax and could identify by the signature, the composition, what that came from and who might have supplied it so they could trace it back to several labs--and there was something about the composition which indicated the anthrax that the Iraqis had had certain signatures, but that weren't present in the anthrax that showed up in the United States.  But you'd have to ask someone who     ?       .

MR. WOOLSEY:  Could I add one point on the anthrax?  The conventional wisdom again is that this was a crazed, solitary American microbiologist operating, say, out of a cave somewhere under Trenton, New Jersey.  If it was, it was either a very quick crazed, solitary microbiologist, because the first mailings were six days after 9/11 and the first one- to three-micron anthrax were 28 days after 9/11, so he got his cave laboratory organized in a very few days.  Or was a very lucky, crazed, solitary microbiologist because he was already to go.  9/11 occurred, unbeknownst to him, and he thought, ah-hah, I'll start writing as if I'm an Islamist fundamentalist.

It is also interesting Mr. Atta comes back to us, that he took another gentleman, who turned out to be one of the other hijackers, for treatment in Florida near where the first anthrax attacks were, near where he lived, who had a black lesion on his leg in the summer of 2001.  Atta got the man treatment.  The doctor said at the time he had never seen anything like this.  He didn't know what it was.  He gave him some antibiotics.  They went away.  Both died, of course, on 9/11.

It's my understanding, based on Washington Post reports, the last ones I've seen, that as of today, both that physician in Florida and two experts on anthrax at Johns Hopkins say that it's more probable than not--I don't know whether they mean 51 percent or 99 percent, but more probable than not that that lesion on the leg was cutaneous anthrax.  That raises some interesting questions, which again I suggest we should pursue rather than burying.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.

The question in the back someplace.

MR. HITCHINS:  My name is Christopher Hitchins.  Can I invite you briefly to make either an inference or an induction from the following?  Mr. Zarkawi is in Iraq now.  If he has done half of what he claims to have done, he has pulled off some very sophisticated, very well-timed, very deadly, very well-equipped operations, including perhaps one in Jordan.

Here's my question of inference or induction: What would you think will be his chances of getting started in Iraq as a freelance who had just happened to arrive from Afghanistan after September 11th, whether he was paying through the knees or the nose, whichever   ?     ?    In other words, do you imagine that he can't have been doing this without party or state infrastructural support?

Thank you.

MR. BERGEN:  Doing what?

MR. HITCHINS:  Doing, Peter, what you know he's been doing.

[Laughter.]

MR. HITCHINS:  Shall I draw you a picture?  I was trying to stay in line with the injunction of brevity.

MR. BERGEN:  Okay.

MR.           :  We're all grateful for--

MR. HITCHINS:  These are not    ?    attacks.  They're very well-organized.  They started very quickly.  Shall I say they appear to be coordinated with the Fedelin Saddam, an organization in development somewhat before.  We're not talking about anything but what we're talking about--direct collusion between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathism.

If it's happening now, are you telling me it started yesterday?  Can you explain--

MR. BERGEN:  Christopher, can I answer?

MR. HITCHINS:  Oh, well, I'm sorry.  I thought you--

MR. BERGEN:   ?    playing on.

[Laughter.]

MR. BERGEN:  You    ?    on     ?    anybody else    ?     on.  But let me just say, in answer, because Zarkawi, of course, is very important to all this, Zarkawi, as I'm sure you all know, had an organization called the Touheed [ph] organization, which means "unity" in Arabic.

We know from the Zarkawi letter that was discovered in January of this year, a 17-page letter to al Qaeda's leaders, that he very clearly saw himself as running an organization that was separate from al Qaeda.  And, in fact, in the letter he says I'd like your guys' help, but if you can't offer it, I won't hold it against you kind of thing.

So, obviously, he felt some degree of comfort with al Qaeda's leaders, but this is not a guy who is part of al Qaeda.  And if you talk to any U.S. intelligence official or European intelligence official, they will say that Zarkawi is a competitor to al Qaeda.  And, in fact, right now he's trying to make himself even, you know, bigger than bin Laden, in a sense.

I accept your point, Christopher, of course, that Zarkawi couldn't be in Baghdad, or was very unlikely that he be in Baghdad without Iraqi connivance.  On the other hand, also, these people tend to have extremely good, as we know, aliases, et cetera.  And there are many Jordanians in Iraq, so I think it remains an open question.  Was he there with the sanction of the state or not?  I'm not sure.

Even the CIA would say, our belief is that he was there with the sanction of the state.  They can't say that for sure.  So the picture is rather murky.  And the picture about Zarkawi's exact relationship to al Qaeda, I think, is also very murky.

MS. YAPHE:  Just that I don't--and you think you know better than we do when Zarkawi first started claiming responsibility for which attacks in Iraq.  He may have been responsible for some, but not for all.  There are too many other groups that are active.  Maybe they're almost competing, but some groups, you know, are the same groups responsible for the murder of Shia clerics, that are responsible for bombing Kurdish headquarters, that are responsible for the attacks on the UN.

To me, there are different signatures of different groups operating.  So Zarkawi may have been responsible for one or two or several, but I certainly wouldn't give him credit for, you know, carte blanche attacks.

MR. HAYES:  If I can just--real briefly, I agree with Peter that certainly Al Khalid was separate from al Qaeda, but there was fairly significant overlap.  I mean, as I understand it, Zarkawi ran a training camp in Afghanistan, an al Qaeda-related training camp at the very least.

He also worked with Abu Zubaida, who I think Peter referred to earlier as a top bin Laden lieutenant, to plot millennium attacks in Jordan, in 1999.  And, in fact, when Zubaida was captured, he named Zarkawi as one of the al Qaeda associates, perhaps we'll call him, who was the most eager and interested in advancing the relationship with the Iraqi regime.

And your last point--and I guess I'll lead with myself and then follow up with ABC News with this crowd.  Zarkawi had been given weapons and funding by the Iraqi regime, according to the CIA documents.  And if you don't believe me, ABC News reported the same thing on May 25th.

MR. WOOLSEY:  I'd only add one sentence, which is that with respect to Zarkawi's claims, sometimes people like Zarkawi not only kill, but lie.

MR. LEDEEN:  Right, and I should also add that on the subject of Zarkawi, I mean the real international connection for Zarkawi has long been Iran, not Iraq, and that I don't know which Europeans you're talking to, but the Europeans I interviewed and from whom I received hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents on Zarkawi all speak to Iran connections going back several years, including intercepts and couriers, and so forth.

And all of that is public.  I mean, none of that is classified.  It's all from court transcripts of people from this organization, some of whom confessed, others who were convicted on evidence.  So I mean sometimes we get so obsessed with Iraq that we tend to lose sight of some of the others.

MR. HAYES:  If I can just add one last thing, I think just to underscore what you're saying, I think as best we know it, the chronology of Zarkawi after the war began was that he transited to Iran, to the border, potentially with help from Iranian immigration officials, and then transited back when he got a signal saying it was okay to do so.

MR. LEDEEN:  I'm sure they're flattered to be called immigration officials.

[Laughter.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Yes?  Please scream because your--it's our failure.  You know, we're--

MR.          :  [Inaudible.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Please don't lecture us about Islamic history.  What is the question?

MR.          :  [Inaudible.]

MR. LEDEEN:  No, you're not.  Just ask the question, please.

MR.          :  [Inaudible.]

MR. HAYES:  Forgive me for being paranoid.  Can I ask, have you read the book?

MR.          :  No, I haven't.

MR. HAYES:  Okay.  Well, that's a very interesting detail that you somehow omitted.  It's hard for me to understand how you can claim that there's a paucity of evidence in the book in a question you're directing to its author without having read it.  It seems to me that that's a logical problem in your question.

With respect to what the American public thinks, I think it's entirely sensible that the American public would think that there's a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.  I think perhaps the American public was paying attention when the Clinton administration made such arguments dating back to the mid-1990s, and perhaps they were paying attention in the run-up to the war when the Bush administration made similar claims.  Perhaps they were paying attention when George Tenet testified, as Ambassador Woolsey has discussed.

So I don't think it's at all conspiracy--nutty conspiracy theories for the American people to believe that there was this connection.  I'm proud of the American people for cutting through the mis-reporting on a lot of this stuff.

MR. LEDEEN:  In the middle of this row here.

MR.         :  I keep hearing--

MR. LEDEEN:  Can you tell us who you are, please?

MR. IGLESIAS:  I'm Matthew Iglesias [ph] from the American Prospects magazine.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.

MR. IGLESIAS:  We've heard a very large number of calls from people in the audience and people up there that say, well, we really ought to look more into that, we really ought to look more into this, and so on and so forth, sort of as if the belief is that somehow the people running the government don't really want to look into this question, like the Bush administration isn't interested in trying to demonstrate--

MR. LEDEEN:  You know the drill by now, Mr. Iglesias.  Would you please ask a question?

MR. IGLESIAS:  Sure.

MR. LEDEEN:  Just as the question.

MR. IGLESIAS:  Why is it, do you think, that the administration wouldn't be pursuing these possibilities as vigorously as you would suggest that they should?

MR. HAYES:  I think that's a very good question, actually.  I wish that they were doing more to pursue the questions.  Of course, from reporting on pre-war intelligence, there's only so much that policymakers, presumably the ones you're talking about with these opinions or with this interest in getting this information out--there's only so much control that policymakers have over the intelligence apparatus, probably as it should be.

So I don't know that they can direct additional investigations, call for additional investigations.  But to the extent that that's in their hands, I hope they do it.  I hope the Bush administration makes a public call or, if possible, creates a parallel team to the Iraq Survey Group.  I think that would be a wonderful thing to see not only because it would help us to understand the historical nature of the relationship, but also because, as we've discussed with Zarkawi, it has practical applications on the ground today.

MS. YAPHE:  That's kind of silly because we shouldn't assume that they're not looking at it.  I would assume that they are.  Politics shouldn't control intelligence.  Intelligence has to investigate all sources.  It then reports to the administration and the administration can choose to take what it wants and reject what it wants, period.

MR. WOOLSEY:  That's theoretically the case, but I have a little anecdote to show the mind set of some in the intelligence community on this question.

A couple of years ago, I got sent a manuscript, as I often do, to perhaps do a blurb on a book.  It was from an intelligence officer writing anonymously.  So the book was by "anonymous."  I read it and I found it fascinating, and one thing in it was a lot of material, much of which surfaced in different form in the Feith memorandum and Steve's book, articles, about various points of tangency--dare we say connection--between Iraq and al Qaeda.

But it had a conceit at the beginning, which was that basically strong belief is strong belief, and therefore al Qaeda is sort of like the American Founding Fathers.  They strongly believed in one thing, al Qaeda strongly believes in what it believes in, and there you have it.

After reading that part and nearly vomiting, I got back in touch with the publisher and I said this is an interesting book; 95 percent of it, I think, really ought to be read, but I am so put off by this one conceit, I'm not going to give it a blurb.

A few days later, I got an anonymous e-mail from "anonymous," and what anonymous said was, I knew--I told the publisher you wouldn't do a blurb on this because you're one of those people who believes there's connections between Iraq and al Qaeda.  The book is full of mentions of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda.  I'm afraid that mind set is rather more current among some members of the intelligence community than I would like.

MS. YAPHE:  Well, since we're talking about mind sets, I've got to say this.  I profoundly disagree with you, as you know, on several things.  But one thing that you've said today--you've resurrected an urban legend which is just plain false, this issue of what you believe and assumptions, and the assumption was always made in the intelligence community that religious-based groups and secular-based groups never cooperate.

That just is not true, Jim, and it has never been true about the links or the reasons for no links between Saddam and al Qaeda, or any other religious extremist organizations who didn't like any of them.  Again, it's not about ideology.  There are many examples, as I'm sure Michael Ledeen can point out -- [TAPE CHANGE] -- and non-religious things.

Look for Muslim Brotherhood, who are Sunni, and the great connections between Hizbollah and Force 17, Force 17, the PLO, Sunni Arab terrorists, and secular and Hizbollah.  So I wish we could get rid of this urban legend once and for all.

MR. WOOLSEY:  Well, I don't think it's an urban legend.  I think that analysts get themselves into intellectual boxes and then they continue to justify an earlier position.  It happens.  That's what senior people in the intelligence community and policymakers are for, is to contest these idee fixe.  I've seen them when I was DCI and I see them still.

And I didn't use words like "always" and "never," Judith, but I do believe that there is an idee fixe in much of the analytical community on this question that there can be, as was betrayed by this anonymous memo I got from "anonymous," which essentially adopts the proposition that there really could be no cooperation of any kind-- essentially a Clarke-ian position--between Iraq and al Qaeda, regardless of what the evidence shows, and cleaves to that view throughout, no matter what George Tenet says to the Congress; no matter what, just cleaves to that view.

I wish your profession, which I have great admiration for many aspects of, didn't develop these idee fixes, but I am afraid from time to time it does.

MS. YAPHE:  Careful.  We won't talk about idee fixes in the administration either who reject a lot of sound information.

MR. LEDEEN:  I think it's time to move on.

[Laughter.]

MR. LEDEEN:  Sorry.

MR. LAKE:  Eli Lake [ph] with the New York Sun.  I have two quick questions.  One for Stephen Hayes: Can you respond to Peter Bergen's argument that because Mr. Hijazi and others who have been in custody--we haven't heard what they've said in custody--that the Bush administration would have this reason to publicize the fact that they had admitted to a connection?  Could you sort of respond to that?

And for Judith Yaphe, could you respond to the fact that leaders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan have said that Abu Wayul [ph], who is apparently this Saddam Baathist funder of Ansar al Islam--that they have more evidence of this?  And can you address the fact that people like Bar Humsala [ph], for example, seem to be even more sure after the war that Ansar is an example of al Qaeda and Iraq, or Saddam's Iraq, working together?

MR. HAYES:  Yes, I will respond to the Hijazi question.  I'm glad because I forgot to do so earlier.  My understanding--I mean, certainly the Feith memo contains what it reports as an overview of the Hijazi debriefing, in which Hijazi admits to meeting bin Laden face to face in 1994 and discusses some of the conversation as he told them.

I mean, obviously I think we would all agree that we need to be very careful with what we take from these debriefings.  People are given strong incentives to cooperate.  They're made uncomfortable if they don't.  So I think debriefings are not in and of themselves, you know, the end of the argument.

One other point, if I could, on debriefings.  Peter mentioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his debriefing, and Abu Zubaida and his debriefing.  The story that came out about Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and their denial of any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda was in the New York Times.  I believe it was June 9th, 2003, and it was a tremendously influential story in terms of shaping the conventional wisdom on whether these two groups cooperated.

Leaving aside for a moment the willingness to sort of take these debriefings at their face value, the reporter, who's a good reporter, was apparently misled about the contents of the debriefing and given only half of the debriefing.  And the half of the debriefing that was reported says that Abu Zubaida claims there were no connections between Iraq and al Qaeda.  I'm simplifying.

The next sentence says, this said, Abu Zubaida said bin Laden would be happy to work with anyone willing to harm the United States of America, and he wouldn't be in a position necessarily to know about all communications between the two; couldn't say it didn't happen, essentially.  So I think it's just a lesson in debriefings and why we need to be careful with them.

MR. BERGEN:  I think if you go to the agency and you ask them about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's debriefing directly, they would say that he denied a role with Iraq.  They would say that Abu Zubaida said the same thing.  They would, as Stephen pointed out, say that Abu Zubaida, because he wasn't in the top-most part of al Qaeda, might not have been familiar with all of the dealings with any other entities.  On the other hand, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after all, was the military commander of al Qaeda and the operational planner of 9/11.

MS. YAPHE:  I don't know what evidence Bar Humsala has.  Maybe it relates to the assassination attempt on him, which Stephen has described very nicely in his book.  I do know that a couple of years ago I went to lunch with Hushiar Zabari [ph], Bar Hum's counterpart for the KDP at the time, the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

And I asked Hushiar about what are these reports coming out of Kurdistan about this Ansar al Islam and all these new groups?  And he just giggled.  And I don't know why, you know, if there was more--when they initially were reported, it was hyped more than really--if it was evidence or not.  So I don't know what the answer is to your question.

MR.         :  [Inaudible] in jail.

MS. YAPHE:  I'm sorry?

MR.          :  There are some people in jail [Inaudible].

MS. YAPHE:  Yes, I know now, but I don't know what it was a couple years ago.

MR. LEDEEN:  So a woman back there.  We haven't had a woman for a while.

MS. FELDMAN:  Hi.  I'm Clarice Feldman [ph].

Steve, I have a question for you.  I was very impressed by Laurie's book about the Iraqi connection to the first World Trade Center bombing.  And while I have not yet had the opportunity to read your book, the summary of your statement today indicates that you've found an al Qaeda connection, and I have a question for you.

I don't really see much in writing anywhere about al Qaeda before 1998, and I don't see anything in Laurie's book which indicates anything about an al Qaeda connection, although she has made some very persuasive suggestions about Iraqi involvement.

Where do you get the al Qaeda connection in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993?

MR. HAYES:  It's probably imprecise language.  I think Judith can correct me, but I think the agency then referred to what we've now come to as al Qaeda as the Islamic Army or Osama bin Laden's Islamic Army, if I'm not mistaken.  So that's basically a short answer to your question.

MR. LEVIN:  My name is Daniel Levin [ph] and I have a question for Mr. Woolsey.  For those of us who are private citizens without access to classified information and are trying to decide in what intelligence evidence to put our credence, what role should or can we ascribe to deliberate disinformation both from the United States and elsewhere?

MR. WOOLSEY:  Well, I don't--you can certain ascribe here and there confusion, mistake, and so forth, to the United States intelligence community and what they communicate to the outside world.  But disinformation, no.

I think that the plans which one would have and would operate in war time to spread disinformation to an enemy are very, very carefully watched here and if there's any chance that something is going to slip over into generally being covered and carried back to the American public, this is something that I think both the military and the civilian side of intelligence are guarded on and watched very carefully by their civilian bosses.

From a broad--my God, you know, people, foreign governments do this all the time.  Disinformazia [ph] was a constant aspect of communications, both official government communications and otherwise, from the Soviets, and certainly it is from dictatorial governments around the world.  There are 41 dictatorship left in the world and I would say virtually all of them are involved in disinformazia.

MR. WOHLSTETTER:  John Wohlstetter [ph], Discovery Institute.  A question for the panel.  In light of the apparent difficulty of connecting unnumbered dots, of separating signals from background noise, spurious noise, and in light of at times, as the anthrax attacks indicate, the difficulty of determining the origin, the return address of certain attacks, does this not justify President Bush's policy with respect to Iraq retroactively, and prospectively perhaps as to others, making demands of states with terrorist or WMD connections to satisfy us that they are out of that business or else we will act preemptively?

MR. HAYES:  Yes, I would argue that it does.  And, in fact, that's one of--you know, one of the main arguments of the book, is that, you know, we had a choice after the war in Afghanistan.  We could continue to focus our attention on al Qaeda and its operatives around the world or we could begin to look at states that either were or would sponsor their operations.

To me, it's a no-brainer.  I think we had to do what we did in Iraq.  I mean, when you look at the pattern of evidence, as I talked about before--and excuse for the "connect the dots" analogy, just because it's used so frequently--it's hard for me to see when you look back at what we knew before September 11th--and, you know, especially with the September 11th Commission, the blame that the Bush administration has taken on that--it's hard to see, given the evidence, I think, that exists on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, how one could not see that as a threat.

MR. LEDEEN:  Okay, we have time for just a couple more questions.  Let's take one here.  The faster you are, the more time there will be for others.

MR. MORRIS:  Stephen Morris [ph], Johns Hopkins    ?    .  I'd like to put this question to anybody on the panel who has an answer.  Presumably, connecting the dots could take place if we had enough documents from Iraqi intelligence.

Could somebody tell me, are there major sources of documentary information which either, A, have not been found, or, B, known to have been destroyed in Iraq.

MR. LEDEEN:  Well, you know, I think the problem is there's too many of them.  I mean, it's the classic case of the information revolution happens and the information won.  I mean, I think we're buried under information.  I think we have too much information.  I think there's millions of pages of it and that we're short of translators and we're short of experts and all the usual.  I think that--

MS. YAPHE:  How would we know what was destroyed?  How would we know what we don't--we don't know what we don't know.  But there is one individual who apparently does have a lot of intelligence documents and I'd love to see what is in his collection--Ahmed Chalabbi.

MR. LOGAN:  Thanks very much.  Justin Logan [ph] from Cato.

I read the book, Stephen.  It was very interesting and pretty even-handed, but I want to know how that comports with your statement just now that it was a no-brainer and the implication in the sub-title of the book that Saddam's collaboration with al Qaeda was endangering America.

What seems to be the consensus up here today is we need to do more digging.  Well, the fact of the matter is we invaded a country in 2003.  We've had